Former Melrose rugby players help Scotland A to 19-17 victory versus Chile


Head coach Peter Horne, drafted to the Greenyards club for the 2009/10 rugby season from Glasgow Warriors, fielded two other past players there in his starting XV against the Chileans, full internationals Jamie Bhatti and Ross McCann.
His substitutes’ bench included one more ex-Melrose man, hooker Harri Morris, and former Knights scrum-half Ben Afshar.
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Hide AdWarriors loosehead prop Bhatti, 31, played for just short of an hour before being replaced by Mikey Jones and Edinburgh left-winger McCann, 27, was given a further ten minutes before going off for Jack Brown.


Edinburgh’s Morris, 23, was brought on for Gregor Hiddleston just past the hour mark, 20 minutes after fellow ex-Knight Afshar, 21, at Warriors since 2022, took over from captain Stafford McDowell.
The hosts’ tries, supplemented by a penalty try awarded by Italian referee Gianluca Gnecchi, were touched down by full-back Arron Reed and blindside flanker Tom Dodd, with fly-half Ross Thompson converting one of them.
Luca Strabucchi and Nicolas Garafulic scored the Chileans’ tries, with Benjamin Videla adding a conversion and penalty and Matias Garafulic a conversion.
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Hide AdSaturday’s win against head coach Pablo Lemoine’s visitors was Scotland A’s first game since a 45-5 victory away to the same opposition in June 2022 and their first at home for a decade, their last one prior having been a 16-16 draw with England Saxons at Glasgow’s Scotstoun Stadium in January 2014 with Shade Munro as head coach and Jonny Gray as captain.


Bhatti, capped 35 times for Scotland’s first XV since making his international debut in 2017, also started that game, together with Melrose’s Rufus McLean, and Jedburgh’s Glen Young joined them as a 52nd-minute replacement.
The prop was one of nine members of Horne’s match-day squad to have featured in first XV head coach Gregor Townsend’s line-up for their 59-21 win against Portugal at the capital’s Murrayfield Stadium seven days prior.
Horne, 35, was happy to have ended up on the right side of the result, albeit only narrowly, saying: “I was really pleased we found a way to win in the end.
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Hide Ad“It was a good young, inexperienced team and they were playing in tricky conditions.


“I thought we defended really well. They didn’t create much. We gave them a couple of soft scores from an intercept and from a hack through off a dropped ball.
“We could have had another three or four tries out there, which is frustrating, but it’s a good learning curve. Those boys will get a lot from that.”
Saturdays’ victory was a Scottish side’s second against Chile in the space of four months as their summer tour squad beat them 52-11 in Santiago in July, that previous win having seen West Linton’s Patrick Harrison make his international first-XV debut as a 46th-minute replacement for Alex Craig.
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