Scotland closed out the opening day of the inaugural Nations Championship with the most complete away performance of the Gregor Townsend era, running in seven tries at the Estadio Mario Alberto Kempes to post their highest ever points total on Argentine soil.<\/p>\n
Los Pumas rallied furiously in the closing minutes through Lucio Cinti and Agustin Moyano to make the final margin respectable and secure a try bonus point.<\/p>\n
This fixture never lets you down<\/p>\n
12 tries. A 21-0 lead surrendered at Murrayfield in November, and now 85 points shared in C\u00f3rdoba eight months later. Whatever else the Nations Championship<\/a> delivers across its first cycle, the schedulers should take note that Argentina<\/a> against Scotland<\/a> has quietly become the most reliable entertainment in Test rugby.<\/p>\n There is a structural reason for it. Both sides are at their most dangerous in transition, both carry world-class strike runners in the back three, and neither has ever been much interested in kicking a game to death. The result is a rivalry that has produced comebacks, collapses, hat-tricks and heists across three decades, and on the evidence of the opening round, the new tournament has inherited its most watchable fixture fully formed. The head-to-head ledger remains almost dead level, which feels exactly right.<\/p>\n Scotland were organised, accurate and utterly ruthless, Argentina were brilliant in bursts but over 80 minutes, the team beat the moments.<\/p>\n Efficiency is the mark of a well-coached side<\/p>\n The raw numbers tell a story that would have seemed implausible to anyone watching the first quarter, when Los Pumas went through 22 phases, camped on the Scottish line and eventually mauled Joaqu\u00edn Oviedo over. Both sides finished with 65 carries apiece, yet Scotland generated 431 metres to Argentina\u2019s 296. That is 6.6 metres per carry against 4.6, and it is the entire match in one comparison.<\/p>\n Every Scottish possession had a purpose, every entry into the Argentine 22 carried menace, and the visitors converted their red-zone visits at a rate that borders on the absurd for Test rugby, scoring seven tries from barely more opportunities than that.<\/p>\n Scotland player ratings: \u2018Lethal\u2019 and \u2018silky smooth\u2019 backs dominate as Argentina stunned in Cordoba<\/a><\/p>\n The mechanism was Ben White. The Toulon scrum-half won the ITV panel\u2019s praise at half-time for his game management and then spent the second half proving them right, his box kicking calibrated perfectly for Kyle Steyn and Kyle Rowe to dominate the aerial contest, his break creating Gregor Brown\u2019s try, his inside offload releasing Scott Cummings. Scotland won the air, shaded the scrum despite losing Elliot Millar Mills inside a quarter of an hour, and slowly strangled the possession battle they had begun by losing, finishing with 54 per cent of the ball.<\/p>\n Tom Jordan, on for the injured Finn Russell and briefly off again for a head assessment, landed six of seven from the tee and marshalled the game with the calm of a man who has spent a season doing exactly this for Bristol. Accuracy plus discipline plus organisation. It sounds boring. It produced 47 points.<\/p>\n The night of celebration tries<\/p>\n Somewhere the rugby gods were paying attention, because every occasion Scotland brought to C\u00f3rdoba was marked with a score. Pierre Schoeman crossed for his eighth Test try on his 50th cap, arriving on a support line off Rowe\u2019s first searing break.<\/p>\n Cummings, also winning cap number 50 in his first appearance since March, finished the move of the match. Gregor Hiddleston came off the bench for a debut and drove over from a lineout maul within minutes, on his debut when fellow replacement Brown had already scored on his actual birthday week too. Four milestone men, four tries.<\/p>\n The only landmark that soured was Mat\u00edas Alemanno\u2019s, the lock becoming the fifth Puma to reach a century of caps in his home city and enduring one of the more painful evenings of the hundred.<\/p>\n Tuipulotu and Rowe force the selection conversations<\/p>\n Sione Tuipulotu produced a captain\u2019s masterclass, and the numbers underline what the eye saw all night: 65 metres, six defenders beaten, four clean breaks and 13 tackles, alongside the surging burst that created Rory Hutchinson\u2019s try. This was the Lions-tier version of the Glasgow centre, dominant on both sides of the ball, and alongside him Hutchinson repaid a rare start with a try, 61 metres and the top Scottish carry involvement of the half in which the game was won. A midfield assembled in the absence of Huw Jones ended the night looking like a first-choice pairing.<\/p>\n Then there is Rowe; handed the 15 shirt with Blair Kinghorn rested, the Glasgow man finished with 116 metres, eight defenders beaten, five clean breaks, two try-making incisions and a try of his own. One kick out on the full was the sole blemish on an evening that turns next week\u2019s selection meeting into a genuine debate. Townsend travels to Pretoria with a fit-again Kinghorn presumably available and a full-back who has just produced one of the individual attacking performance of the tournament\u2019s opening day.<\/p>\n Los Pumas remain a chaos team, and that cuts both ways<\/p>\n For 10 minutes after the interval, Argentina looked like the side the world expected in C\u00f3rdoba. Santiago Carreras began doing Santiago Carreras things, his delicious chip creating Rodrigo Isgr\u00f3\u2019s try, and suddenly the game fragmented into exactly the broken shapes in which Argentine rugby has always thrived. Lucio Cinti was magnificent throughout, beating seven defenders and making four clean breaks, while Juli\u00e1n Montoya put in an astonishing 25-tackle shift that deserved far better support. The trouble was everything in between. Structured Argentina generated one maul try and a penalty from mountains of first-half possession, and the fast, ordered tempo game Felipe Contepomi wanted never posed the questions the chaos did.<\/p>\n