Hawick’s Darcy Graham hits 150-point mark with 30th try for Scotland during 35-29 win v Wales in rugby’s 2025 Six Nations
Hawick’s Darcy Graham marked his return to action after a game out injured by scoring his 30th try for Scotland against Wales in rugby’s 2025 Six Nations on Saturday.
That score, 27 minutes into the hosts’ 35-29 victory against the Welsh at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium, takes the right-winger to within two tries of the current record of 32 held by his Edinburgh teammate Duhan van der Merwe and the number of points he’s racked up for his country to 150.
It was one of five tries touched down by head coach Gregor Townsend’s team on their way to their second win of the tournament, the others being scored at the double by both full-back Blair Kinghorn and inside-centre Tom Jordan, with fly-half and co-captain Finn Russell converting all of them.
Interim head coach Matt Sherratt’s visitors scored four tries via Blair Murray, Ben Thomas, Teddy Williams and Max Llewlleyn, with Jarrod Evans adding three conversions and Gareth Anscombe a penalty.
That result, Scotland’s third win on the spin versus the Welsh, lifts them up to third in the championship table, on 11 points from four fixtures, ahead of England’s game at home to Italy today, with kick-off at 3pm.
Their concluding match of this year’s championship is away to table-toppers France on Saturday, with kick-off at 8pm, and Townsend, 51, has issued a warning to his team that it’ll be their toughest test of the tournament.
“They’re a quality side,” said the ex-Gala back. “When you saw the French club teams dominating in Europe and scoring 70-to-80 points against quality English sides on a couple of occasions, it shows you what can happen if you allow them to get on the front foot.
“France scored 70 points against a very good Italian team, they got 40 points against Wales and 40 against Ireland and I think they could have scored 40 or 50 against England with the amount of chances they had.
“Just now, probably this is the toughest fixture in world rugby – they beat the All Blacks in November – so we can’t wait to be involved in it.
“We know they’ll be going for the title but it’s an opportunity for us to go out and play against one of the best teams in the world right now.”
Graham also acknowledges that his side will have to raise their game a lot to have any hope of ending a three-game losing streak against the French in the Six Nations by claiming a first win at the Stade de France since one by 27-23 there in March 2021.
“We’ve got a lot more in us and it’s a big one over in France,” he said.
“There’s no point in just doing it for 40 or 50 minutes like we did against Wales. It’s a full 80-minute performance we need.
“I think the most disappointing thing is that we’ve not had that yet in the full championship, that ruthlessness. We need to go over there and be ruthless.
“We need to play for 80 minutes and back ourselves. It’s a hard place to go – the French are unbelievable – but we need to be more ruthless for 80 minutes.”
The way his team let slip a 35-8 lead to let the Welsh get within a converted try of a winning fightback on Saturday is a cause for concern and they need to make sure there’s no repeat of that drop-off in performance in Paris, according to Graham.
“It feels like we lost that game,” he said. “We should have put them away and we could have scored another four or five tries out there – that’s the frustrating part.”
Graham played for all but the last 13 minutes of his third game of the championship, returning to Scotland’s starting line-up after being ruled out of the match before, a 16-15 defeat away to England at London’s Twickenham Stadium on Saturday, February 22, by injury.
The 27-year-old, replaced by Kyle Rowe with 67 minutes on the clock on Saturday, was rested for that second defeat of this year’s tournament after being left concussed by a clash of heads with Russell 21 minutes into the Scots’ 32-18 loss hosting Ireland on Sunday, February 9, but was deemed fit to resume his first Six Nations campaign since 2022, having been ruled out of 2023 and 2024’s injured, at the weekend.
He was one of two Borderers fielded on Saturday, with ex-Hawick and Gala loosehead prop Rory Sutherland also making a comeback, as a 62nd-minute replacement for Pierre Schoeman, after missing February 22’s first Calcutta Cup defeat for five years because of a back spasm, making that game’s match-day squad the first of the tournament without any Borderers in.
Graham and Sutherland, 32, are among three representatives of the region in Townsend’s squad for his seventh championship, the other being ex-Peebles hooker Patrick Harrison.
Graham is now on 45 caps since 2018, all but five of them starts, with Sutherland on 40, 21 of them from the bench, since 2016 and Edinburgh’s Harrison, 22, on three since last July, two of them as a substitute.
Graham has been given two matches’ worth of game-time all together so far this Six Nations, also playing for the first 73 minutes of Scotland’s opening 31-19 win at home to Italy and for the first quarter of their loss to the Irish.
Sutherland’s had just over an hour and a half all told, playing for the last 29 minutes against the Italians as a replacement for Schoeman and for the first 48 minutes versus the Irish before making way for the South African, that being his first Six Nations start since 2022.
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