“Seventy to 80 per cent of households in Wales watch when we play in the Six Nations,” Sam Warburton told Gabby Logan before Sunday’s game got under way in Cardiff. By the 15th minute, by which point France had scored their third try, you had to conclude that the 20 to 30 per cent might have been the lucky ones.
With a fair chunk of our own rugby-loving folk feeling a bit gloomy doomy of late, it’s worth remembering that there’s always someone else worse off. True, it’s no consolation at all, but still, no harm in noting it.
It was 54-12 to France in the end, a record win for them in Cardiff, Wales’s 13th successive Six Nations defeat played in front of the lowest non-Covid-era Six Nations crowd at the Principality Stadium. “I think aspects of it went quite well for Wales, actually,” said Sam at full-time, an observation that left Martin Johnson chewing his lip.
But Mack Hansen might have appreciated that effort to look on the bright side. “Irish people can be quite negative,” he told Tommy Tiernan on Saturday night, the fella at a loss to understand “this weird narrative” around the Irish team.
“It would be one thing if we’d lost half our games throughout the year, but I’ve played 30 games and I’ve won 26 – when is that ever heard of, especially in Irish rugby? We win and it’s like, ‘yeah but, they weren’t great, were they?’ But we’re still beating good teams – maybe not as silky and clean as before, but those games are hard to win.”
Do you recognise this man? A clean-shaven Mack Hansen on The Tommy Tiernan Show
(Just a brief side note here, that isn’t, admittedly, one of the weekend’s chief rugby talking points: Since he discarded that moustache, Mack looks in or around 12 years younger, so let that be a lesson to those of you with a penchant for facial hair.)
Mack, incidentally, didn’t have good news for those eager to see him back in a Connacht and Ireland shirt some time soon – his foot injury will keep him out for months yet. How did it happen? “I wish I had a good story for you,” he told Tommy. “Like it was a shark bite, or something to do with saving someone.” But he just stood on another lad’s foot and damaged his own.
Once again, then, his Irish comrades had to make do without him on Saturday, him being part of an injury list the length of your arm, but the talk from the camp was they were hell-bent on burying the memory of that mullering in Paris by seeing off the Italians.
“You can see town is buzzing,” Dan Sheehan told Virgin Media before the game. “The bus journey in, you could see everyone giving us best wishes – which is sometimes hard to see in the media.”
Now, a siege mentality of that class can, of course, work wonders, as Peter O’Mahony would no doubt agree. But having been on Dan’s side of the fence for 13 years, here he was in his media seat in the Virgin Media studios.
Sione Tuipulotu celebrates making wallies of pundits after Scotland’s win over England in the Six Nations. Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images
“You said, ‘if I don’t like it, I’ll never do it again’,” Joe Molloy revealed. By full-time, after a game that would have stretched any souls’s nerves to breaking point, Peter had the look of a man who would have preferred to have been tending to his pansies and cyclamen back home. “My heart-rate is just coming down,” he said after Italy nearly did a job on Ireland.
But his work wasn’t done – next up: Scotland v England.
Peter: “I don’t think Scotland have what it takes to beat that England side at the moment … I think England have too much class for them.”
Conor Murray: “Yeah, I don’t think they’ll threaten England too much.”
Rob Kearney: “I agree.”
Half-time: Scotland 24, England 10.
“It’s mad,” said Joe. “It is,” said Rob. “There’s nothing quite like the Scots to make wallies of Virgin pundits.”
“Are you all sticking with England,” asked Joe. Rob, Peter and Conor: “We’re jumping ship.”
It’s as well, because otherwise they’d have needed a life raft, England going down 31-20. As Scott Hastings put it over on ITV of the game Nick Mullins described as “a tale of the unexpected”, “it’s like having an extra Hogmanay to celebrate”. And probably only 1 per cent of Scottish households watched it for fear of witnessing their boys suffering savagery on the lines of a shark attack.
The fear now, of course, is that an indignant England will sink their jaws into our boys next weekend.