Rattled, but Irish still on course for slam

AND so the champions go to Twickenham on track for the Grandest of Slams, one match away from creating the longest winning Six Nations streak of all.

- PETER JACKSON

That they have now won 11 on the trot, equalling the tournament record set by England seven years ago, amounted to no more than neutrals the world over expected. What they most certainly did not expect was to see Wales cause Ireland more grief than France and Italy combined in the two previous rounds.

No Welsh team can ever have been as grossly insulted by the bookmakers offering Ireland at 1-40, an odds-on price surely unheard of in a two-horse race. And yet for a spell in the second half, the also-ran selling-platers in red dared to rattle the thoroughbreds.

No trace of that can be found in a scoreline that suggests a routine win complete with the routine bonus-point giving them 15 out of 15, thereby preserving the prospect of the Irish being the first Grand Slammers to claim the maximum 28 points since the current system’s introduction six years ago.

There was nothing routine about the first 15 minutes after half-time when Aaron Wainwright stirred Wales into showing they had more to offer than grim survival.

What transpired proved yet again that nobody does the-game-of-two-halves act more infuriatingly than the Welsh, stuck for sometime in the throes of rebuilding on an alarming scale following the exodus post-World Cup.

In the four halves leading to Dublin, they had contrived to turn up 40 minutes late against Scotland only to leave them hanging on at the end of the next 40 to win by one. They reacted by reversing the process at Twickenham, losing by two.

A more one-sided firsthalf than that at The Aviva would have been hard to imagine. Wales had been under the cosh for so long that it took them the eternity of 36 minutes to threaten the Irish line only to see the possibility of a try vanish like a mirage in trying to secure second-phase possession.