Wales edge closer to unwanted record

At Murrayfield 70 years ago, Wales played the role of polite guests to perfection, enabling their supposedly hopeless hosts to end the longest losing run British rugby had ever known.

- PETER JACKSON

Scotland had won after 17 defeats in a row over four years, a sequence which goaded their most famous forward of the inter-war era, the mighty John Bannerman, later ennobled as the Liberal peer Lord Bannerman of Kildonan, into a discreet intervention.

His Lordship persuaded the selectors to pick four new caps, among them Fin Smith’s grandfather Tom Elliot from Gala, drop almost half the team and show a mobile but lightweight pack how to outsmart heavier opponents. Welsh compliance, as personified by Cliff Morgan, of all people, gifting the Scots the first of their tries, ensured that the Lord’s plan worked a treat.

Seven decades on, Wales returned stricken by the same chronic habit of losing almost exactly as many Tests as Scotland had lost in the mid-Fifties. Desperate predicaments requiring desperate measures, they arrived all too aware that another defeat would leave them one short of matching the run which drove Lord Bannerman to the rescue.

The Red Dragon legions turned out in force, their faith restored by the Ireland match and reinforced by the notion, however fanciful, that the Scots would still be hung over from their Calcutta Cup mugging at Twickenham a fortnight earlier.

For a few fleeting moments it felt as if maybe the rugby gods thought it high time they settled an old score; that the fixture would turn out to be a complete role-reversal of February 1955 and bring an end to the worst run endured by any of the home countries since then.

It took the Scots, smarting from the folly of out-playing England 3-1 on tries only to lose by a single point, barely ten minutes to remove any realistic prospect of Wales doing what they haven’t done since beating Georgia at the last World Cup some 18 months ago.