Peter Jackson: Welsh will grab Lions share for Australia

After smashing the team that smashed the All Blacks, Wales will take the Lions’ share when the Test series begins against Australia this summer.
No recognition among the best of British and Irish, however large, will be too great after what they did to England. The Grand Slam pretenders did not merely wilt in the furnace of the Millennium Stadium, they disintegrated.
Wales broke them bit by crumbling bit with a performance of such intensity, discipline and skill that victory on an unprecedented scale will live long in the memory. It was so complete that, incredible as it sounds, England were lucky to have avoided an even bigger beating.
Had Mike Brown’s flailing ankle-tap not brought George North to grief when the Yorkshireman’s son from Anglesey would otherwise have gone careering over between the posts, England’s capitulation would have begun some 20 minutes earlier.
By the time Wales had completed their devastation, more than half of those responsible had inked their names into the Lions’ Test team. After this at least nine are certainties – Adam Jones, Ian Evans, Justin Tipuric, Toby Faletau, Sam Warburton, Mike Phillips, Leigh Halfpenny, Jamie Roberts and The Boy George.
Powerful cases can be made for at least three more Test starters – Alun-Wyn Jones, Jonathan Davies and Alex Cuthbert. England’s exposure as a promising young team with a long way to go, Ireland’s battered state and Scotland‘s inability to offer more than precious few contenders clears the way for a Welsh monopoly.
The evidence of the Six Nations points overwhelmingly to a case of Wales and The Rest. As head coach of the Lions on sabbatical from his Welsh employers, Warren Gatland will scarcely need any encouraging on that score.
A fizzing Welsh performance from start to finish served as a mighty vindication of Rob Howley’s role in charge of the operation. At one stage, shortly after deputising for Gatland, initially because of the New Zealander’s accident, his No.2 looked as though he had been given the mother of all hospital passes.
He limped into the Championship amid all sorts of mutterings after presiding over seven straight defeats, the last four at home. And that duly became five, an inevitable consequence of his team arriving at least half an hour late for the opening match against Ireland.
By the time they woke up, the opposition had filled their boots. None of the disgruntled masses drowning their sorrows in the bars of central Cardiff could have imagined then that six weeks later that the losers would end up retaining their title and the winners would be reduced into a desperate scuffle to avoid the Wooden Spoon.
The real quality behind the grandstand Welsh finish was their ability to temper the ferocity of their game with cold calculation. That potent mixture of fire in the belly and ice in the brain has long been a trademark of the All Blacks, one which separated England’s World Cup-winning team from the rest ten years ago.
Chris Robshaw‘s young guns arrived in Cardiff believing they were about to win the first Red Rose Slam since then. Not for the first time, an English team had seriously underestimated Cardiff and its capacity to provide an experience like no other in the rugby world.
Ten of England’s likely lads had never sampled the Millennium Stadium and it showed. Even the coolest kid in the game, Owen Farrell, lost his mojo while Wales confined him to no more than three shots at goal. By the time England pulled him out of the firing line, the immaculate Leigh Halfpenny had out-kicked him 4-1 off the tee.
Once Wales turned up the heat at the start of the second half, even the All Blacks would have struggled to live with them, never mind the callow youths in white. And to think most of the battalion of ex-internationals-turned-pundits had said all week that this would be “too close to call”.
England were not so much put in their place as blown away by the collective Welsh magnificence who have not conceded a try now in almost four-and-a-half matches since the initial calamity against Ireland. As part of their preparation, England’s players were shown a video clip of Lionel Messi’s first goal for Barcelona against AC Milan to illustrate that defence wins matches.
Maybe they should have shown them the Wales No.10 because Dan Biggar’s drop-goal effectively put England out for the count.
For all the collective Welsh magnificence in outplaying the old enemy, two individuals ensured that England paid a fearful price. One, Tipuric, is the grandson of a Croatian refugee from the Second World War, the other, Cuthbert, is English by birth, Welsh by ancestry.
The discovery of a Welsh grandmother having changed his sporting life, Cuthbert has proved a monumental successor, in every sense, to Shane Williams. Since filling the hole left by the little magician, the juggernaut wing from Gloucester has seldom failed to score in the big games.
He got the only try in the Grand Slam clincher against France this time last year and both yesterday. Tipuric may have put them both on the proverbial plate but they still had to be finished off.
England, unable to respond to the first Cuthbert try never mind the second, could only stand and stare as Wales strode onto the victors’ podium. They had the look of men who had just finished a poor second to a team of real champions, England’s record defeat in a fixture spanning 132 years.