Left field

This glorious, unpredictable northern festival

You wouldn’t have got great odds on Wales and France coming out on top against England and Scotland respectively on the first day of the second weekend of the Six Nations.

But England beating Wales in the try count at the Millennium Stadium and Scotland taking the game to the French the way they did in St Denis were not forecasts I’d read anywhere.

And that, of course, is the beauty of this marvellous northern hemisphere winter ritual, where world beaters one week can become humbled also rans the next.  

In the southern hemisphere, the Super 14 got underway this weekend in what our man in Sydney, Julian Linden, described as an “extraordinary” opening round of matches.