Players, coaches and commentators were all left flailing to make sense of what took place at Twickenham on Saturday as a best ever ‘half’ at the home of English rugby followed Scotland’s worst half hour on a pitch that has been the scene of countless failures by the current team’s compatriots down the years, leaving them at the sporting crossroads.

Down one route lies a glorious future and down the other miserable failure, but those attempting to work out which they will follow might as well toss a coin, which would be apt.

This is a squad that is led by a man who has always had a propensity to gamble, all-in, at key moments and after being punished for their recklessness in that opening period, they were rewarded for their willingness to keep throwing the dice in producing a thrilling comeback which saw them retain the Calcutta Cup for the first time in 35 years and come within a play of becoming the first Scottish team to win at Twickenham for 36.

How much that was down to Gregor Townsend’s high risk approach and how much down to the defiance of his players seemed moot, however, after man-of-the-match Finn Russell broke from the PR-driven ‘As One’ messaging that has been the stiflingly predominant influence at the Scottish Rugby Union in recent years, by admitting that he had argued with his head coach at the interval about the way they were going about things.

That it was Russell who was bold enough to do so seemed all the more telling since, in its way, it mirrored last year’s events off the field when his father, Keith, successfully challenged both the way the people running the sport go about doing so and the methods they use to silence potential critics.

After the interval the stand off was the dominant figure afield, following the lead set by his captain Stuart McInally who, as Townsend was prepared to acknowledge, had made the intervention which crucially turned the momentum of the match around after that traumatic opening that had seen television cameras capture shots of ashen faces in the Scottish coaching booth.

England had been rampant in scoring four tries through Jack Nowell – just 66 seconds into a match the Scots had said they needed to start well – Tom Curry, Joe Launchbury and Tom May, having another one ruled out by the replay official in setting up a 31-0 lead, when the hooker turned a joke into a reality as he reprised his days as a promising No.8 and allowed a front-row forward to genuinely claim that his try had been involved a 50 metre run that had seen him out-pace the opposing backs.

McInally had done well enough in the first instance to get to Owen Farrell and execute a charge down before he regathered the ball with half the length of the pitch between him and the posts. However, the way he held off the chase of May, regarded as one of the best and fastest wingers in Test rugby, as well as that of the embarrassed England captain, spoke to the determination of a true leader who was determined to lift his men, albeit he was offering what seemed at that point little more than a moment of reprieve for the Scots in the face of a siege.

Instead it provided them with something to cling to during those half-time discussions in which Russell apparently asserted himself and the stand off then returned to the pitch to take the match by the scruff of the neck, kicking with a purpose that had been missing in that gameplan-dictated first 30 minutes and moving the ball with a level of touch, skill and judgement that no Scottish stand off has boasted since the last one to taste victory at this venue, John Rutherford.

This player-led revival saw Darcy Graham’s twinkling feet twice take him across the England line, Magnus Bradbury power in for another as his proud mum Dee, the SRU President, watched alongside the Princess Royal and Russell intercept Farrell on his way to levelling the scores before putting in Sam Johnson for the go-ahead try.

It was a performance which stole much of the thunder on the final day of the championship from newly crowned Grand Slam champions Wales, yet strangely carried echoes of events at the 2003 World Cup when, though never properly confirmed by the participants, something of a player revolt in the way they took on their coach’s home team led to a rugby revolution in the Principality.

In spite of repeated off-field chaos, Welsh international rugby has never looked back and nor, it must be said, has the coach, Steve Hansen, who left them a year later before the first of the five Six Nations titles and four Grand Slams they have won since, taking an assistant’s role with the All Blacks in his native New Zealand before acquiring the top job seven years later and going on to become the most successful coach in the history of the international game.

How Scottish rugby and its head coach feed off Saturday’s events will, then, be fascinating over the weeks and months to come, but all concerned have much to reflect upon after Scotland’s players took a contest that was on the point of becoming calamitous to their prospects and turned it into a source of potential salvation.