Guts give Scotland the glory in a brutal encounter

Rugby’s essential brutality was visible in all its gory glory in the rain of Invercargill yesterday, this World Cup game proving such a primal occasion that it wouldn’t have been a surprise had a disapproving dinosaur popped his head above the main stand to tut-tut about the Jurassic nature of what we were seeing out there. It was attritional stuff from first whistle to last, an “up your guts” 80 minutes as Jim Hamilton called it, a Eureka! night, perhaps, for parents of Scotland’s unruly children who now have an alternative to the bogey man in their efforts to bring their bairns to heel. “Behave yourself, kids, or I’ll put the Georgia match on!”

“Sometimes you have to win ugly,” said Andy Robinson in the aftermath and how right he was. In the history of the World Cup there can’t have been too many games quite like it in terms of animalistic, and try-less, grunt, but for all that, there was something grotesquely impressive about the way the Scottish pack looked their much talked-about opposite numbers in the eye and then proceeded to match them and then surpass them for intensity and physicality.

There were grim fears that Scotland’s forwards would get dynamited by the Georgians in the scrum and in the maul, but it never happened. There was more than a whiff of an upset in the air before kick-off and the fact that it never panned out the way some thought it might was down to several factors.

Firstly, Euan Murray scrummaged magnificently against the heralded David Khinchagishvili of Brive. Secondly, Allan Jacobsen was a dervish against David Zirakashvili of Clermont and against his replacement David Kubriashvili of Toulon, who the redoubtable Chunk wound-up something rotten as the night went on. Thirdly, Hamilton and Nathan Hines were colossal in the second-row. Lastly, the entire Scotland back-row played infinitely better – more concentration, more discipline, more power – than the previous lot did against Romania on Saturday.

And the backs? Well, Dan Parks kicked the points and Rory Lawson led the team. It would be a cruel overstatement to say that the rest of them were redundant on the night – far from it – but this was an evening for the forwards. It was their war and their victory.

Richie Dixon, the Georgia coach, bemoaned his team’s lack of coolness under pressure, their high penalty count when the game was still in the balance, their absence of big-game mentality which will come, he feels sure, in time.

As they trooped out of Rugby Park, the Scots had a look of relief about them, which was understandable. Scotland were the better side but they could never gain enough control of things to build anything like a commanding lead. They won the battle up front but didn’t have the accuracy to drive home their advantage on the scoreboard, a failing that would have caused Robinson some palpitations even if he later said he always felt like they had the game in their hands.

With eight minutes to go they were a converted Georgian try away from disaster. In fairness, Georgia never got close to scoring one. Their indiscipline and lack of wit behind the scrum never allowed for anything resembling forward momentum in the Scotland 22. Theoretically, though, the fear was always there until Parks put over his last penalty to make it 15-6.

A pleasing endgame, then. And one that puts Scotand in the healthy position of having nine points after two games. But the night had a difficult enough beginning. If there was one side setting the agenda early on then it was Georgia, the sight of an attempted Scotland maul being driven back 10 metres inducing a mass gulp among the Scottish support, an uneasy feeling that was only added to later when Merab Kvirikashvili opened the scoring with a 16th minute penalty. Parks had a chance to level it soon after, but he made a mess of a close-range penalty and hooked it wide.

Parks, as is his wont, had a mixed bag of a night. He did some good things and some hair-raising things, he put great control on the match at times and on other occasions, with some aimless tactical kicking, he lost the plot. He is nothing if not resilient, though. Having failed with an easy penalty earlier on, he soon made amends and tied it up at 3-3 after good work by Nick De Luca. He missed his next penalty and then landed the one after. At 6-3, Scotland were stuttering their way into the Test.

In games as tight as this, there are always key moments and several of them came in the minutes leading up to the break. Firstly, Georgia attempted to get a maul going in the way Romania had done so effectively on Saturday, but were met with a controlled fury from the Scots and the maul died on its backside without having advanced. Next, Parks capitalised on the burgeoning confidence of his pack by landing a drop goal from a handy field position. Following that, on the stroke of the whistle, Parks tried to casually bring an end to play for the half and only proceeded to slice his kick into trouble. The Georgians piled forward, but Scotland survived. Had that ball found its way into Georgian hands and ended up in a try then you would have feared for the fly-half’s safety in the dressing room.

As it was, Scotland came back out in rude form. Hamilton and Hines continued their monstrous work, aided and abetted by their chums in the front and back-row. The influence of Strokosch, Kelly Brown and Ross Rennie grew as the game wore on. The scrum battle was getting fascinating now. The Georgian wrecking balls had been contained and now Scotland started asking some questions of their own. Early in the new half, they shunted Georgia back in the scrum, then Hamilton stole a lineout, then Rennie sacked Mamuka Gorgodze, the opposition talisman.

The forwards were doing their stuff, but there was a lack of accuracy in Scotland’s play that held them back. Maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the tension of the occasion, maybe it was the thunderous collisions that made their lives hard, but the scoreboard stayed still at 9-3 for the longest time.

Georgia started emptying the bench. On came Kubriashvili at tighthead and so began the game within the game with Jacobsen and Kubriashvili engaging in some mutual mocking. One contretemps ended with Hines leading Jacobsen away from a potential flashpoint, of which there were many.

Parks and Kvirikashvili traded penalties in the last ten minutes which brought it to a perilous 12-6. The ferocity of the game was visible in that moment. Three Georgians hit the deck in quick succession, each one calling for help to heal their cramp. They were on their feet in time to see Parks land a penalty six minutes from the end to ease Scotland into a 15-6 lead, an advantage they never looked like relinquishing.

At the end, some tired men embraced and then left the ground, bound for Wellington tomorrow and the next challenge that will bear a remarkable similarity to this one. “We’ve set the benchmark now in terms of what we can do,” said Hamilton. “There’s some tough boys in our team and we proved it here. It wasn’t pretty, but we never said it was going to be.”

It’s not ballet, he said. True. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t that.