Rugby Union / Five Nations' Championship: Fortune deserts Scotland the brave

Scotland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15

PLUCKY Scotland; lucky, lucky England, who needed a form of divine intervention to give them Jonathan Callard's last-kick penalty. One Scottish paper had indeed tried to invoke the deity in support of Gavin Hastings and his supposedly no-hope team. . .and this was how He treated them.

Delight one moment when Gregor Townsend dropped his goal, despair the next. The injustice of it all was etched so deeply into Hastings's face that he could not keep it straight. 'Christ, it's hard to bear, I can tell you,' the lachrymose captain murmured. It was JC, after all, who had landed the winner.

So an epic confrontation came down to kicks that were landed - Callard's five from seven - and kicks that were missed - Hastings's five from seven. And ultimately it came down to one refereeing decision, an uncanny replay by Lindsay McLachlan of the Brian Kinsey penalty award that gave New Zealand the first Test against the Lions last summer.

The common denominator is Hastings, losing captain on both occasions. No wonder he looked as if Callard had kicked him in the groin as well as the ball between the posts. 'You have to kick your goals in international rugby and, if I had, we would have won by quite a few points,' he said. 'There were no excuses.'

Having said that, Hastings was puzzled, to put it politely, that Ian Jardine should have been pulled up for playing the ball on the ground and Jim Telfer, the Scottish Rugby Union's director of rugby, said that Jardine was doing what McLachlan had specifically said was permissible when they had spoken during the week. Yesterday the New Zealander said that in fact Jardine, who had replaced Scott Hastings, had had two goes at the ball.

'These things happen,' Gavin sighed. In his case, again and again. The more palatable truth was that, even in defeat, this was a quite staggering improvement in three weeks from the game in Wales that Scotland had lost 29-6, never mind the 51-15 trouncing by the All Blacks that had preceded it.

As one Scots questioner put it to Hastings: '15-14, Gavin, the battle of Flodden. Do you think the team did better than King James?' In fact it was in 1513 that James IV of Scotland was killed and his army routed by the perfidious English but yes, there was indeed a better Scottish performance at Murrayfield than Flodden Field.

'The England game always raises the effort and ability,' Douglas Morgan, the coach, said. That is fine as long as it does not become the be-all and end-all, because if the Scots read too much into Saturday's narrow defeat, simply because it was against Sassenach opposition, they will be as sorry as the Welsh were after they had gone one better by beating England by a point a year ago.

On the other hand, if they were to reproduce this kind of rugby against any of their other Five Nations rivals - including France, the next visitors to Murrayfield on 19 March, and even more so the Irish in Dublin in a fortnight - their losing streak would certainly be at an end. 'They couldn't have played with more pride and passion,' Hastings said, implicitly damning the absence of both from the Cardiff match.

The Scots were helped, too, by a rank bad England performance not dissimilar from others when they have come a cropper: Wales and Ireland last season most recently. The way they were so easily hustled out of the smooth stride of their encouraging opening was self-evidently alarming but also betrayed again England's inability to think as well as play their way out of trouble.

In such fraught circumstances no one ever seems capable, to use football parlance, of putting his foot on the ball, though this of course is easier said than done. 'You can't play the game slowly when things are happening very quickly,' was the neat summation of Geoff Cooke, the England manager.

When asked what had gone wrong, he drew a deep breath. 'Nothing worked for us apart from the first 10 minutes when things looked promising but even then we snatched at opportunities. Our line- out didn't work. We were giving the scrum-half an absolute nightmare.

'We didn't deal with kicks and we lost ball in contact, which is somewhere we've always prided ourselves in. We lost turnovers. But we don't want to take anything away from Scotland; they played really well and caused us all manner of problems and we were very fortunate to come away with a win.'

That they did was a tribute to resilience and a cussed refusal to accept defeat, though there was precious little else to appreciate. Will Carling produced one or two slashing runs and Rob Andrew was superb in keeping his head while all around others were losing theirs.

But once Scotland had come relatively unscathed through their shaky opening they found an area of weakness and ruthlessly exploited it. Up, incessantly, went the ball and whenever and wherever it came to earth English indecision was so final that at times it turned to outright panic.

The Scottish try after 28 minutes was the most significant result, Martin Bayfield being the unfortunate under a Hastings kick which squirted away to Tony Stanger and thence to the scorer, Rob Wainwright. If Hastings had kept the score moving the try would have been the clincher, but instead he managed only two penalties and when Callard kicked his fourth with six minutes left Scotland's game seemed up.

Not quite. Eighty minutes had elapsed when Townsend sweetly struck his drop-shot, more than 82 when Callard lined up his decisive penalty from 46 yards to a cacophony of barracking. 'Will (Carling) passed me the ball as he usually does and said, 'It's easy'.' Under the most awesome, excruciating pressure, that was exactly how he made it look.

SCOTLAND: G Hastings (Watsonians, capt); A Stanger (Hawick), S Hastings (Watsonians), D Wyllie (Stewart's Melville FP), K Logan (Stirling County); G Townsend (Gala), G Armstrong (Jed- Forest); A Sharp (Bristol), K Milne (Heriot's FP), P Burnell (London Scottish), S Munro (Glasgow High/Kelvinside), A Reed (Bath), P Walton

(Northampton), G Weir (Melrose), R Wainwright (Edinburgh Academicals). Replacements: I Smith (Gloucester) for Wainwright, 66; I Jardine (Stirling County) for S Hastings, 71. Temporary substitute: B Redpath (Melrose) for Armstrong, 48-50.

ENGLAND: J Callard (Bath); T Underwood (Leicester), W Carling (Harlequins, capt), P de Glanville (Bath), R Underwood (Leicester); R

Andrew (Wasps), K Bracken (Bristol); J Leonard, B Moore (Harlequins), V Ubogu (Bath), M Johnson (Leicester), M Bayfield (Northampton),

J Hall, B Clarke (Bath), N Back (Leicester).

Referee: L McLachlan (New Zealand).

----------------------------------------------------------------- FIVE NATIONS STANDINGS ----------------------------------------------------------------- P W D L F A Pts Wales 2 2 0 0 46 21 4 France 1 1 0 0 35 15 2 England 1 1 0 0 15 14 2 Ireland 2 0 0 2 30 52 0 Scotland 2 0 0 2 20 44 0 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Remaining fixtures: 19 February England v Ireland, Wales v France. 5 March France v England, Ireland v Scotland. 19 March England v Wales, Scotland v France. -----------------------------------------------------------------

(Photograph, graphic and statistics omitted)