For 20 minutes at Murrayfield last weekend, little was going right for Damian McKenzie.
The 30-year-old, 5-foot-8, 25-pound, blonde-haired, fresh-faced player looks a little out of place among the blocks of breeze flying elsewhere on the field.
At first, after coming off the bench in the 44th minute against Scotland, he felt it too.
“Kyle Steyn had just scored for them when I came on,” he said.
“We started, they gave me a penalty from the nine, I went up to catch it and couldn’t. I also hit my head.
“The blood started to flow. We were defending most of the time. We had a scrum, I kicked it, but I didn’t travel too many meters.
“Then I missed a tackle on Darcy Graham, luckily Cam Roigard saved the try in the corner, but I cut my chin. I started bleeding and thought, ‘here we go, it’s going to be a long last 15 minutes’.”
It was also a crucial 15 minutes.
At that time the score was 17-17. The All Blacks were a man down due to Wallace Sititi’s yellow card. Scotland was smelling history.
In 120 years of trying, a first victory over New Zealand was just one point away and within a quarter of an hour.
