Peter Jackson: Stern Vern allows himself a smile as Scotland box clever

Murrayfield rejoiced yesterday at catching a glimpse of a moment even more truly historic than the Grand Old Championship‘s first bonus point.
What they witnessed amounted to grinning confirmation of something they had waited the best part of 20 years to see – Scotland showing the faithful they have emerged at long last from their perennial Six Nations‘ role scrapping over the wooden spoon.
As if three tries in the opening half hour and a late comeback were not enough, the fans wound up seeing something every bit as unusual in the understandably ecstatic aftermath of a match that will take some beating as the best of the tournament.
Vern Cotter was caught with a smile on his face.
Grinning from ear to ear might have been an exaggeration but at long last Scotland’s head coach had every reason to shatter the ‘Stern Vern’ image and put a few cracks in the poker face. To be fair to him, Murrayfield hadn’t exactly been a bundle of laughs for years before the Kiwi arrived there via Clermont.
Various Scotland teams had made such a pig’s ear of their opening Six Nations match that the championship would no sooner start than they would be counted out of the title equation.
Until yesterday, Auld Reekie had seen depressingly little to celebrate since that Monday morning at the end of the last century and the crowning of the last Five Nations champions courtesy of the famous Welsh ambush of England at Wembley the previous day.
Scotland’s finest hour in the Six Nations, therefore, had been the best part of two decades in the making.     They did more, far more than reintroduce themselves as serious contenders and that has not been said of any Scottish team for far too long.
In defying the odds to edge a six-try thiller, they did the tournament as big a favour as they did themselves. Those of us nursing a hunch that Ireland would fall at the first fence never imagined that they would be brought to grief by a piece of Scottish ingenuity so implausible as to be outrageous.
The plot, as hatched on the training ground, defied all logic. Put the smallest man in the team, Greig Laidlaw, at the front of an attacking line-out within striking distance of the opposition line.
Then deploy one of the centres, Alex Dunbar, to stand at No. 2, herd all your giraffes towards the tail and hope it kids the other lot. Ireland, to their everlasting embarrassment, didn’t just buy it. They fell for the most glorious kidology hook, line and sinker.
It worked like a dream. The Irish ignored the strange figures at the front of the line-out so completely that they left a gap wide enough for a dray horse and cart load of 40 Shillings to plod through. Worse still, the man at one end of the gap, Tadhg Furlong, had literally turned his back on the throw, preparing to lift his jumper on the assumption that Ross Ford would throw to the tail.
When he lobbed it gently over Laidlaw to Dunbar, the Glasgow Warrior barely had to ease himself more than two inches off the ground to make the catch and touch down almost in one fell swoop. In the end, that try made all the difference.
No wonder Cotter broke the habit of a lifetime and looked as pleased as he felt. “It’s quite a nice feeling, to be honest,” he said before deciding that was quite enough frivolity for one day, put the smile away and reverted to type.  “After that I thought we’d found a way of getting into trouble again.”
Ireland, 21-5 down after half an hour of being outwitted by smarter but lighter opponents, responded to the looming crisis in a manner expected of potential champions. One point behind going into the final quarter, Scotland were in danger of being counted out on their feet.
They would have been had Sean Maitland not saved the Scots by preventing tries for Robbie Henshaw and Rob Kearney.  Only good players can get away with wearing a flash pair of boots and despite Maitland’s luminous brand of yellow, the Irish never saw him until it was too late.
Finn Russell’s risky grubber would have ended with Henshaw strolling over had Maitland’s intelligence not enabled him to intercept the scoring pass. No sooner had he saved his team once than he saved them again, his tackle doing just enough to drag a small piece of Kearney’s body into touch.
Maitland’s two tackles proved every bit as devastating as Stuart Hogg’s two exhilarating early tries.    The Scots had been heroic all match but they still needed another intervention above and beyond the call, this time from a substitute flanker earning his corn in Welsh-speaking west Wales.
John Barclay’s turnover ten minutes from time did more than lift the siege. It gave his team new heart that, for all their mangling in the scrum and for all Ireland’s territory, the game was still there to be won.
Laidlaw’s two late penalties ensured due reward for the bravery of a team with the guts to keep boxing clever and the guile to land blows that the heavyweight slayers of the All Blacks never saw coming.
Whether they can manage a repeat against the French behemoths in Paris next weekend, can wait. For now they can draw immense pride from the knowledge that there will not be a smarter winning performance throughout the tournament than the one they accomplished yesterday.
And, at long last, their head honcho had put one over on his fellow Kiwi and partner from their days at Clermont, Joe Schmidt. If Uncle Vern is still smiling when his Scots visit the dreaded Twickenham next month, England had better watch out.