Match action
As if the wounded Welsh hadn’t suffered enough before kick-off and immediately after it, an old Twickenham ghost reappeared in mocking defiance of their recovery.
Losing a ninth Lion before the match and conceding two tries in the opening quarter left them in dire need of a break from somebody, somewhere, somehow. It came in fortuitous circumstances, Rhys Patchell’s cross-kick bouncing off Steff Evans’ knee close to the left touchline, then rolling invitingly into England’s in-goal area.
Gareth Anscombe, summoned from the bench in response to the Leigh Halfpenny emergency, could hardly have believed his luck. The New Zealander got one hand on the ball before Anthony Watson got both of his only for the try to be disallowed by another New Zealander, Glenn Newman in his role as TMO.
Having examined the video evidence, Newman relayed a surprising verdict into the earphone of the French referee Jerome Garces: “Not clearly grounded. First grounding by England. No try.’’
Wales had ample reason for thinking they had been robbed. The first grounding appeared to be from a hand belonging to a red jersey. For the old players who created the Golden Era of the Seventies and the fans who followed them it will have evoked memories of highway robbery from a time when Wales expected to beat their old rivals as a fact of Five Nations life.
Back then, on March 16, 1974 with the title riding on the result, JJ Williams swore that he outsprinted two English backs to get the try eleven minutes from time with the match in the balance. It happened, by almost eerie coincidence, in the same area in front of the North Stand. The referee, John West from Dublin, relied on the only technology at his disposal, his eyesight, and decided that one of the two English defenders who privately thought they had been outpaced by JJ, David Duckham and Peter Squires, had reached the ball first.
The outrage in Wales inspired Max Boyce, then making a name for himself as a troubadour par excellence, to compose a song which he turned into a smash hit, entitled: Blind Irish Referees.
The lingering grievance rages almost as fiercely within JJ as it did more than 40 years ago. “From that day to this,’’ he told me not so long ago, “I never needed to look at the videotape because as I landed on the ball, the point of it struck me in the stomach.
“Imagine my horror when I saw John West, who must have been almost 20 metres away, disallow the try. Duckham and Squires of England were still within earshot and when I said ‘That’s a try’ they agreed.
“If only technology had arrived 30 years sooner. We could have begged Mr West to signal to the TMO and ask him: ‘Try, yes or no?’.”
Garces, having asked the selfsame question of Newman, there will be no shortage of Welsh players, officials and supporters to wonder whether new technology is all it’s cracked up to be. Had the try been given, as it ought to have been, England could not have complained.
They knew they had been let-off. Not surprisingly, Eddie Jones, for once, chose not to give his view, happy to abide by the official verdict. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
The England party line, as spouted by Jones, that the TMO’s ‘got all the time in the world to make the right decision’ conveniently ignored the view of a great many that the same TMO had come to the wrong decision.
Nobody can ever say how a try then would have changed the course of the game, but the fact is that seven points went abegging
and England finished up winning by six. And they did that thanks to a superhuman cover tackle from a substitute wing forward who learnt a fair bit of his trade as an Osprey.
How Sam Underhill prevented Scott Williams sliding in at the left corner nobody will ever know, perhaps not even the man himself. A match which began with England threatening to win it inside the distance finished with the champions mightily relieved to hear the bell.
The whole dynamic of a Test match as enthralling as any between the next-door neighbours changed when Warren Gatland made a tactical alteration that left his sparring partner in the Red Rose corner grateful for his team’s recurring ability to find a way out of so many tight spots.
He moved Gareth Anscombe from full-back to fly-half, sent George North onto the right wing and moved Josh Adams to the position which had been vacated by Halfpenny’s foot infection – all at the expense of Patchell within an hour of him being exposed to the biggest stage of all.
Even some of the most revered products of the fabled fly-half factory had been forced to endure losing initiations at Twickenham. David Watkins, Barry John, Phil Bennett, Jonathan Davies and Stephen Jones all failed to win there on debut down the decades from the early Sixties to the mid-Noughties.
In preparing to tread a way through such illustrious footsteps, Patchell would have been less than human had he not envisaged all manner of scenarios as a positive response to ‘Jones the Gob’ singling him out.
Of all the possibilities spinning through his mind, it can be safely said that kicking-off three times in the first quarter of the match would not have been among them. Nor would an aerial duel like the one which allowed Owen Farrell to seize a loose ball and catch Wales naked with the deadliest of punts for May to soothe English nerves barely two minutes into a rollicking contest.
A few weeks ago Welsh fans would have taken a losing bonus point with some relish. This morning it will feel like poor reward for Aaron Shingler tearing the English door off its hinges, for Anscombe’s skill in going within inches of putting Evans in at the corner and so much more.
The biggest compliment that can be paid to Wales is that never under Jones can England at ‘HQ’ have been more relieved at belting the ball high into the crowd knowing their dangerous opponents had run out of time.