What the hell was happening? Let's explain...
It was so nearly victory in the most improbable of circumstances, but what changed in the Principality Stadium on Saturday evening?
First of all, there’s only one place to start this newsletter.
The news that Barry John, the iconic former Wales fly-half, has died at the age of 79 is a dreadfully sad piece of news to end the opening round of the Six Nations on.
On a personal note, one of the earliest thrills in this job was sitting next to Barry in the Principality Stadium’s press box as a journalist straight out of university. Although I never saw him play, I can’t recall a time before I knew who he was, or what he did.
To watch him watch Wales was surreal.
He was, quite simply, the King.
How Wales almost completed the comeback of all comebacks
Few actors can portray split personality like Willem Dafoe.
The four-time Oscar nominee has never played Jeckyl and Hyde, but Spiderman villain Green Goblin and his alter-ego Norman Osborn was close enough to marrying the sublime and the ridiculous.
In that sense, he’d have likely loved being in the Principality Stadium on Saturday, to watch Wales and Scotland take turns in being either brilliant or awful.
Because that’s the big takeaway from this Six Nations clash above all else. In the first-half, Scotland were superb and Wales were disastrous and then vice versa in the second-half.
That first-half, as Warren Gatland said, was “probably one of the worst 40-minute performances in my whole rugby career as a coach”. From the press box, it was certainly hard to recall a Wales performance as dismal as that - with journalists turning to one another to check exactly when Wales were kept off the scoreboard last.
And then, conversely, the second-half was remarkable. People might like to think of journalists as grizzled, cynical, world-weary and all boasting the same byline picture (shoulders turned slightly to the left, vacant look in the eyes and an awkward smile that tries to straddle smug and embarrassed) but all of us - bar the travelling, tortured Scottish journalists - were laughing like children on Christmas morning at the absurdity of it all.
In the end, Wales’ comeback fell short, but, ahead of a trip to Twickenham, there’s plenty to unpack ahead of next week’s meeting with Steve Borthwick’s England.
This is a forensic look at what was actually happening on the pitch.
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