Milton Keynes seems to be a town designed to avoid conflict. You can drive through it without once seeing a house – so you can’t envy your neighbours. And with those roundabouts you’re unlikely to engage in road rage, let alone a satisfactory car chase. It would offer the perfect locale for witness protection, and perhaps already does, if the number of people who admit to living there is anything to go by.
There was a worry before the game that its blandness might infect this encounter. You’d think that with their colonial history, France v Canada should be some kind of grudge match: after all, half the world are lining up to smash England at sport because they’re the old imperial masters. But the visiting fans didn’t seem to see it that way. Maybe the French weren’t that irritating as overlords. Maybe Canadians are too nice to bring up the past.
The crowd had come to be entertained, not engage in vicious battle. This made Stadium MK the perfect venue: if the rugby didn’t hold their attention, they could always cross the road to the multiplex, and there was plenty of shopping nearby. M&S stayed open late, and French fans mooched around the aisles; one stood by the entrance, holding a craft beer and whistling the Marseillaise. As visitors reached the gates, they were quizzed by a student researching the economic impact of the match. All she really needed to do was look across the road, to the parade of chain restaurants. Here, truly, was the world in union: fans coming together to eat the food of every nation, from Nando’s to Chimichanga to Pizza Express.
When the evening’s main event began, the crowd’s desire for entertainment was immediately fulfilled. For the first 10 minutes the players rocketed up and down the pitch, ball always in hand. And suddenly those fans who had seemed so placid in the safe wide boulevards outside came alive.
Half an hour in, when Guilhem Guirado scored the second try of the match, you would have thought the stadium was full of only French fans. Then the Canadians rolled forward, and DTH Van der Merwe shot over, and every Tricolore appeared to have turned into a maple leaf. When Canada narrowed the gap to 17-12, you’d have sworn the game was taking place in Ottawa.
At half-time, the crowd had seen 36 points scored, and Frédéric Michalak break France’s points record. Even when Canada couldn’t keep up with the game in the second half, they still kept up the pace. The crowd loved it all, some a little too much. In the 77th minute, two streakers raced the length of the pitch – technically half-streakers, since they were wearing Canada shirts but no bottoms. The players didn’t seem to notice, and neither did the stewards. So they took themselves off at the hoardings and ran up the stairwell, eventually disappearing, one assumes, to find some trousers.
Few of the visitors from France and Canada will have seen anything of the town itself. They were delivered to the stadium by coaches that took them away again straight after the game. Some said they’d heard there wasn’t much reason to stick around. But they won’t forget this game. And Milton Keynes will be just a bit less anonymous in future.
