The history of this fixture suggested Scotland needed a near-perfect performance, while hoping the visitors had an off day.<\/p>\n
That’s not how it went, but the spectacle was sensational.<\/p>\n
Scotland battled bravely at close quarters – especially on their own line – but gave away two soft tries as a result of weak defence further up the pitch.<\/p>\n
After just three minutes, the towering Josh Lord ambled through a huge gap in a ruck before nonchalantly popping the ball off to scampering scrum-half Roigard.<\/p>\n
That took the wind out of the crowd’s sails and Murrayfield, marking 100 years of international rugby, was silenced again moments before half-time when Scotland were caught sleeping and Sititi put Jordan away.<\/p>\n
The atmosphere was flipped completely, however, as Gregor Townsend’s side emerged from the break like men possessed.<\/p>\n
Ashman bundled over after a powerful surge from the pack and Savea was sent to the bin for an infringement during that maul.<\/p>\n
Russell then went wide to find Steyn and the winger, preferred to Duhan van der Merwe, nipped in for this 14th Scotland try.<\/p>\n
The noise from the crowd was deafening as White was stopped just short and Schoeman had the ball stripped from his grasp on the whitewash, while a stretching Graham could not hold on as he reached for the line.<\/p>\n
Scotland continued to flood forward and Russell banged over a penalty to make it an even game.<\/p>\n
With Sititi guilty of a deliberate knock-on, the hosts had all the momentum – but could not get their noses in front.<\/p>\n
Once back to their full complement and with the power of their bench on the field, New Zealand found a second wind.<\/p>\n
It looked like Blair Kinghorn and George Turner had arrived in time to knock McKenzie into touch but he somehow managed to spin out of the tackle and twist his way over.<\/p>\n
McKenzie produced a woeful conversion attempt but then put the game beyond Scotland in the closing moments with a monster of a long-range penalty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The history of this fixture suggested Scotland needed a near-perfect performance, while hoping the visitors had an off…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-129213","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}