Townsend has five wins and a draw from his previous eight meetings with England, with Scotland losing out by a single point in London last year.<\/p>\n
There are no Edinburgh players in the starting XV, while 10 come from United Rugby Championship leaders Glasgow Warriors.<\/p>\n
Seven of Van der Merwe’s 35 Scotland tries have come against England, including a hat-trick the last time they met at Murrayfield in 2024.<\/p>\n
“There are reasons we selected that backline and bench going into Italy and it’s the same reasons going into England,” explained Townsend.<\/p>\n
“We weren’t able to play as well as a backline given the weather and opportunities at the start of the game.<\/p>\n
“What the back three did in the kicking battle was excellent and how they have been training is superb so we’ve backed them again this week.”<\/p>\n
Adam Hastings was an unused substitute against Italy and Townsend was quizzed about going for the same bench split.<\/p>\n
“Adam covers 10, so it’s someone we know can focus on that role during the week and he has been playing very well,” he said.<\/p>\n
“There are gambles going 6-2 with limited cover. We think the weather is going to be dry so there is more opportunity for backs coming on to have an influence.<\/p>\n
“You go into the game with expectations of using the bench but if you don’t need to – if players are playing well and there are no injuries – then at times people don’t come off the pitch.”<\/p>\n
England started the tournament by thumping Wales 48-7 at Twickenham, making it 12 successive Test victories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Townsend has five wins and a draw from his previous eight meetings with England, with Scotland losing out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-422629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}