Peter Jackson: Peter O'Mahony's elbow did little for Tomas Francis’ looks but real damage to title hopes

Peter O'Mahony of Ireland leaves the pitch after being shown a red card against Wales. Picture: Chris Fairweather/Sportsfile

When the red alerts kept flashing all around him at Cardiff’s reopened Superdome, Tadhg Beirne responded by running the ball more often than the entire English threequarters managed 24 hours earlier.

The Red Rose quartet had been so completely corralled by the rampaging Scots that their collective runs amounted to a miserable 14. Leinster’s multi-dimensional lock made half as many again on his own, 21, in the mayhem against Wales and still lost to opponents written off by their own fans as well as everyone else’s.

At the end of a match stopped so often for video analysis, head injuries, and assorted other alarms that it ran 27 minutes overtime, Beirne was still there, still refusing to succumb to a series of savage blows, still the best bet for salvation.

James Ryan had long been counted out when Johnny Sexton fell to an accidental Welsh knee some 20 minutes from time.

The old ringmaster battered into submission yet again, Beirne offered the most likely source of redemption from the final set-piece, a line-out 5m from the Welsh line. It never happened because Billy Burns spared the Welsh nation its anguish, skewing the penalty hopelessly into the dead-ball zone.

His visible distress would have been as nothing compared to Peter O’Mahony’s over the devastating impact of his senseless action.

It did not require a hotline to Aristotle or Socrates for confirmation of the blindingly obvious, that Ireland lost because of their flanker’s grossly gratuitous indiscipline, almost a carbon copy of his red for Munster at Llanelli last October.

Smashing an elbow into Tomas Francis’ face did little for the tighthead’s looks but it put a sledgehammer through the Irish Six Nations playbook. For half an hour or so, they imposed a control which made Wales feel as if they were the ones a man short.

Thirteen unanswered points suggested they could take a red card on the chin and still win, as they had done despite CJ Stander’s against the Springboks in Cape Town five years ago and, more recently, Bundee Aki’s against Samoa in Fukuoka at the last World Cup.

When the strain took its toll, Wales eventually got round to saving themselves and ensuring history repeated itself.

The late Willie Duggan, the only other Irishman given an early bath in the championship, along with Welsh lock Geoff Wheel in the same city 44 years ago, always protested that the referee, Norman Sansom, did not send him off.

He said to me: ‘Would you mind leaving the field?’”

“And I said to him: ‘Don’t mind if I do. I’m knackered.’”

One to add to the seismic victories taking Grand Slam out of English hands

Scotland did more, far more than win where they hadn’t won for almost 40 years. Out-witted and out-played from start to finish, England’s forensic inspection of the evidence will bring them to the conclusion that they ought to have lost by 15 instead of five.

In succeeding where 10 other head coaches had failed since Jim Telfer in 1983, Gregor Townsend presided over a performance so good that England never got close enough to threaten a try, something they hadn’t failed to do since Simon Geoghegan ambushed them almost 30 years ago.

Scotland head coach Gregor Townsend. 

Finding a day when England scored fewer points at home in the championship requires going back further still, to the same weekend in 1988 when, outclassed by Wales, all they managed in reply was a solitary penalty from Jon Webb.

On the Richter scale of English shockers, the champions falling at the first hurdle is as seismic as any and that’s saying something considering the competition:

April 1999 at Wembley: Wales 32, England 31.

Lawrence Dallaglio’s gung-ho leadership in going for the corner instead of the posts with Jonny Wilkinson infallible off the tee allowed inferior opponents to ambush them via Scott Gibbs’ famous last-minute try. Grand Slam gone with Neil Jenkins’ conversion.

April 2000 at Murrayfield: Scotland 19, England 13.

Warm sunshine first-half, Arctic squall in the second, as widely forecast yet England without Martin Johnson’s pragmatic influence kept trying to run everything from deep. Duncan Hodge picked them off. Grand Slam down the drain.

Oct 2001 at Lansdowne Road: Ireland 20, England 14.

