KEY POINTS:
When They read the Scotland team out, I knew about two of them. As a punter who'll be travelling to the game, I was disappointed.
This is almost a Third XV. In the World Cup. I was in Glasgow last Thursday at a speaking engagement and I said then that if I was Simon Taylor or any one of the top Scottish players, I'd be climbing the walls if I wasn't selected against the All Blacks.
I'd be saying: "Give me a crack at them." Players like that want to play the All Blacks; they want to take on the best.
They don't want to sit on the bench. They are professionals, highly trained. They can front for two games in six days, surely.
Don't try and tell me that Italy are any great shakes at the moment. They're not.
It's a shame that the Scots have decided to go down this path. This is the World Cup. It's the place where you test yourself against the best there is; where you take part in something that doesn't happen very often.
You don't want to take part in something that involves saving yourselves for Italy, with all due respect to them. Where's the sense of achievement; the sense of experience in that?
Let's hope the Scots, when they do play their top team, are better than the English and the Irish have been. I keep coming back to it - the English were embarrassing against the Springboks the other day. They have all the resources, the size, the strength, but they were totally outplayed.
Even many of their countrymen are saying: "Let the Samoans beat them and let us get it over with so we can enjoy the World Cup."
Having said that, I don't think the Samoans will beat them. The English will keep it tight and play it how you should play the Samoans.
I was talking to Michael Lynagh the other day and we reckoned that they would probably just do enough to beat Samoa and Tonga - and then turn around and beat the Aussies in the semifinal. We were just having a laugh but Lynagh said he could feel it coming...
However, if the English were embarrassing, the Irish were terrible. They just had no agility or athleticism and Ronan O' Gara was just awful; Paul O'Connell was off his game; even Brian O'Driscoll didn't look up to much... unbelievable. O'Gara looked to have no confidence at all and his first and every thought was to kick the ball.
Ireland have lived off their reputation for a couple of years now. They're a bit like the 1991 All Blacks - they have just kept selecting the old players and haven't developed others.
You've got guys like prop John Hayes who was dealt to in the Lions tour of New Zealand in 2005 - he's still playing.
Young halfback Eoin Reddan has been talked about for some time but he finally gets his big chance - in the Stade de France in front of 60,000 screaming Frenchmen and in a real crunch game with a misfiring team.
The Irish have been living on their reputations - and they have been found out in this tournament.
