Good weekend to be an Aussie

There was no risk of me missing my flight this weekend and on Friday evening travelled to Edinburgh with 5 other friends for what turned out to be a high quality boys’ weekend. It was only my second visit to Edinburgh – the last time being more than 3 years ago. It really is a great city; very picturesque, lots of places to go out and have fun, there’s a good vibe about the place and plenty of nice people about.

The purpose of the visit of course was to see Australia take on Scotland at Murrayfield. While I have seen the Wallabies play in Scotland before, it was at Hamden Park and so I was keen to visit the home of rugby in Scotland as well. Murrayfield is a great stadium and my only complaint was that there is no big screen for the purpose of seeing replays of the action. This was most disappointing as there was some scintillating back-line play from the Wallabies in the second half especially.

The Scots certainly fancied themselves before the match and given the way the Wallabies have been playing, I was predicting a close match. However Australian teams are never ones to give up and I knew the Wallabies would fancy finishing the tour on a high note. That they did and it was probably the best I have seen them play all year, finally the forwards managed to gain some kind of ascendancy which meant that the backs actually had some time and space to show what they can do. Some great backline moves in the second half especially created some quality tries; it was very entertaining to watch. The defence as well was superb especially when Scotland were pounding at the line at one stage in the second half, the Wallabies just kept repelling them. I hope the Wallabies can take a lot from the tour and improve next year so they can be a serious challengers to the All Blacks in September and October next year.

It was of course an even better weekend to be an Australian, with a crushing of England in the first test of the Ashes. Congrats to England for winning the last series, but they went on as though they had won the bloody world cup. When taken into context, they had in fact narrowly won a single test series, that’s all. The fact that they had not been able to achieve this in 18 years was the reason that they were so elated. Now it seems though the team that won that series is a shadow if its former self. The Aussies are fired up this time and by the end of the summer, the urn will be back in its rightful place and normality will be resumed; it will be proven that last year was nothing more than an anomaly.

Last year though the Aussies won the first test pretty convincingly and then faltered so the series is far from over. Things though are different this time and I don’t think anyone can see that happening again. England will take some heart from their second innings fight back, but they don’t have the skill, class, ability, or confidence at the moment to retain the trophy they fought so hard to win last year. Before the series began, you could only get a paltry 4/1 on Australia winning the series 5-0, something that has happened only once in ashes history; now the odds are even shorter.