. Not the sternest test, it is true, certainly if ambitions of a first title of the Six Nations era are to be entertained seriously, but how easy to imagine previous iterations of 21st-century Scotland teams failing something similar.
Five beautifully constructed tries against one interception try tells its own story. Scotland played by far the better rugby, but they know better than anyone that playing the better rugby does not on its own a victory make. That this was as close as it was owed to Italian obstinacy – this is a team that will not go away – and the boot of Tommaso Allan, followed by the absolutely classic wobble of a fancied team of still-not-unshakeable composure in the third quarter, when 10 quickfire points at the start of the second half brought the Azzurri level at 19-19, having played the square root of no rugby. Having not been allowed to.
Huw Jones will steal the headlines, Scotland’s centre scoring a hat-trick of tries, the second and third of them in the final quarter, brilliantly executed, through which Scotland passed that test. But it was Scotland’s wings, the little and large of international rugby, who in the various ways paved the way for Jones’s finishes.
If there were an obvious difference between the two sides beforehand, it lay out wide, where the home team’s firepower seemed noticeably more potent. Nowhere was the disparity more pronounced than in the form of Duhan van der Merwe. Brilliant though his opposite man, Ange Capuozzo, is, he gives away more than a few pounds to Scotland’s bullocking left wing.
Sure enough, twice in the first 10 minutes, Van der Merwe was released on a raid down the touchline, twice tries resulted. Blair Kinghorn supplied the pass each time. From the first, Van der Merwe set up position deep in Italy’s 22. A penalty was tapped by Dave Cherry; Kinghorn went close, before Rory Darge charged into and through …
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