Respect! Anscombe as Wales get it right The hero this time
WHEN he lined up that touchline conversion, Gareth Anscombe had no way of knowing the magnitude of a shot at making history on a global scale.
The man who spent almost three years refusing to abandon his career despite recurring knee surgery would have known, of course, that Wales had never beaten the Springboks in South Africa. He would have been sick, sore and tired reading about it.
What the almost forgotten fly-half was about to attempt amounted to striking a still more significant blow for the game at large in Britain and Ireland. Anscombe had given himself the chance to reap what he had sown, his pass floated to perfection over some 20 metres providing Josh Adams enough room to squeeze in at the corner.
Suddenly, it all came down on the shoulders of a player scarcely seen on the big stage during the three-and-a-bit years since he played a leading role in winning the last Welsh Grand Slam. Adams’ reliable finish saddled him with a kick from the most oblique angles from the left touchline, the one advantage for a right-footed kicker.
Miss an all too missable kick, and Wales would be condemned to the cruelty of a second near-miss in seven days. Nail it and they would have not much more than a minute to do what they couldn’t do in Pretoria last weekend and hold on.
The fastest Springboks flew towards him like bats out of hell. Anscombe, aware that the kick allowed no margin for error, blocked them out of his mind, trusting in his technique to secure the goal kick of his life.
When it soared high and handsome between the posts, the Boks had 74 seconds
to save themselves. This time Wales would not grant them an unwitting stay of execution as Dan Biggar had done with his deliberate knock-on at Loftus Versfeld.
This time they would keep their discipline and defend their lead with legitimate ferocity. The hooter had sounded and still the Boks kept coming only this time they ran into one red wall too many and Vincent Koch knocked-on.
This time, the Boks pushed their luck a tad too far. And so Wales finally brought an end to a
chronic record of failure over six decades against the Springboks under African skies. In punishing the hosts for thinking they could field an almost entire reserve team and keep winning, they rounded off a unique treble.
The home countries had never beaten all three Southern Hemisphere superpowers in their own backyards on the same day. Ireland set the mood at breakfast time back home with their thumping icebreaker of a win over the All Blacks in Dunedin.
England kept the ball rolling on the other side of
the Tasman, leaving Wales to follow suit and square their series, if only they were up to the challenge. Whatever else they may have lacked, it wouldn’t be motivation.
Between them, Jacques Nienaber and Sir Gareth Edwards had seen to that. The Springbok head coach’s strange decision to start with 14 secondstringers around Eben Etzebeath prompted Wales’ greatest loving rugby son to accuse him of ‘disrespect’.
He urged his compatriots to respond by giving their hosts ‘a good tonking.’ For long periods of a match which had precious little to commend it until the last ten minutes, his words seemed to fall if not on deaf ears then certainly on stony ground.
Biggar missed two penalties and once again his team were in danger of falling into a mire of indiscipline. Virtually every time they got into an attacking position, the line-out went haywire and Alun Wyn Jones suffered the indignity of a second successive binning.
He appeared to have good reason to be mightily miffed at referee Angus
Gardner’s explanation of hands in the ruck. He came back immediately after Anscombe’s penalty 14 minutes from time and reinforced Welsh belief that the match was still there to be won.
The venue would make it all the more satisfying. Instead of being granted the small mercy of a Test at sea-level, Wales had no choice but to concede still more of the high ground. Instead all they got for their heroics at Loftus Versfeld amounted to another trial at altitude in another of the Springbok shrines.
Perversely, the match never scaled any heights until Wales realised they didn’t have that much to beat and found an inspiring way of helping themselves to a famous victory. In doing so they ensured the Boks paid dearly for taking a few liberties in their selection, to put it politely.
Bloemfontein, even nearer than Pretoria to one mile above sea-level, guaranteed the World Cup holders another lofty stage, a fact known only too well by more seasoned students of Welsh rugby. From their perspective, the best thing that could be said about the Free State was that they had given it a wide berth in the 14 years since Ryan Jones and his 2008 Grand Slammers lost by 26 points.
As if they were still bristling over the indiscipline which cost them a famous win seven days earlier, Wales blasted out of the traps as never before to win what surely must have been the fastest penalty ever awarded in any Test match anywhere.
From Biggar’s kick off to the referee pinging Pieter-Steph du Toit for going off his feet at the ensuing ruck took all of seven seconds. Put another way, the Springboks had given the visitors a threepoint start in less than the time it used to take Usain Bolt at his fastest to complete 100 metres.
No sooner had Biggar accepted the gift from 20 metres than the visitors returned the favour, providing his opposite number with a similar potshot from an even closer range. Pollard helped himself on a night of recurring similarity beteen the fly-halves.
Just as Biggar missed a long-distance penalty donated by hooker Joseph Dweba, so Pollard followed suit from an almost identical range six minutes later. And so it went on: Biggar shanking another shot wide five minutes into the second half, Pollard doing likewise ten minutes later.
Neither went the distance. While the Boks continue to suffer from a serious shortage of Test fly-halves, Wales could replace their injured captain with a matchwinner of proven quality.
All Anscombe had to do was find a minimum of ten points in a short space of time. One sumptuous pass and two shots at goal, the second the ultimate in pressure kicks, did the trick.
In doing so, Gareth Anscombe ensured that his name will be inscribed in letters of gold somewhere up there in the Welsh pantheon….