Misfiring attacking play
miles away from clicking but the offloads just didn’t stick, especially at Murrayfield.
Warburton and Biggar combined well in the 18th minute, but the Ospreys man threw a speculative offload that was never on and Wales knocked the ball on.
Just minutes after, Webb made a break of his own, taking play deep into the 22 but again the offload was forced and Scotland intercepted it.
Webb failed to gather a high offload from Jonathan Davies early in the second of that game too, just after the centre was sent through by Ken Owens.
Around a quarter of the way through the Italy game, Wales are attacking close to the Italian line when Edoardo Padovani shoots out of the line – just a hint of offside about it – and gets to Biggar.
The Wales pivot tries to force a pretty unlikely pass to Jonathan Davies and the move ends. Cause for optimism... Had those offloads stuck, I probably wouldn’t be writing this article, the Six Nations probably wouldn’t have been so bad and Wales would have scored a few more tries.
They were inches away from securing a bonus point in Rome, a number of chances went begging against England – not least Webb’s forward pass to Biggar and James Haskell’s cynical infringement - and they were 20 minutes of chaos away from beating France.
But in international rugby you have to deal with pressure. The physical pressure put on by opposition defences and the psychological pressure of executing the right decisions in the heat of battle.
The fact the Welsh offloads didn’t stick, and the fact they lost to England, Scotland and France, meant nothing was there to paper over the cracks.
When Wales varied their attack, they actually looked quite dangerous but we simply didn’t see it often enough.
They sleepwalked through phases to what became an inevitable mistake, much like they did when they were unable to get through a 13-man Australian defensive line at the World Cup. Wales have talked a good game when t comes to evolving their style. But I’ve not seen much to suggest things have moved on from that Twickenham loss to the Wallabies.
That, perhaps, is the most worrying aspect of the lot.