Thirteen minutes to play at Twickenham, and Scotland trail by four. They have a penalty on England’s 22. It’s a straightforward kick to the corner if they want to take a crack at the lineout but their captain, Jamie Ritchie, doesn’t fancy it. He asks Finn Russell to take the shot at goal. If Russell makes it they’ll still be one point off England’s lead, but Ritchie believes there’s enough time left for them to win it yet, and Russell agrees with him. It’s a big call. This is a different England team to the one that started the match, they’ve made six replacements, Mako Vunipola, Dan Cole, Ben Youngs and Anthony Watson among them.
England have well over 700 Test caps on the field now, almost 50 a man. Some of them, like Youngs, have been playing international rugby since Ritchie was trying to fight his way into the school first XV back at Strathallan. They know enough between them to pin Scotland back in their own half, and make sure the final stretch of the game is played right down by the visitor’s try-line. Only Scotland aren’t planning to wait for England to slip and gift them the match; they’re thinking they can rip it from them as soon as they win possession.
When Russell takes a kick from Youngs just outside Scotland’s own 22, the clock reads 73 minutes. He passes to Blair Kinghorn, who passes again to Sione Tuipulotu, who presses on, then passes back to Kinghorn who goes into and through a tackle and offloads to Duhan van der Merwe. He’s brought down, but Scotland are soon moving again. Russell passes to Jack Dempsey who gives it back again, then Kyle Steyn is through and closing in on the other 22, and all of a sudden England are scrambling. Tuipulotu passes the ball to Russell who slips it on to Ritchie, he sends it to Fraser Brown who whistles it across to Richie Gray, who flicks it to Matt Fagerson.
And all of a sudden Van der Merwe has it. He’s 15 strides from the line, and Marcus Smith and Owen Farrell are closing in. He steps infield off his left, and slides by the pair of them. Max Malins catches up to him a split second too late and Van der Merwe dives over the try-line with Malins hanging off him like a backpack with a snapped strap. And Scotland have won. Van der Merwe had already scored one of the great individual tries earlier in the game, when he beat five men, but this was something else again. Sixteen players, 14 passes, three phases. It was an utterly ruthless bit of finishing.
Up in the stands, Gregor Townsend smiled to himself. The try only took 47 seconds from beginning to end, but it was at least six years in the making. Townsend’s teams have always had the courage to play that way, and sometimes had the chops to pull it off, too. What was different about this one was that the sense of irresistible conviction that carried them along. It wasn’t a Hail Mary play. Watch those 10 minutes of the match back. Scotland weren’t running off the hope they might win, but the expectation they would. They knew exactly what they wanted to do, and how to go about it.
Scotland slipped almost unnoticed into this Six Nations. Steve Borthwick had taken over at England, Warren Gatland was back at Wales, Ireland were top of the world rankings, France in the thick of 13-match winning streak, and even Italy were improving. There wasn’t a lot about Scotland, though, that hadn’t been said already in the last six years. In fact a lot of the talk around their camp was about what’s next, and whether Townsend is going to move on from the job in the autumn. His contract is up after the World Cup, and there have been reports linking him with the French national team, and the top job at Leicester Tigers, too.
Maybe everyone was looking too far ahead. Townsend clearly feels that whatever is next he’s got some unfinished business to deal with here. His Scotland have always promised a lot. They’ve won famous victories in London, Paris, and Sydney, and had a couple of oh-so-closes at Murrayfield against New Zealand and South Africa. They’ve beaten England, and Australia, more often than not, and France in every other game they’ve played, but at the end of it all, haven’t had so much as a triple crown, or even a World Cup quarter-final to show for it, let alone a championship.
Which is why Townsend and Ritchie were talking about their next game almost as soon as that last one was over. In 2021 they beat England in the opening round, then lost narrowly to Wales the next week, in 2022 it happened all over again. It remains one of the more surprising statistics, and Scottish fans are going to be sick of hearing it, that they haven’t won both their first two matches of the championship since 1996. It would be a test of Greyfriars Bobby’s patience to keep faith after a run of setbacks like that. Judging them on the back of that first match, maybe Townsend’s Scotland are just about ready to reward their fans for it.
