For 20 minutes at Murrayfield last weekend, little was going right for Damian McKenzie.<\/b><\/p>\n
The 30-year-old, 5ft 8in, 12 stone, fair hair, fresh face, looks a little out of place among the flying breeze blocks elsewhere on the pitch.<\/p>\n
Initially, after coming off the bench in the 44th minute against Scotland, he felt it too.<\/p>\n
“Kyle Steyn had just scored for them when I came on,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We kicked off, they put up a box kick from nine, I went up to catch it and wasn’t able to. I knocked my head as well.<\/p>\n
“Blood started pouring out. We were most of the time on defence. We got a scrum, I kicked it out, but didn’t make too many metres.<\/p>\n
“Then I missed a tackle on Darcy Graham, luckily Cam Roigard saved the try in the corner, but I cut my chin. That started bleeding and I thought, ‘here we go, it’s going to be a long last 15 minutes’.”<\/p>\n
It was a crucial 15 minutes as well.<\/p>\n
At that point, the score was 17-17. The All Blacks were a man down via Wallace Sititi’s yellow card. Scotland were sniffing history.<\/p>\n
In 120 years of trying, a first win over New Zealand was a single point and a quarter of an hour away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For 20 minutes at Murrayfield last weekend, little was going right for Damian McKenzie. The 30-year-old, 5ft 8in,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":571838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4102],"tags":[4151,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-571837","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115553277412813907","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/571838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}