The fixture at the Millennium Stadium tomorrow between Wales and Ireland is a Six Nations Championship oddity. The results of games between them go firmly against the notion that a team gain an enormous advantage from being at home and that good fortune almost routinely favours them.
It is as if these Celtic cousins wish, at least as far as the score is concerned, to extend a rare sense of hospitality towards each other, although the temper of the matches, as with other familial relations, can often turn out to be highly charged. There is always room for an argument, of course, which invariably doesn’t last for long.
Since 1984, of the 13 fixtures played at home by Wales (including one game at Wembley in 1999), Ireland have won 11 and drawn one, in 1991. Wales’s solitary victory was in their grand-slam year of 2005. This is extraordinary, in the context of the belief in home advantage as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma (as someone said in trying to explain the inexplicable behaviour of another country).
To add to the conundrum, Wales have done pretty well during the same period when playing in Ireland — not quite so convincing as Ireland away to Wales, perhaps, but still worthy of note. They have succeeded on eight occasions during the same period. In 115 fixtures overall, Wales have 62 victories to Ireland’s 47.
For tomorrow’s game, neither team will arrive with chest-thumping or even quiet confidence. Uncertainty belongs to both teams, as indicated in their games against Scotland. Ireland scored three tries and looked as if they could expect more of the same. Yet Scotland, as the match wore on, gained the ascendancy.
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As can so often happen, the home team can be stimulated by fear not to let themselves or their supporters down, or simply finding they are galvanised to seek within themselves another gear-change. This Scotland did and were only one try away at the end from an unexpected victory.
One note of praise for a player wearing green: Ronan O’Gara showed once more his singular mastery of knowing precisely where his team should play the game. Three times in my recollection, with so much restless and unguided motion around him at Murrayfield, he understood his team’s needs, calmly looked up and, with grid-reference precision, punted the ball into unoccupied territory and saw it roll to within a few metres of Scotland’s line. It was energy-sapping for Scotland, energising for Ireland.
No other player does it quite the way that O’Gara does it and with such consistency and pinpoint accuracy. Jonathan Sexton may be Ireland’s future at fly half, but for the moment the evergreen O’Gara remains in command of his stage.
Wales also had a game of two halves, as they say. Having begun in Edinburgh in grand style, they seemed by the second half — when they were back to a full quota of players after two yellow cards — as if they did not want to play the remaining 40 minutes. Promise was not fulfilled.
We are left with the feeling that, with good players at the disposal of both teams, it is high time that they played to their potential in both halves.
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Of all the teams this season, England look the most consistent. Beckoning Scotland to their Twickenham lair on Sunday, they will doubtless feel confident. But we know, and they know, that if the plans go the way they are expected to, the moment of truth lies in wait and the spectres that have haunted them in the past will revisit them.
To go to Dublin’s Aviva Stadium in search of the grand slam will, in anticipation, be to England what it is for New Zealand when called upon to play France in the knockout stage of the World Cup. The dressing room will be as full of thoughts of what has gone before as with what is to come.
They will no doubt be reminded of the sequence of events that occurred in the four years that began in 1999. There were unpredictable happenings then, too.
England were in their pomp. The grand slam was in the offing in each of the years up to and including 2002, but was denied in each case. Wales were the first to frustrate them with a remarkable 32-31 victory at Wembley when it had been there for England’s taking all sunny afternoon. A year later, Scotland were their nemesis. Ireland followed in 2001 and finally France a year later.
It was England, however, who had the last laugh. They ran rings round everyone with high scores in 2003, culminating with World Cup glory in Sydney.
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In all this there is much for Martin Johnson to ponder as he views the horizon. There are always checks and balances.