Jones: Scots can take heart from stemming Welsh tide
◆ Centre reckons clinging on for win over Wales wouldn’t have happened in previous Cardiff games and huddles were key to getting back into match
At half-time in Cardiff the conversation wasn’t about whether Scotland would win, it was by how much.
And when Duhan van der Merwe jet-heeled his way around flailing red shirts to score his second try in the 42 nd minute it felt like an appropriatemoment to check the record books. Just what is Scotland’s record win in Cardiff in this fixture? (34-18 in 1982, five tries, by Jim Calder, David Johnston, Jim Pollock, Jim Renwick and Derek White, four Andy Irvine conversions and a drop goal apiece for Renwick and John Rutherford).
All wonderful players and the bedrock of the side which won the grand slam two years later. As witnessed by their secondhalf collapse, the class of 2024 remain well short of that gold standard. Scotland’s 27-0 lead was cut to 27-26 with 11 minutes remaining and we were on the brink of witnessing the biggest Six Nations collapse since England tossed away a 31-0 advantage against Gregor Townsend’s side at Twickenham in 2019.
Scotland rallied at the principality and finished the match the stronger of the two sides, camped on the Welsh line and with van der Merwe being denied a hat-trick try after a TMO check.
The second half felt like slowmotion torture at times as Wales ran in four tries in 20 minutes but, when the dust had settled, Scotland had their victory, their first in the Welsh capital for 22 years, and they deserve credit for that. But this was a young Welsh side, inexperienced to the point of giving a debut to a full-back who’d played only 15 games of professional rugby.
If Townsend’s team hadn’t won it would have been an utterly deflating start to their Six Nations and Huw Jones agreed it was a match Scotland sides of recent vintage would have lost. “Yes. Totally,” said the outside centre. “It would have been really disappointing if we had lost that. So, I guess we can take heart from the fact that we stemmed the tide, managed to hold onto the win and, actually, almost get a try of our own which would have meant a bonus point. So, that was disappointing not to get that fourth score, but we’ll take the win. there are obviously positives to take from it, but there was a 30-minute period in that game which we really need to look at.” James Botham sparked the Welsh revival with his try in the 48th minute and the comeback that followed was almost up there with the one his grandfather, Sir Ian, masterminded in the 1981 Ashes. Further tries followed from Rio Dyer, man of the match Aaron Wainwright and Alex Mann as Scotland’s defence and discipline crumbled alarmingly. They conceded 14 consecutive penalties and had George Turner and Sione Tuipulotu yellow-carded as they tried desperately to stem the flow.
At avenue which has been the scene of so much disappointment for Scotland teams, the feeling that a golden opportunity was slipping away prompted some urgent team talks. “Those huddles under the posts when they’ve just scored are to work out how to get back into the game,” said Jones. “We needed to stick to the plan, not give them easy entries into our half, but we didn’t manage the second half very well.
“We set out to do exactly what we did in the first half – manage the game, manage the territory, take our chances – but in the second half our discipline let us down. We let them into our half too many times and they came out with such a great response after being 20 points down, so credit to them, and we just didn’t deal with it well enough. It is frustrating but I think we salvaged a little bit in those last five minutes, and in the end we did enough to get the win which is what we came here for.”
Scotland's points came from van der Merwe's double, an early try by Pierre Schoeman and 12 from the boot of Finn Russell. They were also ahead on the crime count. Turner was sent to the sin-bin in the 48th minute for trying to haul down a maul in an act of desperation as Botham scored. And centre Tuipulotu followed 12 minutes later after twice being caught off side. jones insisted the whole team had to take responsibility for the disciplinary meltdown.
“Across the board we were guilty,” he said. “When we were one man down, we talked about not putting our heads into rucks, and then I went and put my head in a ruck at one point. So, it is stuff like that. And discipline is not just penalties, it is sticking to the plan, and doing what you’ve said you are going to do. And I think at different times we were all guilty of maybe that panic of ‘we need to get that turnover now’ and trying to solve something by ourselves, which doesn’t work, especially when you are a man down and the opposition are playing wide to wide which means you are chasing touchline to touchline. It wasn’t ideal.
“Our response to what they brought in that second half wasn’t good enough, but we had the right messages, and we need to be better as a team responding to those messages. The thing is, we had the right plan. We were saying the right things. We did it in the first half, and we didn’t quite do it in the second half and I think I’ve said so many similar things after tight losses before. A five-minuteperiod orate n-minute period has let us down and we’ve lost the game. That happened today but we're really happy that we’ve come out of it and we’ve won but I guess it’s still happening and it’s something we really need to fix if we want to continue to grow and win big games.”
There was a 30-minute period in that game which we really need to look at Huw Jones