It is regrettable that so little regard was paid to Wales's resurgent second-half performance last Saturday. However odd the contest may have turned out in the eyes of most people, England failed to reflect their control of the play on the scoreboard and so secure the lead their first-half dominance, and Wales's profligacy in surrendering possession, suggested.
Wales could have caved in, as they have often done, but instead showed a resilience that surprised their coach as much as their opponents. Their errors were corrected after half-time, allowing them to have more of the play and to defend less.
There is an ebb and flow in rugby, affected and determined by many aspects; at the scrum say, or the lineout, at the clever reading or otherwise of the game at half back, or effective play beyond. Chances are taken, errors committed. Strong character as much as physical talent plays its part.
There is always a time and a place to recover. The game was certainly afoot at Twickenham because England allowed it to be so. It may well be England's fault but it was up to Wales to notice the tide turn and capitalise on it. Their game took shape, helped by the replacements admittedly, as England's energy sapped and they fell apart.
England were able to look back, soul-searching at the four clear breaks they inspired in the first half and to wonder at the “what-ifs” had these promises led to tries. They were, one after the other, wonderful moments of the kind that lift the game above the humdrum. As I saw them, they were born of natural flair, a rare instinct for adventure away from the tight squeeze of manufactured manoeuvres.
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Toby Flood and David Strettle, for example, responded to the instant, yet each somehow, given their chance in the open air, seemed to lose their way. They hesitated briefly. It can often be like this to young players embarking on a career in international rugby where the rapidity of the play is so much swifter than a level below and there is no time to think.
A second, a half-second in thinking - from the mind to the feet or hands - is an expensive luxury with a heavy cost. There is no time to rationalise the predicament. A player responds because it is in the blood, a sixth sense, or in time it becomes a replay of having been there before.
“Talk me through that try”, the questioner asks in the tunnel afterwards. “Tell me how it happened ...” is hardly likely to elicit a lucid exposition of the events the player may have experienced as the main actor at the scene.
For, quite often, in the heat and fury of the contest and the place of the defining moment within it, it is not reason that guided him to do what he did, exceptional and brilliant though the execution may have been; it is intuition.
The raw player can be undone in the moment that he escapes the defence. It is experience, when he has grown accustomed to the sweep and turmoil of international rugby, that brings the control.