WITH all the praise that Scotland deservedly got for their performance against New Zealand on Sunday, very few pundits pointed out the bleedin’ obvious – you can’t give the All Blacks 14 points of a start and hope to beat them.
The match wasn’t lost only because Scotland fell away in the second half and made too many mistakes including the concession of penalties, nor was it lost only because the All Blacks’ bench was far superior to ours. No, the game was lost over 80 minutes and if Scotland had not conceded those two early tries then the flow of the game and the result might have been entirely different.
