Despite the icy non-event in Paris, it’s two games in for most and lessons are starting to be learned — on and off the pitch, writes Brendan Fanning
For the last three minutes in the first half of the Wales versus Scotland game last weekend, the away team laid siege to the home line like drowning men reaching for a life raft. A score at that point would have swept them into the lead, and into a mental state the Scots don’t often enjoy in the Six Nations. For a team who rarely enjoy the thrill of touching down — Greig Laidlaw’s try that day would be their first in five Tests — this was a critical period in their season.
At the start of the sequence, the phenomenon that is George North had hobbled off the field, leaving his team down to 14 men and his wing position exposed. In a series of plays that must have terrified their defence coach Shaun Edwards, the station was left short-staffed until the break.
Not that it mattered too much. With Toby Faletau and Jonathan Davies covering an increasingly wide space — Faletau was so shagged he couldn’t even summon extra defenders to the cause — Scotland ignored the lame ducks. Instead, they picked and jammed the ball until they knocked it forward, courtesy of Gethin Jenkins diving off his feet for what should have been a yellow card. And from the scrum Mike Phillips knocked it out of play.
The Scots ended up getting tonked. And in the process, Welsh stock has risen to the pitch of 2008 when they were en route to their second Grand Slam in three seasons.
Warren Gatland‘s team have become the talk of the Championship so far. When they have the ball, they give depth to what is a massive backline and pretty much let them at it. And when they don’t, they start by depriving the other team of space so fast that opponents find it hard to breathe, let alone think.
It worked against Ireland and it worked against the Scots, and it will be interesting to see if one half of it — the blitz defence — is still working by the time they take on France in the Millennium Stadium on St Patrick’s Day.
The line on blitz defence used to be that the higher up the game you used it, the less effective it became. So while it would terrorise schoolboys, and unsettle senior club players, at Test level it was no more than an inconvenience to the opposing attack.
During his Ireland incarnation, defence coach Mike Ford never had it as his first trick in the box, and he didn’t change when he moved to England.
“My rule of thumb is you either go over the top of them or you use your kicking game and it’s beyond me why (Mike) Phillips is such an aggressive
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