Referee puts crowd through brief purgatory

Mere words cannot convey how truly awful this was.

Perhaps the best monitor of one of the most dismal A encounters of all time was simply the crowd. There were about 5,000 of them, mostly Irish and mostly just out of the pub, and they were mostly gone long before a funereal final quarter. They probably wished they hadn't come.

Taking pride of place as a target for their disgruntlement was Welsh referee Gareth Simmonds. Loud shrills of his whistle reduced the game to a staccato affair by the end of the first quarter, during which he awarded 10 penalties. By the time he gave the game a bit of slack, nobody cared. He awarded 28 penalties in all, and the first-half count of 10-7 in Scotland's favour, coupled with his penchant for awarding set scrums with indecent haste and a perceived bias toward the home side, drew loud boos from the visiting crowd and ironic applause over the few decisions that went Ireland's way.

The Irish backs were pinged for offside five times in that opening quarter, yet he never applied the same criteria to the Scots, whose forwards also hugged the fringe.

Ruck ball was slow or non-existent; there was no continuity. It was sheer purgatory to watch. You wanted it to end half an hour before it did.

Mind, the Irish gave their worst A performance of a nondescript season to finish with three defeats out of four by losing to an unexceptional Scottish team, who were themselves half-way towards a whitewash.

The first-up tackling was particularly poor, with Mervyn Murphy especially badly missed in a porous midfield where Cian Mahony, unfortunately, had a bad night. But he wasn't the only one.

Try as they might, the pack could hardly raise a gallop. Ponderous back row mauls typified a flat display, and usually culminated in turnovers. The Irish lineout didn't deliver, the restarts were kicked long nearly every time, while the reception of them was sometimes of the schoolboy variety, and turnovers abounded.

In the tackling count, David Corkery was an honourable exception, while Shane Horgan ran hard and was one of the few to consistently breach the gain line, though usually he lacked support. It was a shame that an in-form, keyed-up, talented 19-year-old was surrounded by so much dross.

Jimmy Screene did manage to rumble a fair bit in the second-half, and after Barry Everitt added a little zest amid the final quarter catch-up, Darragh O'Mahony benefitted with a reworking of the old Connacht midfield reverse try and a late, knife-through-butter counterattack from deep.

But there were few crumbs of comfort. And there wasn't even a Niall Woods break to look forward to.

After Mason had kicked them ahead, the Irish coughed up the restart ball to put themselves on the back foot and George Graham was driven over from a lineout take by Stuart Lang.

Then the Irish midfield began waving Ally Donaldson through: two breaks by the Scottish out-half led to soft tries for Cammie Mather and Jamie Mayer in turn.

Horgan kept plugging away, leading to a couple of Mason penalties. The first he landed, the second, amazingly, struck the upright from no more than 20 metres, but even more amazingly bounced into the charging full back for an opportunist if bizarre try.

Everitt worked the consolation score for an elusive O'Mahony.

Scoring sequence: 3 mins: Mason pen 0-3; 7: Graham try 5-3; 9: Mason pen 5-6; 12: Mather try, Donaldson con 13-6; 24: Mayer try, Donaldson con 22-6; 27: Mason try 22-11; 31: Donaldson pen 25-11; 36: Donaldson pen 2811; 40: Mason pen 28-14; 54: Donaldson pen 31-14; 71: O'Mahony try, Mason con 31-21.

SCOTLAND A: S Laing (Edinburgh Reivers); C Moir (Northampton), J Mayer (Edinburgh Reivers), D Officer (Harlequins), C Joiner (Leicester); A Donaldson (Currie), G Burns (Edinburgh Reivers); G Graham (Newcastle), R Russell (Edinburgh Reivers), M Proudfoot (Edinburgh Reivers), I Fullarton (Edinburgh Reivers), S Campbell (Glasgow Caledonians), C Mather (Edinburgh Reivers), S Reid (Leeds, capt), S Holmes (London Scottish). Replacements: W Anderson (Glasgow Caledonians) for Proudfoot (66 mins), R Shepherd (Glasgow Caledonians) for Officer (66 mins), K Milligan (London Scottish) for Shepherd (69 mins), G Flockhart (Glasgow Caledonians) for Holmes (80 mins).

IRELAND A: S Mason (Ballymena); P Duignan (Galwegians), S Horgan (Lansdowne), Cian Mahony (Dolphin), D O'Mahony (Bedford); K Keane (Garryowen), B O'Meara (Cork Constitution); J Screene (Buccaneers), A Clarke (Dungannon, capt), J Hayes (Shannon), G Fulcher (Lansdowne), M Blair (Ballymena), D Corkery (Cork Constitution), A Foley (Shannon), E Halvey (Shannon). Replacements: F Sheahan (Cork Constitution) for Clarke (50 mins), D Hickie (St Mary's College) for Duignan, B Everitt (Lansdowne) for Mahony, M Cahill (Buccaneers) for Hayes (all 59 mins).

Referee: G Simmonds (Wales).