Wales run riot in Cardiff to crush Italy for first Six Nations win since 2023

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.

Italy had had their great moment of history the week before. There was bound to be a hangover. The hunt for three wins in a single campaign can wait. They finished the match with three tries in the last half-hour and had another two ruled out by the narrowest of margins, but given the score was 31-0 by then Wales could well dismiss that as academic. The meat of the game was theirs.

After hideous experiences here and elsewhere at the hands of older and uglier opponents, Wales have steadily improved – from around the hour mark against France. That game was long gone by then, but Steve Tandy has pointed to a gradual hardening of physicality and confidence in the games that have followed. Here Wales consummated the improvement with a result at last, a bonus point too.

“It’s everything for us,” said Dewi Lake, Wales’s try-scoring captain. “Everything we’ve been working for. Over the last two to three weeks our performance has built and we’ve grown as a group. That led in to today. We asked for our best performance of the campaign, and we got it.”

What a far cry from recent humiliations this was. How far, for example, from that experience here against France in round two. It helps, of course, when you are not drowning in a deluge of opposition tries, but also just having a stadium reasonably full on a Saturday afternoon conjured distantly familiar atmospheres.

Aaron Wainwright dives home under the posts for the first of his two tries. Photograph: David Davies/PA

And then came the tries. Three in the first half alone to – get this – none from the opposition. The tries were not exactly works of art; indeed all three came directly from lineouts. The first was the best, Aaron Wainwright bursting off a set move through two Italy forwards to crash over between the posts after only 10 minutes.

As ball-handling forwards go, Rhys Carré has won all the plaudits with that try against Ireland, but this was reward for Wainwright, who, even in the darkest times of late, has remained a beacon for Wales. He scored again 10 minutes later. Wales to the corner again, taken by Ben Carter at the front, and in they piled. Wainwright picked from the base and forced his way over for a second.

On the half-hour, an umpteenth penalty was awarded to Wales. Corner again, lineout secured again, try again, this time Lake touching down at the back of the advancing maul. Dan Edwards was successful with all conversions – 21-0 at the break. And the bonus point followed only a few minutes after the restart, this one a little more sweeping in its majesty. Wales won an early lineout and worked through enough phases for us to forget about that.

Paolo Garbisi scores Italy’s third and final try in the dying moments of the game in Cardiff. Photograph: David Davies/PA

By the 10th, after big carries from Wainwright, Lake and Carré – the usual suspects – Wales sent it wide. Edwards looped round Joe Hawkins and glided smoothly through a gaping hole in the Italian defence. Still not satisfied, Wales came again. Alex Mann chipped too far ahead for Louis Rees-Zammit, but the goalline dropout found Edwards loitering around the 10-metre line, whence he landed a towering drop goal.

That was the game already, as if the delirious crowd needed any advising of the fact. Italy dominated the final half hour. Where they had kicked relentlessly in the first half, they started to chance their arm; where they had been whistled off the park, they now enjoyed the referee’s whistle at their back.

Wales did not win a second-half penalty until the last five minutes. Italy’s first try came, of course, from a lineout, Tommaso di Bartolomeo, the replacement hooker, driven over decisively for the first. Archie Griffin was shown yellow to boot. And so the test for new Wales became that bit more searching.

They handled it with hunger and hardness, surviving Griffin’s absence with no points conceded. Tommaso Allan went over with 10 to go, having been foiled by a heroic Tomos Williams cover tackle, only to pick himself up and accept the try-scoring pass at the end of the next phase.

Monty Ioane and Leonardo Marin were awarded tries and then denied them by televisual inquest, but Paolo Garbisi went over at the death for Italy’s third. No matter, the mood here was set long before that. This is no grand slam, but the win was greeted as raucously as any here. Cardiff is rocking again.