• Wales 31-17 Italy

• Steve Tandy’s side end 15-game losing run in competition

So that’s what it was like. Wales win a Six Nations match in Cardiff for the first time in more than four years. A crowd of 70,000 fairly ripped the roof off. And they did it with virtually every play of the game. Most of those gave some cause or other for a cheer – and, boy, did the locals respond.

How familiar an experience, and yet how not, a ghostly echo of times past. Wales’s mission now is to put flesh on the spirit, to do it again as a matter of course. And then there were the guys in blue. Darlings of the Six Nations Italy may be (there are quite a few of those these days), but they could not make anything work. This was a throwback to times past for them as well, forlorn and blown away by a country imbued with the culture of rugby. How retro.

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