The three Wales changes Pivac needs to make for Scotland showdown including throwing in dynamic youngster

Before the Six Nations commenced I stated that Wales, defending champions or not, would this time be battling with Scotland to see who finished fourth and who ended up last from bottom.

This weekend's game was key to deciding that and, given the Principality Stadium factor and the way the Cardiff crowd can influence things, I was reasonably confident Wales would be the ones coming fourth.

Having witnessed the contrasting fortunes of the two teams from the opening weekend, I'm suddenly not so sure. Far from it, in fact.

Wales were awful in Ireland but those writing Welsh rugby's obituary are premature

Every single aspect of our performance against Ireland was poor. The stats showed we were second best on possession and territory, the lineout was awful, we lost the breakdown, the scrum was reasonable I suppose - until the replacements came on and we went backwards.

Then, to compound matters, we didn't even look like creating or scoring with the possession we did manage. Ireland just waited for the Welsh players to run out of ideas, lose their composure and give the ball back to them, which is what happened time and again.

Yes, I know Taine Basham bagged a try, and if anyone was deserving then he was, but that was more from Ireland throwing the ball to us than Wales opening up their defence with any form of subtlety.

There was next to nothing to enthuse about and, by contrast, Scotland will head to Cardiff buoyant after beating England and feeling they can exploit the Welsh weaknesses shown up in Dublin.

For years, Scotland have been developing a loose game where they run everything back at you, something they perhaps have been forced to do as they don't possess a great pool of players to produce a conventional team, so