Forget the goat and shenanigans ...Eddie banishes all the demons
YAT THE PRINCIPALITY STADIUM ES, there was indeed a goat, just as the England coach Eddie Jones had said there would be. It was dressed in rather a fetching waistcoat as it was led on to the pitch at the head of a marching band half an hour before kick-off.
And, yes, dotted around the Principality Stadium, there were men and women who had made passable attempts at dressing as daffodils, just as Jones had said there would be. Their cunning was open to question but their enthusiasm was not.
All the pillars of Welsh patriotism were ranged against Jones and his team. The Dunvant Male Choir and the Pontypridd Male Choir stood on the pitch and sang rousing, impassioned renditions of Men of Harlech, Delilah and Bread of Heaven before reaching their crescendo with Land of Our Fathers.
Wales threw absolutely everything at England here. Absolutely everything. The build-up was magnificent and their performance was courageous and utterly, utterly committed. Some of their defending was heroic, some of their tackling was savage and unyielding. And yet still England would not be beaten.
And still Jones would not be beaten. Some may have thought his talk of ‘shenanigans’ and Welsh dirty tricks before the game patronising and outmoded. But when you keep winning, it doesn’t matter. When you keep winning, it means you got it right. And England under Jones just can’t stop winning.
This epic 21-16 comeback victory against the Welsh made it 15 wins in a row for Jones and 16 for England altogether. England keep digging it out when they need to and their belief is growing and growing. They were second best for much of this game but they found a way.
The better they get, the fewer ‘shadows in the corner’ lie in wait for them. Game by game, Jones is banishing their demons for them. Maybe he is banishing his own, too. He was sacked by Australia as head coach following a defeat in Wales in 2005 and this stunning victory, courtesy of a late try by Elliot Daly, eased away some of those memories. A second successive Grand Slam will be the target now.
It had always been difficult to take Jones’s dire warnings too seriously. England may have lost four of their last six matches against the Welsh in Cardiff but their most recent foray across the Severn Bridge ended with a 21-16 victory in February 2015.
If there were any psychological blemishes, they might have lingered from the 30-3 defeat England suffered under Stuart Lancaster in March 2013 in Cardiff or from Wales’s epic 28-25 victory over England in the 2015 World Cup that dealt a devastating blow to England’s hopes of progressing in the tournament.
But there is a sense that Jones is banishing those mental frailties. Anyone who continues to harbour them will not last long in his set-up and England did not begin this match looking like a team who had been spooked by choirs or men and women dressed as flowers. They began like a team who have not lost a game for more than a year.
Sure, Wales threw everything at them in the opening minutes and went into an early 3-0 lead when Leigh Halfpenny drilled a penalty between the posts. Thereafter, though, England dominated possession and put Wales under constant pressure.
Wales defended superbly but some of the handling of the England backs left Wales grasping at thin air. Some heroic Welsh defence frustrated England time and again at the tryline but their resistance was broken midway through the half when Ben Youngs forced his way over to add to an earlier Owen Farrell kick and put England 8-3 up.
There was a sense then that England might accelerate away but Wales hung in there. In fact, they seemed galvanised by going behind. The support of the crowd grew in intensity, too, and soon Halfpenny had belted another kick through the posts to reduce the arrears. As the strains of Land of My Fathers rang around the stadium, Wales began to turn the tide and Jack Nowell had to chase back to win a desperate race with Dan Biggar and stop the Wales No 10 running in his grubber kick.
But England could not last out until half-time and as the interval approached, Liam Williams scythed through the England defence to score under the posts. Wales’s intensity did not drop after the break and for the first time, England began to look a little ragged and weary.
The Wales back row were playing brilliantly. Even former England stalwart Brian Moore said they had taught their English counterparts a lesson. Sam Warburton tackled particularly ferociously and the crowd roared its approval when Ross Moriarty delivered a savage tackle on Farrell.
Wales exerted almost constant pressure on England for the first 20 minutes of the second half but all they had to show for it was another Halfpenny penalty to match a third Farrell score. When England began to press hard for a try of their own, Wales were grateful for a superb Biggar interception and run that relieved the pressure.
But England would not surrender their unbeaten run. They kept pressing and pressing. Wales clung to the lead until a few minutes from the end when a poor clearance gave England the opportunity they had been craving.
When Farrell’s superb pass found Daly out wide, Daly’s pace did the rest. The goat, the choirs, the daffodils, the shenanigans and an inspired Wales team: England conquered them all.