'It's like trying to tackle a snooker table!' Bill McLaren's greatest lines, 20 years after his final Test

The Scotland international centre Jim Renwick once said after a narrow Scottish defeat by Ireland: “We’d have played much better had Bill McLaren been commentating.”

Call that Bill’s commentary-box superpower, perhaps.

Twenty-years ago this term, one of sport’s best-loved commentators worked on his final Test match, a Six Nations assignment between Wales and Scotland in Cardiff. Really, it was a woeful game to send him off with, littered with handling errors, poor decisions, ill-directed kicks and slapdash play.

The visitors prevailed, allowing the man from Hawick to deliver a final sentence that he presumably would have enjoyed: “Scotland the winners, 27 points to 22.”

The crowd sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ in his honour and a banner in the crowd proclaimed ‘Bill McLaren’s a Welshman’.

Announcing his retirement months earlier, he had said: “My last international match will be Wales against Scotland in Cardiff. That is very fitting because I have always received a great welcome from the people in Wales and I've loved commentating on their matches.

"I'd say the period from 1969 to 1979, when Wales played magnificent rugby, will probably be my favourite era. I've lots of memories and it will be sad to be no longer involved, but I think I'm ready to be packed off to do the dishes.”

And so off he went to the kitchen sink, leaving behind memories aplenty.

As with David Coleman, another great BBC institution, McLaren was a commentator who made the matches he was covering infinitely more enjoyable for viewers. His voice seemed to chime with the game and his phrases lit up even the gloomiest winter day.

Were they all off the cuff or were some of them of the Blue Peter one-I-prepared earlier school? It didn’t matter. They