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 rul
