Let’s get the confessions over with. I thought a 12-point win was more likely than not, for Wales. I doubted that England would find either the inviolable fight or the flow to counter Wales’s customary booming and pillaging. I thought the multitude of changes would count against the away team and that the alleged shift towards ambition and ball-in-hand creativity would fail, again, to materialise. Despite the accidental discovery of a spookily exciting centre-pairing, (I thought) England would retreat into the safety of their shells… and be duly steamrollered by Roberts and North.

I was wrong. England not only deservedly won, but their confidence, movement and athleticism – even when 10 points down – made Wales look pedestrian; one-dimensional; lost.

In mitigation I swear I was aware of this possibility – that one mildly revelatory day pretty soon Wales would get found out – I just didn’t think Friday, with home advantage and cruel injury conspiring in the reds favour, would be that moment. It was, and this means Gatland has problems.

It’s a while, in truth, since he was broadly loved and the resurgence of any warmth towards the abrasively dour Pack Leader now seems deeply unlikely. Post the event in Wales the phones and columns and consoling bar-fronts remain a-buzz with stinging rebukes. The sense is that Wales have gone cosy in a bad way; dumb and intransigent rather than brotherly and fiery; sleepy, almost and dull in every meaning of the word. (Please note; the Welsh equate ‘dull’ with stupid.) The finger points very much at the coach.

Folks – well, cognoscenti – from Mold to Machynlleth have jabbed accusatively for years. ‘Gatland only knows one way!’ ‘S a team full of bison, mun!’ ‘How can he not pick Williams (L)?!?’

The counter-argument to the Kiwi’s approach may ironically be more old-school than his own. It’s predicated on that innately Welsh view of the game as a marvel, a flicker, a scramble. A field for feints and dummies and yes – intuitions. Even in the days of wall-to-wall giants (the theory goes) there must be dash; there must be timing. How else can the hwyl be expressed?
Great hands and dancing feet are likewise enmeshed into this ideal. They legitimise it.

If this implies some spurious/generous hierarchy then fine. The aspiration is for finer sport, for success through skilled excellence – through versatility, comfort with the ball, awareness. Welsh rugby fans identify with this and believe it works.

In this context, Gatland Time feels gone, or superceded. At fifty minutes, when everything cried out for some uncorking of the spirit and Liam Williams remained surplus… we knew it was gone. Thirty minutes previously, when despite being ten points down England found a gearing beyond Wales’s scope, and the Welsh support began already to drift, an understanding emerged. The cauldron ran out of fire. And it was England fans who roared.

As the game rushed away from Wales, Haskell stumbled or was thrown seemingly blindfold against an upright and Attwood was denied by a contentious intervention from the TMO. (I reckon seven out of ten officials would have judged the crossing/blocking of the Welsh defender to be insufficiently relevant to the score to have wiped it out.) Meaning England might well have scored a further fourteen points. Joseph and Watson did cross – the centre corkscrewing through three defenders and the wing profiting from a deft nudge through from Brown. Lancaster’s ‘B Team’ were not just storming to an emphatic win, they were (shock, horror, probe) doing it in style.

Gatland countered at the end by blaming ‘individual errors’, citing a Rhys Webb kick as key. That felt unnecessary – some would say cheap. Sure mistakes are always important but the systemic differences were plain to see. England, without Launchbury, Lawes, etc etc, re-invented themselves as entertainers and Men Of Action – this time for real. The battalions gathered under the heading of England Coaching Staff, after much pontification on the subjects of culture and ‘execution’, seemed vindicated.

As immaculately conceived theory became practice, young Ford seemed to have donned some protective cloak; without being flawless he was supremely immune to the occasion. Backs play broke out. Brown again located classy and alarmingly confident mode. Joseph and Burrell both stepped and hit; Robshaw owned the place. Whilst not entirely in sustained rampage mode, England had an authentic, collectively charged energy about them, such that the second half became a mild under-achievement at a thirteen nil massacre. It was the kind of victory that really can mark out something new; a landmark or ‘stepping stone’ as Lancaster likes to say, along a more significant journey.

The positives for England are of course negatives for Gatland and for some of his players. Given the comparative shallowness of his squad there may be few opportunities for energising swerves in selection. Cuthbert, Davies and possibly North and Roberts may, however, feel vulnerable. It’s the gaffer, though, for me, who is most exposed.

There’s an important postscript to all this – bigger than this one apparently defining encounter.

My timeline on twitter (@bowlingatvinny) has been broiling with rage and indignation around the hi-jacking of ‘these events’. The Friday Night scheduling, the pre-game, super-bowlesque in-your-faceness, the pricing and the essential often grotesque booziness of the affair is clearly offending a great many genuine fans. They think much of this is anti-rugby – or at least irrelevant to or subversive of the real rugby experience. And they aren’t all miserable sixty-year-olds. Most love and understand the game and get no obvious pleasure from having a moan. They’re protective people. They object, indeed they are hurt by the combination of high ticket prices and faux-carnival ambience, responsible, in their view, for the shrillness, fickleness and increasing presence of the Millenium (or Twickers) dilletantes. There may always be snobbery around such things but there seems no doubt that a percentage of contemporary punters get international tickets without (actually) getting the game.

How fine it would be to somehow sort all that. But the crass crashes and bangs and wallops are surely here to stay? (God forbid they can only get crashier and bangier). They’re locked into or wrapped up in the ‘whole corporate or consumer experience’.

Research, I imagine, has pointed to us punters needing or expecting or remaining unfulfilled when shorn of flame-thrown excitement. We cannot conceive of mystery and magic without dry ice so they give us… dry ice.

How sad, how cynical to be pedaling this joyless garbage. I mean… did these people never catch a ball and run?