14-man Scotland push Wales all the way at Murrayfield
WALES stand defiantly astride the Six Nations table this morning, put there against all the odds by their youngest player’s electrifying reaction to another crisis.
Louis Rees-Zammit dared to turn a lost cause into a winning one with an irresistible concoction of pace and imagination rarely seen from a Test novice since Keith Jarrett stepped straight out of school and routed England almost single-handedly at the Arms Park more than half a century ago.
Jarrett, then 18, has been residing in the rugby Pantheon ever since.
In the course of giving England’s conquerors both barrels, ReesZammit, 19 until the start of the month, has now shown the world at large what Gloucester supporters have long known, that the Cardiff boy is a rare talent.
His achievement in snatching a victory as astounding as the match itself deserves to be put into a historical perspective.
Nothing can detract from the dazzling nature of his winning try, not even the fact that, for the second time in six days, Wales found themselves aided and abetted by an opposition red card.
In the heat of a real humdinger, Zander Fagerson somehow managed to get all hot and bothered on a freezing night, so much so that he managed an action replay of what Peter O’Mahony had done the previous Sunday.
Like the Munster flanker, the Scottish tighthead ploughed straight into a ruck and smashed a shoulder into the head of a Welsh prop, leaving Matt Carley no option just as O’Mahony had given another English referee, Wayne Barnes, no option either.
The only difference turned out to be the identity of the victim: where O’Mahony struck Tomas Francis, Fagerson careered into Wyn Jones.
By then Rees-Zammit had started work on engineering one of the most unlikely of Six Nations come-backs.
Fourteen points down approaching half-time, his first try, finished off with the composure of a veteran, offered a seriously depleted Welsh team some hope of salvation.
Three minutes before Fagerson’s folly, the right wing of Welsh-Maltese ancestry presented Liam Williams with a try on the proverbial plate and suddenly Scotland’s lead had shrivelled to two.
The Scots came back, Stuart Hogg finding another hole in a Welsh defence prematurely lauded for doing nothing more than holding out against an Irish XIV while failing to concede that the luckless Billy Burns let them off the hook at the end.
The lead had changed four times when ReesZammit changed it for good in the finest tradition of cometh the hour, cometh the man.
The sheer perfection of his try will be shown over and over again, chipping into space at full throttle on the right touchline and finding a fifth gear to score without anyone getting close to lay a hand on him.
At the end, he made the under-statement of this or any other Six Nations’ season: “I just tried to use my gas.”
The artistic equivalent would have been Michelangelo looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and saying: “I just tried to use my painting set.”
Three other critical factors conspired to leave the Scots cursing their inability to win the first two rounds of the Championship since the fag end of the Five Nations era 25 years ago.
The first happened in the 48th minute when Hogg opted for successive scrums from penalties in front of the posts, a decision for which he would pay a price far higher than the try rightly disallowed because of Stuart Cummings’ obstruction.
The second major decision took place immediately afterwards, as authorised by Wayne Pivac. The embattled head coach withdrew the underperforming Dan Biggar and Gareth Davies and replaced them with the younger, infinitely less experienced half back pairing of Callum Sheedy and Kieran Hardy.
When Wales were back in front of their posts and under desperate pressure from Scotland’s redesigned scrum with Willem Nel a destructive force as the substitute tighthead, repreated infringements raised the spectre of a penalty try.
Pivac took the pre-emptive action of sending Leon Brown on and withdrawing Francis.
Brown’s immediate impact in stabilising the set-piece helped Wales escape from their tightest corner and find a way of winning a match which at one stage their fans would have feared losing by the length of Princes Street.
Maybe the writing had been on the wall for Scotland right from kick-off. In their anxiety to start where they had finished seven days earlier at Twickenham, Scotland offered Wales no shortage of unwitting encouragement.
In next to no time, they lost their first line-out of the Championship and, with it, Blade Thomson from their back row – the victim of an accidental knee to the head from his own hooker, George Turner.
Against England, the Scots had reduced their penalty count to the bare limit, conceding a magnificently niggardly total of six.
They gave away half as many in the first five minutes, allowing their depleted opponents to find their bearings without too much interference.
The comparative comfort lasted only for as long as it took Ali Price to catch Leigh Halfpenny out of position.
Darcy Graham seized his punt to touch down before Wales knew what had hit them and they were still trying to recover from the shock when Hogg sprang another with a chip which a retreating Halfpenny could only push back into the full back’s path.
The double blow had been dealt with such swift ease that it made a mockery of Hogg’s pre-match acclamation of Wales as ‘a fantastic team, full of quality and experience’.
After barely half an hour it sounded the usual guff of talking the opposition up.
Just when it might have been dismissed as Hoggwash, Wales finished up by proving him right, that they did pose ‘one hell of a challenge’.
Nobody though, least of all Hogg, can have imagined that they would be put to the sword in such cavalier fashion by the new kid on the Six Nations block, Louis Rees-Zammit.
Or, as he will be remembered in Scotland, Louis Rees-Dammit…