WARREN Gatland might be too focused on trying to secure a second win of his new regime in Wales to be all that bothered about old hoodoos but I'm guessing that at some point this week he will have stopped to think about the anguish the Scots have caused him in his previous life as coach of Ireland.
Gatland took over at Lansdowne Road after his predecessor Brian Ashton quit in the spring of 1998 after a defeat against, you guessed it, the destructive Scots. This was an era when Scotland caused Ireland all sorts of problems. Remember that 18 year
s passed before Ireland won at Murrayfield, finally breaking the jinx in 2003. Gatland, of course, was long gone by then. His Irish team played Scotland on three occasions and they lost two of them.
Each one had a drama all of its own,. The 1999 game, for instance, was a horror show for Gatland. His team were utterly humiliated in Edinburgh. By the time the 2000 match came along Gatland was in mortal danger of losing his job. Ireland had been knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina the previous autumn and in their next game, the Six Nations opener at Twickenham, they'd shipped 50 points in a record defeat. The troublesome Scots arrived in Dublin after that. Gatland knew that if his team lost that day he'd have been sacked that night.
He rolled the dice with his team selection and brought in four new caps. That game was the first we saw of Ronan O'Gara, Peter Stringer, Shane Horgan and Simon Easterby on the international stage. All four remain in the Irish squad to this day having won buckets of caps in the meantime. Ireland won the 2000 game and Gatland survived. But not for long.
The death knell of his Ireland reign came at Murrayfield in the food-and-mouth delayed championship match of 2001. Ireland won four out of five that season but such was the fallout after the Murrayfield debacle that the IRFU kingmakers decided he had to go. His team selection for that fateful Scotland game was a disaster. He ignored form and went with hunches. Ireland got eaten alive and it was only a matter of time before the IRFU dismissed him, the union bigwigs fed-up with the maddening inconsistency of his results.
It was a tough call on Gatland and one that he found impossible to comprehend for a long time after. Bitterness chipped away at him until Wasps came calling and offered him a new chance to show his talents. He took that chance with aplomb, winning multiple Premiership titles and a Heineken Cup.
Now he's back in our midst and his old foes, the Scots, are before him. He has a score to settle. It's not one he'll talk much about publicly but, like an elephant, you can be sure that Gatland does not forget.
FRANK Hadden is a one-man excuse factory and the production line is whirring like never before. His rants against Alain Rolland in the wake of Scotland's awful performance in defeat against the French last Sunday were just a continuation of a policy of whingeing that Hadden instigated when he first came in the door. It is crass and it is embarrassing.
It's true that Rolland made some terrible calls on the day, one of which allowed the French to score their first try. No arguments there.
Rolland got it badly wrong. But by rabbiting on for so long about Rolland, Hadden gave the impression that the referee was a key factor in the game rather than Scotland's inability to perform the basic functions of Test match rugby. And, of course, we heard little about Rolland's other main blunder, the one that saw him ignore the views of his touch judge in the incident involving Andrew Henderson.
Let's be clear, Henderson butted an opponent. The mitigation that has been offered up in his defence, that he is a nice guy (he is) and that this was totally out of character (it was), was completely irrelevant. Henderson butted an opponent. End of story. At best, it was a yellow card but a lot of referees would have waved red in the centre's face for what he did.
Frank conveniently ignores this. But that's par for the course. He talks of the penalty count always going against his team when Rolland is refereeing but says nothing of the giant break he got from the Dublin official in the business of the butt.
The Scotland coach might be one-eyed when it comes to his team but he'd be better off opening up the other and getting a clearer view. Hadden started off like a train in the job but he's slowing all the time. In his first season in 2006 he claimed two massive scalps with victory over France and England but nothing has come close to those highs since then. He got the wooden spoon last year and has started this year with a shambolic display at home.
Hadden sought to put the heat on Rolland last Sunday. But the real focus should be on him and how uncomfortable he looks in the role right now. After the disappointment of the World Cup, Hadden needs a performance in Cardiff this weekend to jog our memory as to why he's the national coach. Quite honestly, I'm beginning to forget.
The full article contains 910 words and appears in scotsman.com newspaper.
