article: John Barclay is one of the few men who played then and who's still playing now. Whenever the game is mentioned and he's asked if it feels like half a decade ago, he smiles and says, no, it doesn't, it feels a whole lot longer ago than that. It does. Barclay's partners in the back-row that day were Alasdair Strokosch and Ross Rennie. Nick de Luca was in the midfield, Joe Ansbro on the wing. Tom Brown won his one and only cap in that match. Tom Ryder was the back-up lock on the bench. That Scotland side didn't possess much in the way of an attack compared to this one. Scotland didn't score a try in Newcastle and yet they won. In their last two meetings with the Australians, the Scots have scored six tries and lost them both. As they left Singapore after a pleasing performance in the win over the Italians, Gregor Townsend's team arrived in Sydney for a proper Test against a side that has caused them no end of strife in recent times. They'll have travelled in good heart. Some of the stuff that Scotland produced against Italy was really good, but it has to be viewed in the context of a woeful opponent. It was a solid win laced with some excellence in difficult conditions. It got things off to a nice beginning under Townsend, but Italy are so lamentable these days that nobody in the Scotland camp will be fooling themselves about the significance of the win. There were obvious successes. Some players - Damien Hoyland and Ben Toolis - that have previously been bit-part, or no-part, performers stepped up impressively. An old soldier, WP Nel, returned. A class act, Duncan Taylor, reappeared. What will have gladdened Townsend's heart wasn't just the way the five tries were constructed, it was the way his player options now look to be increasing. Australia will be an infinitely bigger test of that theory in Sydney next weekend, but if Townsend is going to take this thing where he wants to take it then building depth is paramount. Stuart Hogg, Tommy Seymour, Greig Laidlaw, Huw Jones, Sean Maitland, Mark Bennett, Alasdair Dickinson, Richie Gray, Jonny Gray, Hamish Watson and John Hardie were absent against Italy. Most of them won't be involved in Sydney either. That's another dimension to what should be an intriguing Test match. Can Scotland beat an eminently beatable Wallabies side while missing so many go-to men? What do we know of Australia? We know that they are experimenting with selection right now, we know that they played Fiji on Saturday and put them away 37-14 after racing into an 18-0 half-time lead. We know that the wondrous attacker, Israel Folau, who hadn't scored a try for his country in a year, scored two against the Pacific Islanders. We know that, despite the dire straits of some of their clubs in Super Rugby, they can still pick a squad of 23 that is formidable. They are also flawed, however. They're not to be feared. They were good
summary: Five years - and a whole lot of pain - have passed since Scotland last beat the Wallabies, a 9-6 gruntathon in the monsoon of Newcastle in New South Wales.