ONE swallow doesn't make a summer, and all that. Nevertheless one may reasonably hope that Frank Hadden's team turned a corner on Saturday, and that brighter days may be before us.
Admittedly the sense of optimism has to be tempered by some more sombre
reflections. We didn't score a try and never came close to doing so. We struggled in the scrum and, uncharacteristically, in the lineout too.
England had more possession tha
n we had, even if they didn't seem to enjoy it much. Then Italy are a better side than their record of four
defeats this season may suggest.
They ran Ireland close in Dublin, England in Rome and France in Paris, and were perhaps unlucky to lose the first two of these matches. Finally, anything can happen in the Six Nations.
On the other hand that "anything" might take the form of Scotland cutting loose and at last producing a truly commanding performance.
There were signs in the first quarter of Saturday's match, before Chris Paterson was perforce moved to the wing after the injury to Rory Lamont
that we may, just, be on the verge of that.
More immediately, Saturday saw the resurgence of what we like to think of as the characteristic Scottish game: utter commitment, and ferocious rucking and counterrucking.
The tackling was terrific; England never looked like finding a way through. Quite simply, the match was won because Scotland were better than England in key positions: numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9.
The back-row of Strokosch, Taylor and Hogg gave a performance that recalled the days of John Jeffrey, Derek White and Finlay Calder or David Leslie, Iain Paxton and Jim Calder, while Mike Blair just gets better and better. Three takes of the high ball invited superlatives. This may well have been his best game for Scotland, but there is more to come, in Rome perhaps on a dry pitch with the sun shininng.
He was deservedly made man-of-the-match – I thought Princess Anne was going to kiss him when she handed over the Cup – and which of us would not have cheered if she had?
Simon Taylor and Nathan Hines ran him close however for the day's honours. Taylor's return was significant. Kelly Brown is a very good player and one who is still improving, but Simon is a great one.
Some thought the rugby of poor quality, even dismal. I thought it was a match for the connoisseur. There was so much intelligence in the Scottish play and the game was splendidly hard, no quarter given on either side. If line-breaks were as rare as hens' teeth, that says as much, perhaps more, about the intensity of the tackling and the quality of the defensive organisation than about the lack of attacking skill or
enterprise.
The key moments of the match came immediately after Rory Lamont was injured. First Mike Blair made a try-saving tackle. Then when England were awarded a penalty because Ally Hogg had tackled a man without the ball, they opted to put it into touch and drive the lineout. They failed but got another penalty, tried the same thing again and were repulsed.
This was reminiscent of action in the same quarter of the field in 1990, except that then they chose to scrum and scrum – and failed likewise to score the try. When, granted a third penalty, Wilkinson kicked the goal, the score was 3-3, rather than the 7-3 they had first gone for, but really, as Frank Hadden said after the match, their failure to score the try made it 1-0 to Scotland.
There has been the usual over-reaction from the English media. Sometimes I think they exist to prove the justice of the famous observation of the 1984 Wallabies coach Alan Jones: "one day a rooster, the next a feather-duster". So it's been feather-duster time for the
English team. My own view is that they played as well as they were allowed to. That's an old cliché of course, but it's only a cliché because it expresses a truth. There are two teams on the field, and often it is one of them that dictates the way a match goes. On Saturday
Scotland were doing that.
Even Jonny Wilkinson, so often the acclaimed rooster, is now being reduced to featherduster status. Absurd. He didn't have his best game, and perhaps, given the difficulty we had in securing clean ball on our own throw, should have kicked more often for touch rather than down the middle.
But he himself summed up the situation better than any of his critics in the press when he said , "I did feel a bit helpless. We were short of options. You look around for the best thing to do and often it was the least damaging thing." There's good sense as well as honesty in that
appreciation of the match. One might add that Scotland denied him any chance to drop a goal – and how often have teams managed to do that? Also that I doubt if I was alone in being delighted and relieved when
Brian Ashton took him off. It was at that moment that I was sure that, barring an interception or a dropped pass hacked through to the try-ine,
we were going to win.
So now to Rome, with selfrespect regained. Physically it's going to be every bit as hard as Saturday's game, for the Italian scrum is very tough indeed, and skilful too.
Still we're entitled now, the players most of all, to approach it with zest and hope, rather than with doubt and trepidation. And that's something not many would have banked on a few days ago.
The full article contains 967 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
