AFTER numerous meetings in recent years, these two old foes know each other all too well and they staggered around Stadio Flaminio yesterday afternoon like a couple of punch drunk prize-fighters, neither of whom could find a knock-out blow.
It eventually came but only when the fat lady was going through her scales.
It is ironic that the Scots actually played some of their best rugby of the tournament, although that in itself is no great boast, dominated huge swathes of this encounter
and still emerged empty-handed. Coach Frank Hadden insisted that he was looking forward to leading the squad on their daunting trip to Argentina in June. "Considering the start of this competition and how far we appear to have regressed from the World Cup, we were in a pretty dark place at that stage and we had to work incredibly hard to make the progress that I feel we have (made] in this championship. We are not far away from making a serious impact and punching above our weight in future competitions."
Essentially, Hadden was suggesting that Scotland had gone so far backwards after the World Cup that the team has actually improved hand over fist since the opening match. He's probably right, although it is possibly not the sort of progress that anyone in tartan had hoped for at the start of this tournament.
Hadden has not had to go looking for his problems over the past few weeks, especially in the absence of several strike runners and, sure enough, a few more came his way yesterday. Nikki Walker pulled out in the run-up to this game and his replacement, Simon Danielli, lasted exactly six minutes. Once again the Scotland team that played the majority of this match bore little resemblance to the one that had trained all week but that was, at least in part, because Hadden once again started a Test match with just two backs on the bench.
In addition to that skinny cover, he insists on picking players who are so far off the pace that if this was the Gold Cup there would be calls for a stewards' inquiry. Dan Parks has some admirable qualities but even the chipper Aussie is going to take a while to digest the full implications of yesterday's performance.
According to the yesterday's stats, Parks made seven errors and, according to common consensus, the first was getting out of bed. His distribution was almost comical and Kaine Robertson and Sergio Parisse were laughing all the way to the line after both men intercepted loose passes from Parks.
Hadden bewailed these mistakes which cost the match after claiming to dominate and control events and, for once, he wasn't exaggerating but still the coach can't quite resist some fatuous claims.
"Had we scored in the second half with some of the opportunities that we created we could have gone on to record our best performance ever over here in Italy." The key word in that sentence is "could".
It wouldn't be a Hadden press conference if he didn't throw a few churlish remarks into the mix: "Although you normally get forward passes when they are thrown over a line, it wasn't to be for us today." That was reference to the pass to Gonzalo Canale from his skipepr Parisse.
After all his heroics last weekend, Simon Taylor came in a poor second to the Italian in yesterday's battle within the battle. Parisse was simply immense and led by example.
He also showed welcome empathy in paying tribute to Canale. The midfielder bounced back from missing the rugby equivalent of an open goal against both Wales and France to grab his team's vital try in the second half yesterday. Perhaps there is hope for Parks after all.
The full article contains 640 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
