Scots confident of ending long wait to beat Wales
Yesterday lunchtime on Edinburgh’s famously pub-laden Rose Street, small groups of Wales supporters started suddenly sprouting up, like the bi-annual outriders for those raiders in red who habitually leave Murrayfield with the spoils. Yet if Edinburgh has been one long party for Welsh supporters of late, there is a palpably different feeling to this year’s encounter.
Scotland, for so long so poor, have gradually been transformed under the leadership of Vern Cotter and have already accounted for Ireland. Wales, shaky in the autumn, were mediocre in Rome and lost a game they could and arguably should have won against England in Cardiff. No wonder their fans need a few pints in Rose Street to settle their jangling nerves.
For both sides, this is shaping up to be the defining match of this year’s Six Nations. Not only is it the halfway point of the Championship, but for Scotland this is the match they targeted before the season began. Scotland fans, their optimism jaded by a Six Nations era which has been characterised by underachievement, have seen enough of both sides to know that Cotter’s men should finally beat Wales for the first time since 2007. Even the loss of Greig Laidlaw and the knowledge that they did remarkably well to beat Ireland cannot staunch a growing sense of confidence. Assistant coach Jonathan Humphreys believes that a win against Wales would finally validate the talk of corners turned.
“I’ve seen the intensity of the fans’ support change since I first came here four years ago,” he said. “My first Six Nations was quite a muted affair, especially compared to the Ireland game, when everyone was singing at the end of the game and the atmosphere was incredible. You hope that the Scottish nation can see the characteristics that they like in this team and that is where you get that attachment.
“But it isn’t just the fans who have begun to believe. There has been a shift, especially over the last 18 months in the team’s expectations of themselves. They love the fact that they come into the stadium and they can feel the anticipation. The whole of Scotland is really behind what is happening here.”
If the significance of today’s game is apparent to everyone, so is its likely ebb and flow. In their two games so far, Scotland have started well only to be brutalised after the break, withstanding the onslaught of Ireland but succumbing in Paris. The Welsh, by contrast, were poor in the first half against Italy and England, trailing the Azzurri at half-time in Rome and lagging behind England until Leigh Halfpenny’s try moments before the interval. History is not fated to repeat itself but the chances that this game will follow a similar trajectory to both countries’ previous two Six Nations matches seem fairly high. Certainly, Scotland seem to have selected on that basis, shoring up the scrum by bringing in loosehead Gordon Reid so that Scotland have an allGlasgow front row, before bringing on the more mobile Allan Dell later in the game. Similarly, at openside flanker, Scotland have selected John Hardie to start, primarily for his big hits in defence and ability to slow Wales’ ball at the breakdown, with Hamish Watson coming on in the second half for his trademark big carries.
“We’ve been trying to look into a crystal ball,” Humphreys said. “Wales will be incredibly physical but we feel that we have a bench that can make a difference, we feel that we have more power than we have had for a long, long time on our bench. So hopefully we’re ahead and trying to really push on. We are concentrating on how we start this game correctly and then how we keep the pressure on so that we don’t relent like we did for periods of the game against Ireland and France, so that if this game gets tight at 60 or 65 minutes we can close it out.”