The loss of captain Rachel Malcolm to injury shortly before kick-off may have played on the minds of the Scottish players as they failed to come out the blocks.<\/p>\n
Italy were not in the mood to wait around and prop Zanette crashed over on her first Test start to stretch the home side’s lead.<\/p>\n
It took 25 minutes for the Scots to muster an entry into the Italian 22, only to be turned over as they worked their way towards the try line.<\/p>\n
A wonderful break up the touchline from D’Inca left the Scottish defence scrambling and Zanette took advantage of the chaos to plough over for her second try, Italy’s third.<\/p>\n
They wrapped up the bonus point when Veronica Madia spun a beautiful pass out wide for D’Inca to dive over in the corner for her second score.<\/p>\n
Italy were cooking, Scotland were floundering and a slick backline move cut the visitors open as Muzzo steamed on to a clever inside ball from Madia to go in under the sticks and effectively end the contest before half-time.<\/p>\n
The traffic continued to flow only one way after the break and hooker Vecchini was able to touch down after an Italian lineout maul powered over the Scottish line.<\/p>\n
Yellow cards for Madia and Elisa Giordano temporarily reduced Italy to 13 players and finally Scotland managed to land a blow when Skeldon, captain in the place of the injured Malcolm, finished off the rolling maul from close range.<\/p>\n
Despite being two players down, Italy regained quickly regained the initiative and lock Duca blasted through to touch down under the posts.<\/p>\n
A wonderful individual try from substitute Poolman raised a few Scottish smiles on an otherwise chastening day in the Italian sunshine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The loss of captain Rachel Malcolm to injury shortly before kick-off may have played on the minds of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-551126","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551126","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=551126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}