Ospreys 24 Harlequins 23: Hook puts cruel boot into Quins

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Wales versus Harlequins seconds? It had 50 points written all over it, which just goes to show you should never believe what you read.

More than one of the Londoners' back-room staff expressed fear and loathing before kick-off: fear that Shane Williams would rip them up for loo paper in open field; loathing of a fixture list that had forced them to head into Ospreylia with only one first-teamer in the starting line-up. Oh ye of little faith. Quins were winning the game in stoppage time and would still have been winning it at the final whistle had luck not deserted them at the death.

In the end, this most courageous of efforts splintered on the jagged rock of Ospreys' star quality.

Williams, operating at scrum-half rather than wing after a back-line reshuffle that had a "last throw of the dice" whiff about it, threw the Quins defence off-balance with a twinkle-toed dart close to his forwards and, in a flash, the long-striding Lee Byrne moved quickly away from De Wet Barry and cruised into the danger zone.

The full-back's kick for Jonny Vaughton was perfectly weighted and, although Vaughton's inside pass fell into enemy hands, Byrne clattered the retreating Charlie Amesbury from behind. Amesbury spilled the ball into his own in-goal area, where Tommy Bowe claimed the try.

Ospreys were still a point behind, but their opponents, spitting tacks at conceding so late and chaotic a score, would have bet their mortgages on James Hook nailing the wide-angled conversion – always assuming, of course, that the Harlequin types in the City had not already gambled those mortgages into oblivion. Sure enough, Hook bisected the posts with a kick so geometrically precise that his earlier misses defied explanation. Talk about rubbing it in.

Not that Sean Holley, the Ospreys coach, was remotely convinced by his side's victory, reliant as it was on oases of individual brilliance in a desert of collective confusion.

"It's a Catch 22 thing for us," Holley admitted. "You want fabulous individuals in your team and we're lucky to have a lot of them at our disposal.

"But rugby has to be about the sum of the parts and the challenge for us is to ensure that our performances are less about individualism and more about the team as a whole.

"We spoke about the team emphasis before this game, but it didn't happen that way," he added "It leaves us with some selection issues to address."

Holley and his charges now move into Heineken Cup mode and they confidently expect next weekend's visit to Leicester to be infinitely more demanding than this little run-around in the EDF Energy Cup.

If Quin were "tenacious", to borrow the coach's description, the Midlanders will be positively murderous. Can Ospreys really hope to prosper at Welford Road, given their half-cocked performance yesterday? Yes, because they have match-winners coming out of their ears, not just Williams and Byrne and Hook, but forwards like Alun Wyn Jones, whose first-half performance here was as close to spellbinding as second-row forwards tend to offer, unless they happen to be John Eales.

But the Leicester hard-heads will have noted Ospreys' lack of authority at the second-half set-pieces and their increasing indiscipline at the breakdown, one example of which propelled their captain, Ryan Jones, into the sin bin at a delicate point in the contest.

While Jones was off the field, the Fijian outside-half Waisea Luveniyali kicked Quins into a 23-17 lead they never looked like conceding until they actually did. Unless the Welshmen get themselves up to speed at the tackle area, their next opponents will make them suffer.

Luveniyali was right up to speed. Operating outside Andy Gomarsall, who played a crafty veteran's hand at scrum-half, he mixed up his game cleverly, interspersing long spells of inventive distribution with direct assaults on the Ospreys midfield. His fellow Pacific islanders, the Samoan hooker Tani Fuga and the outsized Tongan wing Epi Taione, also played their part, although the latter was shown a yellow card for a trademark "look, no arms" hit on Hook. Taione, proud owner of the game's most innocent expression, was genuinely baffled. He saw it merely as one of "Epi's little tickles".

Neither Taione nor anyone else in a quartered shirt of many colours saw which way the Ospreys went from the start. Gavin Henson ran the ball back at the visitors from the kick-off, Byrne and Williams attacked down the right and Hook would have opened the scoring immediately but for some obstruction in front of the sticks.

Further opportunities were spurned, both of the try-scoring and penalty varieties, before Williams crossed towards the end of the half – a try that owed much to Alun Wyn Jones and his footballing dexterity. Come the break, Quins were lucky to be 14-3 down.

Yet from the restart, the boot was on the other foot. Chris Robshaw's strength and determination in the heaviest of traffic was rewarded when Barry beat Henson and Hook to score at the posts on 43 minutes, and when Fuga burrowed his way over a dozen minutes later, the Londoners were ahead for the first time.

Try as they might, Ospreys could not make sense of the turnaround in fortunes and the majority of them still looked startled long after pinching the spoils.

Dean Richards, the Quins director of rugby, said: "I take comfort from the fact that, after a pretty poor opening, we picked ourselves up and put ourselves in a position from which we could, and should, have won the game. That being said, I'm disappointed we didn't win it." So he should be. Not as disappointed as Ospreys, though. Some scorelines fail to tell the whole truth.

Scorers: Ospreys: Tries Williams, Bowe Conversion Hook Penalties Hook 4. Harlequins: Tries Barry, Fuga Conversions Luveniyali 2 Penalties Luveniyali 3.

Ospreys: L Byrne; S Williams, S Parker (T Bowe, h-t), G Henson, J Vaughton; J Hook, R Webb (D Biggar, 65); D Jones, H Bennett (R Hibbard, 52), A Jones, I Gough (L Bateman, 76), A W Jones, F Tiatia (T Smith, 65), M Holah, R Jones (capt).

Harlequins: T Williams (S Stegmann, 74); E Taione, D Barry, T Masson, C Amesbury; W Luveniyali, A Gomarsall (capt); A Croall, T Fuga, M Lambert, J Percival, G Robson, C Robshaw (T Guest, 55), N McMillan (Guest, 25-32), P Davies.

Referee: T Wigglesworth (Yorkshire).