The RFU is spending £50m rebuilding the eastern half of Twickenham. It is putting up a new rooftop rose garden, restaurant and music stage to make the old cabbage patch more welcoming. England, and Eddie Jones, of course, want to do the very opposite thing. The harder their visitors find it here, the happier they’ll be. And since the East Stand is a mess at the moment, all scaffolding, plyboard and piles of breezeblocks, Jones’s work is a lot further along than the builders’. England have not lost here since he took charge, their last defeat that 20-point thrashing, so much more painful than even that scoreline suggests, to Australia in the pool stages of the World Cup. A lot has changed since then, and this Saturday it felt an ugly, unforgiving, intimidating place to come and play. Jones will be delighted.
Twickenham always comes alive when England are playing Australia, since it’s one of those rivalries which can’t be anything but exciting. Even when the weather is this foul, with the rain sweeping in under the roof, falling so thick and fine that the spotlights in the upper tier of the stadium seemed to be lost in fog, while down at ground level the temperature was so cold that great clouds of steam came rising off players as the two packs set about the scrums. The game was only three minutes old when the crowd broke into Swing Low for the first time. But then they already had plenty to sing about. The urgency of England’s play in those opening 10 minutes suggested Jones had plenty to say about England’s listless day against Argentina last Saturday.
Australia were rattled by a couple of early carries from Sam Underhill, and another from Nathan Hughes, rampaging away off the back of a scrum, through Michael Hooper and Will Genia, who made him look like Gulliver throwing off the Lilliputians. And the first time Kurtley Beale got the ball in broken play he was battered down by Courtney Lawes in the kind of bone-jarring tackle that will soon be up on the YouTube highlights reel. England were playing with furious intent. At every breakdown, you could hear Englishmen screaming “nine! nine! nine!” as they looked to close down Genia before he could get Australia away. Michael Cheika said before the match that England would look to hit Genia with late tackles, but the opposite was true. They were busting to get to him early.
This Australian side, though, are a tough lot. And when Underhill went off for a head injury assessment, they regrouped and wrested back control. Though since Maro Itoje came on in Underhill’s place, England were hardly any weaker for the loss. From then on, the game became a wild old stramash of a match, all flailing limbs and flying bodies, slipping boots and screwy kicks, lung-busting runs, last-gasp tackles, the ball as slippery as a second-hand car salesman and the grass as slick as his suit. The only good chances anyone had to catch their breath, half-time aside, was during all the long delays while the TMO tried to figure out exactly what was going on in the last frantic passage of play.
With 30 minutes to play, England were in the thick of a desperate contest, the score was 6-3 and Australia had weathered a stretch in which they lost both Hooper and Beale to the sin-bin. England, then, had failed to impose themselves on a team that was, for a brief moment, down to 13 men. Which tells you plenty about how resourceful this Australia side is. England just couldn’t seem to find a way ahead. A brutal lineout drive, joined by Owen Farrell and George Ford, was stopped just short. And when Ford found a little space out wide on the wing with a deft floated pass, the move came to nothing because the man on the other end of it was Dylan Hartley rather than one of the rapier-quick backs.
The game broke open, in the end, on a lucky bounce of the ball. It landed on the very edge of the touchline and turned back infield. Elliot Daly got the toe of his boot to it just before Beale could gather it in and chased the kick down to score. There were what felt like an endless series of replays, some in super closeup, before the TMO decided there wasn’t conclusive proof that the ball had been in touch. So the try stood. It felt like one in a series of unlucky breaks for the Australians. Cheika didn’t much care for the referee, Ben O’Keeffe, before this match. He bawled him out after Australia drew with South Africa 27-27 in Bloemfontein in September. Since his team had two men sent to the sin-bin, and two tries disallowed, he’s unlikely to have changed his mind about him now.
Jones, though, was positively purring after yet another Twickenham victory, as happy as the cat with the cream. Three tries in the final 10 minutes meant that this was England’s record win against Australia. And if that margin was so flattering that it felt like the scoreboard could have been airbrushed, England still deserved to win, if only because they somehow managed to hold themselves together for 60 minutes and then scramble out from all the confusion to find a way to victory.
