Scotland hold off amazing Wales revival
SIX NATIONS 2024
Wales…………………………… 26pts
Tries: Botham 47, Dyer 53, Wainwright 60, Mann 68
Conversions: Lloyd 54, 61, 69
Scotland ……………………… 27pts
Tries: Schoeman 11, van der Merwe 30, 42
Conversions: Russell 12, 31, 43
Penalties: Russell 6, 22
ONLY the Six Nations would dare to dig into the Bumper Book Of Sports Cliches and redefine one of the biggest of all: the game of two halves.
There have been thousands of examples in hundreds of stadia all over the world but in many respects this, in the context of team sport's oldest annual international event, was surely the ultimate.
Why? Because nobody could remember ever seeing Wales in Cardiff daring to be so bad for the first 42 minutes and then daring to rise from their pit of despair so gallantly for the last 38.
That they went from staring down the barrel of a 40-50 point national embarrassment to within one missed conversion of completing a comeback to beat them all illustrates the astounding nature of the game's transformation, from a no-contest to an 18-carat gold thriller.
If it left the sell-out crowd bewitched and bewildered, then the same can be said of the players. At the end it felt as if Scotland needed reassuring that they had won and that Wales, for all their heroics, had lost, albeit by a point.
At half-time, they were losing by 20 and two minutes later by 27. To describe it as one of the worst first halves Wales have ever inflicted on their fans at home is to put it politely.
They were so dismal that the only cheer of any substance came just before kick-off when a video of the late JPR Williams in his dynamic pomp flashed onto the big screens. From the late Sixties until the early Eighties, the game's supreme warrior never lost a single championship in the old citadel at the Arms Park.
Forty or so minutes later, Wales had been all but counted out without firing a shot. Warren Gatland could not be accused of exaggerating the predicament with his terse condemnation of the first half: ‘Absolutely terrible.'
To some it might not have been that good. The disbelief swirling around the stadium came from all sides, from Scotland because they couldn't believe a Six Nations match could be as easy as this, from Wales because they couldn't understand why they were plodding along on the bones of their backsides. The crowd, united in bemusement, didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of it all.
Incredibly, it would become even worse for Wales before it could get better. Having led their young opponents a merry dance through Finn Russell's puppetry, the Scots promptly increased their lead from 20 to 27.
Had the Marquis of Queensberry rules applied, the referee, Ben O'Keeffe from New Zealand, might have thought about intervening to spare Wales further punishment. Certainly anyone volunteering the opinion that the Scots would finish up on the ropes would have been certified on the spot.
In retrospect, it can be seen that two major factors contributed to the game being turned inside out and upside down: One, Scotland, however subconsciously, declared at 27-nil, ludicrously so given that they were still one try short of all five points and, two, Wales began to trust their instincts instead of whatever passed for a game-plan.
How JPR would have loved what happened next. In 20 minutes, Wales found four tries of their own, the first from James Botham when, for the first time, they managed to combine the basics of putting a penalty into the corner and then catching their own throw.
Scotland ignored the danger until a Welsh side galvanised by Aaron Wainwright's emergence at the head of the rescue party set alarms ringing all over the place. The Welsh substitutions made a difference, the Williamses, Teddy and Tomos, combining to send Rio Dyer hurtling in at the corner.
When Wainwright plunged over between the posts, Scotland were heading almost inextricably towards the rocks. Having long lost their discipline in conceding all nine second half penalties, they then began losing players, just as O'Keeffe warned them they would.
George Turner had only just returned from the bin when Sione Tuipulotu trudged off to sit on the seat which the Glasgow hooker had warmed up for him. Ioan Lloyd, another Welsh sub revelling in the wonderful chaos, made it 19-27 before Tuipulotu could start serving his time. Four minutes later, another of the new generation, Alex Mann, announced himself with the fourth try. Miraculously, Lloyd's conversion cut the monumental deficit of barely half an hour later to a single point.
Veteran members of Proud Edward's Army watched in mounting anguish. They had been down the most barren of Welsh roads so often for so little that they could have been forgiven had they opted to miss this one on the basis of one biennial slog too many over more than 20 years.
Yet still they soldiered on, for once clinging to something more than a blind collective faith in the law of averages. Never at any time since their last win there in 2002 had Scotland rolled into Cardiff to find the hosts in such a wretched state of disarray.
If they couldn't put the most makeshift of Welsh teams away with something to spare, when on earth would they? And yet the Scots still had reason to fear that once more they would be undone by some kind of calamity.
There had been so many, not least a blizzard of red and yellow cards: Scott Murray sent off in 2006, Stuart Hogg eight years later when Wales made those left behind pay for their full back's early madness by winning 51-3. In between those defeats, Scotland suffered the most traumatic one of all, in 2010 when they contrived to lose a commanding lead, an occasion when Scotland's team doctor, James Robson, saved the life of Glasgow wing Thom Evans after a frightening collision.
Now they were witnessing something they thought of as too ridiculous for words. And they might not have got away with this one had Wales not let them out of a tight corner when their lineout conked out as it had done throughout the first half. A game of two halves, par excellence…
