Not sure it's quite that definitive, the loss of Faessler so close to kick off in a week where we had little opportunity to train likely had as much or more impact on our lineout. That's pretty clear to me in the fact that are lineout still struggled after Skelton left the field.
I would probably be looking at Frost as his partner in the future though, he has much more capacity to get up above the competition and is better over 80 than Salakaia-Loto.
Edit: Losing Williams so close to kick off won't have helped the lineout either. We aren't a settled enough side to roll with these sudden changes and a disrupted build up all rolled into one.
Have to disagree with your takes on the lineout Wilson. Skelton had a massive detrimental affect for us. The Scots just looked where he was standing in the lineout and threw it there as they knew they would be uncontested. On our own throw, they made sure they had their best jumpers competing with LSL (Lukhan Salakaia-Loto) and Wilson (which to be fair wasn't hard for them - Wilson definitely is not a premier lineout jumper) because they knew we were not going to Skelton. The result was that for the whole time Skelton was on the field, the Scots had clean ball from their lineouts and we had rubbish if we even won possession. That situation led to the second part of the first half and well into the second half, we were starved of possession. That was where the game was won and lost.
Incidentally, after Frost replaced Skelton, we actually won a couple of their lineout throws.
Otherwise, Skelton was little more than a penalty magnet. From my recollection, he gave away three very early penalties in the first half which gifted territory, possession and flow of the game to the Scots. And for all of his reputation at the maul, we lost possession from our rolling maul on at least two occasions while Skelton was on the field. Cummins made a mess of our mauls while Big Willy never had an impact.