Despite sweeping all before them until the foot-and-mouth epidemic caused a delay, England fell to Keith Wood’s try straight from the training ground. As another Grand Slam disappeared, head coach Clive Woodward said: "It's as if the ceiling had fallen in.’’

Feb 2004 at Twickenham: England 13, Ireland 19.

This time it was the roof. The newly-enthroned world champions taken to the cleaners and barely six months later Woodward resigned to join Southampton Football Club.

Mar 2007 at Croke Park: Ireland 43, England 13.

An occasion which will be never forgotten by those lucky enough to have been there.

Mar 2013 at Cardiff: Wales 30, England 3.

They came to collect the Grand Slam only to lose by such a distance that Wales even stripped them of the title on points difference. Mental disintegration.

Giving youth its chance can have mixed results

Stephen Varney is a 19-year-old Welsh-speaking scrum-half from Pembrokeshire whose Italian great-grandfather stayed there after serving time as a prisoner-of-war.

Paolo Garbisi, as Venetian as a gondolier, is 20 and theirs has been touted as the youngest half-back partnership in the championship.

The claim will have come as news to a High Court judge in Dublin and a financier in Belfast.

Scrum-half Johnny Quirke was a 17-year-old pupil at Blackrock College and out-half Gerry Gilpin a 21-year-old student at Queen’s, when the Irish selectors introduced them to each other 48 hours before their joint baptisms at Twickenham in February 1962.

It turned out to be a fiery one, a literally pointless exercise on a day when Ireland crammed their team with nine new caps.

Three — left wing Laurence L’Estrange, flanker Noel Turley, and hooker Jimmy Dick from Ballymena — never played again. Another novice from Ballymena would last a little longer — Willie John McBride.

By then, a pair of 18-year-old Welsh schoolboys had gone down in history not merely because they had been picked to play against the All Blacks, an event in itself, but because they gave them the runaround.

Willie Davies and scrum-half Haydn Tanner lined up for Swansea against New Zealand in September 1935 by kind permission of the headmaster of Gowerton Grammar School.

Davies, lauded as ‘a sprite of a genius’ from the nearby cockle village of Penclawdd, made two of Swansea’s three tries in a decisive 11-3 win.

All Blacks skipper Jack Manchester told reporters after the match: “Please don’t tell them at home that we were beaten by a couple of little schoolboys.”

Scrum caps required

A view of one of the 13 scrums in the England-Scotland clash on Saturday. Picture: INPHO/Laszlo Geczo

Italy-France in Rome generated a total of nine scrums of which took up almost nine minutes. Only three were completed without a penalty or free kick.

England-Scotland produced 11 over an aggregate time of 13 minutes. Seven ended in referee Andrew Brace punishing one team or the other.

Wales-Ireland, by contrast, featured ten scrums, five each and not a single penalty. Try and work that out.

Taking the knee

Given that Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales stood behind the Springboks in most of South Africa’s despicable apartheid regime, it ought to surprise nobody that rugby union appears confused on the question of taking a knee.

Only four Scotland players — Ali Price, Cameron Redpath, Jonny Gray, and Chris Harris — did so in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The SRU issued a statement yesterday supporting the 19 who did not, saying they “are free to demonstrate their support for this important issue in the way they see fit”.

All but six of England’s squad knelt during the minute’s silence for Rugby Against Racism which meant that the standers outnumbered the kneelers 25-21.

Six England players did not take a knee prior to the clash with Scotland. Picture: David Davies

Unlike Premier League football, neither World Rugby nor the Six Nations has given a specific directive.

Peter Jackson's team of the weekend:

15 Stuart Hogg (Scotland), 14 Teddy Thomas (France), 13 George North (Wales), 12 Cameron Redpath (Scotland), 11 Duhan van der Merwe (Scotland); 10 Mathieu Jalibert (France), 9 Antoine Dupont (France); 1 Wyn Jones (Wales), 2 George Turner (Scotland), 3 Andrew Porter (Ireland); 4 Tadhg Beirne (Ireland), 5 Jonny Gray (Scotland); 6 Dylan Cretin (France), 7 Hamish Watson (Scotland), 8 Matt Fagerson (Scotland).