Scotland held their nerve in the final seconds to spark unconfined — and unwittingly bloody — jubilation by winning in Australia yesterday, ending a dismal seven-match losing run that goes back to 1982.
There was so much joy around after the 9-6 victory that two Scotland players required stitches in their heads as a result.
First the match. Played in the predicted storm, Scotland looked set for defeat when Australia levelled the game at 6-6 two minutes into the second half, with another 38 minutes to find a way to land the winning score.
The home side must have been confident that the score they needed was coming, but instead they hit a magnificent Scotland defence, led by Alasdair Strokosch, the flanker who is about to move from Gloucester to Perpignan, and they refused to buckle.
A late breakout presented Greig Laidlaw, already on a high after captaining Edinburgh to their Heineken Cup semi-final appearance, with the chance to win the match two minutes into injury time. It may have been into the gale, but he was never going to miss.
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“As soon as we got the penalty I let out a nice scream and thought to myself ‘happy days’,” Laidlaw said. “Once I calmed down I thought, ‘oh, oh, I still have a job to do here’. I have always said to myself if I hold my technique they will go over, but I was still delighted to see it fly through the posts.”
Strokosch was also involved in the strange events after the final whistle. As the Scotland players celebrated in a huddle, the flanker and Joe Ansbro, the wing, raced to join in from opposite side. Both hurled themselves over the group and met head-to-head in the middle in as classic an example of a “Glasgow kiss” as any rugby pitch will see.
If anybody wanted any idea of how much it meant to the players, they had only to look at those two and the huge grins on both their faces as they left the ground a few minutes later with blood streaming, on their way to be stitched up in the Scotland changing room.
Not that the pain mattered. Their team had just recorded their first win in Australia for 30 years, and it is the first time in the same period that they have beaten the Wallabies in successive games.
It also ended Scotland’s dreadful and depressing losing run and has probably done enough to lift the pressure that had been building on Andy Robinson, whose position as head coach had been called into question after failure in the World Cup and the Six Nations whitewash.
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“This tour we talked about reigniting the flame in Scottish rugby and that came out tonight,” Laidlaw said. “We won all the mini-battles and we were geeing each other up and getting into the Aussies.
“That shone through and they did not like that. We wanted to show what it means to play for Scotland and felt we did. It has gone a long way to reignite the spark.
“We never lost our spirit, but today we knew it was there. It showed itself through good tackles, guys blasting through the ruck, getting excited if we won penalties and getting it right up them.
“There was a bit of shouting. As a player that was brilliant. At the scrum at the end the backs were flying in, congratulating the forwards. That just builds the energy.”