Canada 10-48 Scotland: Donald trumps Scots but new caps emerge with pride
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Highlights: Canada 10-48 Scotland
A little after 11pm on Saturday, a woman dressed as a rainbow and a man done up as a princess carried a pink unicorn up the footpath on Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton. As a spectacle, it was quite something.
The annual Pride Parade had taken hold of the city from mid-afternoon and clearly wasn't intending on letting go for hours yet. Polite enquiries ascertained that the unicorn's name was Donald, after Donald Trump.
Just when you thought that the night could not possibly bring a more unusual sight than George Turner scoring a hat-trick for Scotland from a combined distance of about a yard along comes Donald and his colourful owners.
They knew nothing of Turner, or the rugby. They didn't even know Scotland were in town.
Just over 12,000 people attended the Test match at the Commonwealth Stadium and only a small number will store it away as a special memory. Turner is one of them.
Lewis Carmichael, a try-scorer on his debut, is undoubtedly another. Fellow debutants Jamie Ritchie, James Lang and Adam Hastings are in the club as well.
This was a professional job by Scotland. The team was an inexperienced crew. Only Fraser Brown started the last time they played - against Italy in the Six Nations - and even Brown was gone after half an hour, a rib injury putting the rest of his tour in jeopardy.
They had to find their way through a fairly error-prone first half, but when they recognised Canada's inability to deal with their maul, they launched it at them and sickened them time and again.
Glasgow Warriors' George Turner scored three tries against Canada
Gregor Townsend has now won eight of his 12 Tests as Scotland coach, some of them sensational, some of them stodgy, some others that can only be described as solid. And this was one of the solid ones.
Canada are no longer at the races at this level of the game. Their demise is a sad one. In the past 18 months, they've lost to Brazil and have conceded more than 50-points against Fiji, Georgia, the United States and Ireland.
Scotland should have got a half-century as well, but what they got was a pleasing opener to their trip, with the next game against the Americans that bit harder and the one after that, Argentina, harder again.
With their two toughest games to come, they have the kind of momentum that they failed to get here four years ago, when Canada took them to the wire and should have beaten them.
In the winning of the match they weren't ambitious in the way that Townsend likes them to be, but they were smart and direct and aggressive in that second half.
Every time Scotland won a line-out anywhere near Canada's 22-metre line, the only question that was left to be answered was not whether they could score but who would score.
Invariably, it was Turner. The replacement hooker became the first Scot to score a hat-trick in a Test match since Ally Hogg got a treble against Romania in 2007.
Edinburgh's Lewis Carmichael scored a try on his Scotland debut
Every game that Scotland plays over the next year will be looked at through the prism of the World Cup and the construction of the 31-man squad that gets to go to Japan. Townsend wants players to make his selection brutally hard.
He wants Ritchie to get himself in the picture as one of possibly four flankers and Ritchie did a fine job on Saturday. He wants Magnus Bradbury and Lewis Carmichael to put their hand up and they did.
It's only Canada, yes, but those guys enhanced their reputation. All they can do is stay relevant to Townsend, to keep themselves in his thoughts every time Japan flits across his mind, which, he says, is often.
They all move on to Houston now to face the USA, who monstered Russia 62-13 on Saturday. The Scotland team will change for that one.
Rested in the main for the Canada game, the Glasgow boys will come to the front. Stuart Hogg will definitely start.
Hastings will be in from the beginning, probably with George Horne beside him for his debut. Matt Fagerson will also win his first cap as Townsend continues to deepen the pool.
That's what this tour is all about. Some will emerge and some will fade and some of the ones back home might start looking over their shoulder with a little more regularity and a tad more concern. And, if that happens, Townsend will know that he's really getting places.