Parks angered that ball arrived for drop-goal when he didn’t want it

Given what happened at the Cake Tin, some in the Scotland camp may have doubted it, but the sun did, indeed, come up over Wellington the morning after the night before. Monday dawned bright and warm, an utter contrast to the foul conditions in which their World Cup aspirations took a dramatic, and desperate, twist. It was with the deepest irony that one Scottish player who soldiered to the last in the wind and the rain against the Pumas took a look at the blue skies over the city yesterday and said how lovely it was to get some nice weather. He would have appreciated it all the more had it come 24 hours earlier.

The scene around the Scotland hotel was a pretty grim one. Normally in these situations you’ll find that the management relay a message to the players that preaches the importance of putting on a front in public, that they must be upbeat about the impending challenge of England and the fact that their World Cup is still alive. If the message was passed to them then the ones we encountered were in no mind to heed it. These players were not thinking about Saturday night in Eden Park, they were still trapped in Sunday evening in Wellington and the way they let a game slip through their fingers like falling sand.

They will move on, but Monday afternoon was too soon. Dan Parks sat down for a chat and said he wasn’t ready to think about England, that the failure against Argentina was still buzzing around in his head and he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Decision-making under pressure is the essence of rugby. You get seconds to make these calls. On Sunday night, eight minutes from time, Scotland were on the Argentine line with a guaranteed penalty in the bank. Parks had a decision to make in that moment; get his forwards to have another rumble for the line in the realistic hope of getting a try or take the easy drop goal. He took the latter, but you have to ask, with the penalty secured, why on God’s earth did he not encourage the former?

In such moments are games won and lost. Scotland players make too many wretched decisions under pressure.

“Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be,” said Parks. Was it really fate that did for Scotland? Quite honestly, Parks didn’t sound like a man who believed in such a theory. “I haven’t watched the whole game, but I was quite intrigued to look at the last play,” said the fly-half.

The last play was, of course, the one where Scotland could have won it, but didn’t. At that critical ruck on the Argentina line, Mike Blair let the ball out to Parks when Parks didn’t want it. Why? Parks said he was screaming for one more surge from their forwards, one last drive that he felt was vital to increase the chances of success with the drop goal, given the way the Argentina defence were lining up.

“It was all set up for a big finish,” he said. “I wasn’t ready for the ball when it came, but they [the Pumas] were ready. They were expecting it to come on that play and it’s such a frustrating thing. Any other time it probably wouldn’t have happened, but for whatever reason the ball came earlier than expected. It’s not even about Felipe Contepomi being offside. If he was offside, he got away with it. That’s not the issue. We didn’t set it up well. The ball came and it was the wrong time to come. I didn’t want the ball.”

Scotland had their post-mortem on Monday afternoon and the chances are that the end-game and the decisions made in those vital moments will have been uppermost in the analysis. Parks said he was shouting at Blair and the forwards to truck it up one more time, to take it around the corner to create a better angle for the drop goal. If they heard him, why didn’t they listen? Why did that ball come back when Parks demanded that it be driven on? When it came out, Parks had half of Argentina all over him in a flash, cutting off a right-footed drop goal and forcing him into an impossible position on his left.

“It was just one of those things. It just appeared and there was no chance I could have a shot with my right foot. I could imagine it getting charged down and they go down the other end. We’re on the line and we play