So, how were the first Welsh festive derbies for you? Full of good cheer? A winter warmer to give you a glow right through to the Six Nations? Harri Morgan watched the Ospreys do battle with the Scarlets and was left wondering whether he should have gone shopping instead.
As the game got underway at the Liberty, yesterday, I struggled to reconcile the vast number of empty seats with the occasion – or at least my own perception of the occasion.
Ok, it wasn’t Boxing Day, but this was, nonetheless the West Wales Christmas derby – not quite the Catalina Wine Mixer of Welsh Rugby days – but it’s up there. The festive games have come to be the last bastion of the rivalries that once were, or at least so I am told.
I’m sure people had their reasons for staying away: perhaps a vicious hangover, the nasty type that inevitably follows a night when you clock off work at two in the afternoon and march straight to the boozer, waking up on the sofa the following morning in a Christmas jumper reeking of Jagermeister and garlic mayo.
Others will have been forced to swerve the game, overcome by a last minute compulsion to spend an afternoon in Boots evaluating whether a distant relative would prefer a Lynx combo pack with a Voodoo, Java or Africa flavour.
The list is long. The seats were empty.
I didn’t get it. In my eyes, the Liberty Stadium was the place to be. Two teams, littered with Wales’ finest rugby union talent, desperate for a win. A desperation not just to boost their respective Pro 14 points total, but also to claim the intangibles that come with a derby W.
By the time the stadium announcer informed the audience that they were one of a 13,000 crowd, I would have been hard pushed to justify to any of those who had chosen to stay away that they had missed out.
Damn, I would have been on the back foot trying to justify to any of them that regional rugby deserved a portion of their social expenditure.
In a week that saw Jose Mourinho sacked as manager of Manchester United, both the Scarlets and Ospreys played with the type of negativity that characterised and ultimately resulted in the demise of the Special One at Old Trafford.
It was a race to the bottom – he who makes the fewest mistakes wins. In practice this approach manifested itself in a high volume of kicking. We saw the full spectrum – long punts, grubber kicks, defensive box kicks – crikey, even attacking box kicks. Some were productive, most lacked intent and characterised a fear of losing that seemed to be the motivation for both teams.
Front and centre of this kicking exchange was Hadleigh Parkes. My own reaction to his selection in the No.10 jersey was that it was innovative, and that he would feature heavily as a distributor with Rhys Patchell coming into the line to take charge of tactical kicking duties.
The Wales centre showed some nice touches to release runners at the line, but all too often he just gave it a welly.
The moment that gave the Ospreys the lead, one that they wouldn’t relinquish, involved a ricochet off Jonathan Davies’ hip before Luke Morgan showed predatory instinct and some serious wheels to touch down having toe-poked it through.
Once the Ospreys opened up the lead they wisely chose to double down on their risk averse game plan.
Sam Davies’ scrum-capped head remained cool, as he pulled the trigger on a couple of sweetly struck drop goals to leave the Scarlets needing a converted try just to get a share of the spoils.
Try they did, but score they could not. A late surge of pick and go rugby looked threatening, until it was thwarted by Owen Watkin, who picked the perfect time to play jackal.
The Scarlets did get one more opportunity as Ben Whitehouse appointed himself Santa, gifting the Scarlets a final play when the stadium clock read full time.
Thankfully, the ensuing line-out came to nothing, or the reflective scrutiny would have focused on a time discrepancy rather than the quality of rugby – or distinct lack of – on offer for the paying consumer.
