‘Warren’s Whippersnappers’ may have lost but this felt like Wales were reborn

Only the Six Nations can leave one side feeling buoyed by defeat and the other deflated in victory

Wales were 27-0 down after 43 minutes and wondering how they could escape with any dignity. They lost 26-27 and were actually gutted that they must depart without the glory.
No, none of it made much sense. Not even by Six Nations standards.
A Warren Gatland team so wet behind their ears that it was all fertile enough to grow a whole field of leeks, belied their collective age, made a mockery of their inexperience and produced a second-half display that not only emphasised the power or momentum, but also of bum-fluffed exuberance.
On the day that the Principality Stadium said goodbye to the late JPR Williams, the young Dragonhood threatened to produce a record comeback that even those magical legends of the Seventies would have termed miraculous.
It was not to be. Yet what a scenario and what a game. The home support were fed until they wanted plenty more. And as much as this was the slaying of Scotland’s “Cardiff Curse” – 22 years without a victory in the capital – it also felt like a Welsh rebirth.
Gatland’s Greenhorns – or Warren’s Whippersnappers – will go to Twickenham next Saturday fostering a bizarre mood of feeling buoyed in the wake of a historic defeat.
Goodness what happens to the emotions after this, because here they were all pointing north, before dramatically switching south. Scotland’s late decision to play under the rainy evening night sky was labelled as a ‘U-Turn’. Yet that turned out to be but a mere swerve on the road compared to this complete 180 in momentum.
Never mind their roof being shut, for a long time Wales wanted their scoreboard turned off. Scotland’s Harlech Hex seemed not to have so much been laid to rest as buried so deep in the Principality Stadium, Gregor Townsend’s men need not worry about it for many, many years.
By half-time, the Welsh were not talking about their Tartan streak, they were simply thinking about the 51-0 against France in 1998 and praying they would not be ‘nilled’ at home again.
There was not the faintest whiff of a comeback. Not in the stadium anyway. In truth, the Welsh would have been philosophical. The nation knows that Gatland had been forced to conduct a rebuilding job and to do so with foundations that were barely evident.
Fair enough, as he prepared for last year’s World Cup, Gatland lost Alun Wyn Jones, Josh Navidi and Justin Tipuric to retirement. Then, after they won their pool and reached the quarter-finals, Dan Biggar and Leigh Halfpenny bid farewell and Liam Williams decamped to Japan. Ken Owens remains injured, while George North joined Taulupe Faletau, Jac Morgan and Dewi Lake on the treatment table.
Meanwhile, Louis Rees-Zammit, the true Prince of Wales, signed with the NFL to play American Football instead and by that stage Gatland must have been fearing anything and everything. Gareth Thomas, the influential prop, came a cropper in the day’s before and Will Rowlands was also deemed unavailable.
Gatland’s troops were depleting more quickly than he and his management could ever have imagined. Chuck on the kids. There was no other option.
The team sheet said it all. In their XV, Scotland boasted 13 starters from last year’s record 35-7 victory against the same opposition in Edinburgh. Wales had only four. There were nine players in red shirts aged 23 or under in the match-day squad. Just one for Scotland. To employ a tired old cliche, this was men against boyos.
Yet one thing Wales players can do, regardless of their DOBs or CVs, is play rugby and when given an opening they instinctively know how to run into the sunlight. The Scots became complacent and as they began to see yellow, so the Greenhorns sensed the opportunity. Aaron Wainwright was outstanding, Ioan Lloyd a revelation when he came on at fly-half for the concussed Sam Costelow.
Heroic losers? No doubt, But, blimey, they would have taken that moniker when staring down grim humiliation.
Of course, both sets of fans departed in some state of contentment, while the two sets of players were tasting strange bitter-sweetness. “I’m not very happy, to be honest,” Finn Russell, the Scotland captain said. “We will go to bed thinking we should have won,” Dafydd Jenkins, the Wales captain, said.
And therein those two quotes is what makes the Six Nations so unique. The Championship does not obey pre-written scripts, does not comply with the norms of sport, and refuses to obey any second-guessing.
It has its own ideas of agony and ecstasy, of euphoria and despair. And never have the lines been so blurred than here.