Three minutes past the last, England were still playing. They had nothing to gain now, except seven points on top of the 54 they had already scored. But they still had something to prove, to Eddie Jones, who rode them hard in the previous week, and to everyone who watched them against Italy, Wales, and France and wondered whether they were good enough to win this Six Nations, or worthy rivals to the world’s No1 side, New Zealand, whose record of 18 consecutive victories they have now equalled.
So they kept running at the Scots, moving the ball back and forth until, at last, they found an opening and Danny Care was able to slip through for a final try, which, when converted, made it 61-21. That was a record score in the history of the oldest international fixture in the sport, achieved against one the finest Scotland sides in a generation.
By that point Jonathan Joseph was back on the sidelines, substituted with a standing ovation. The moment he sat down was the first time he had relaxed all afternoon. He had been in the thick of it and scored his second international hat-trick.
Joseph has not scored a try for Bath so far this season and his performances for England had, by his own high standards, been so ordinary that Jones dropped him from their match against Italy. Now he was back in the lineup and playing as well as he has ever done. Jones said afterwards that the reason he dropped Joseph was so he could try to build depth in the squad by giving other players a start. But the turnaround in Joseph’s form told its own story about the effect Jones’s decision had.
England have seemed uneasy so far this year, and a shadow of the side that whitewashed Australia last summer and won every game they played in the autumn. But as Jones said, Joseph and the rest seem to have had a change of attitude in the last fortnight.
“There’s been a real shift in the team,” said Jones. He said they have decided “to embrace what’s ahead of us and to move to the next level.” At half-time in this match he told them he wanted them to be “ruthless”, to “play like the No1 team in the world”. And they looked closer to it than they have at any other point in this tournament.
You could see it when Owen Farrell was lining up his third conversion. His team-mates jogged back into their own half and gathered together in a huddle. You would have thought that there was not much left to be said. They had torn Scotland apart in those first 40 minutes, and were already leading 28-7.
England have only once had a larger half-time lead in the past two years, back when they played Fiji in the autumn. But they stood there, arms around each other, rapt with attention listening to Ben Youngs and Maro Itoje bellow orders and instructions for the final few seconds of the half.
England played with furious intensity all the way through, as if Jones had starved them during the previous week, and promised they could only eat that night if they won by 40 points.
The Scots were hapless, undone by both the yellow card shown to Fraser Brown and the injuries to Stuart Hogg and his replacement Mark Bennett, but England were quite brilliant, ugly, ornery and unforgiving. In this form there isn’t a team in the world that would enjoy playing them, or feel all that confident of coming out on top.
The first scrum did not come till some time after the start, but when it did it immediately exploded into a great bust-up, the first of five or six in the match. Dan Cole came up steaming, a fistful of Ryan Wilson’s collar in his mitt, and everyone else piled in. Cole was not the only one who boiled over. James Haskell, Mike Brown, Joe Marler and Courtney Lawes all had to be dragged away from other scraps. At times the game looked more like one long rolling brawl. You half-expected to see a couple of bar stools come flying out of the mauls.
It was not anger, but determination. You could see how sharply Jones had honed England’s focus in the way Farrell chose to take so many penalty shots at goal. He kicked a fifth in the 47th minute, even though England had scored four tries and were 30 points ahead.
It felt so relentless, as if the team wanted to make amends for the slapdash way in which they had played during patches of their previous three Six Nations matches. There was Dylan Hartley, blowing red in the face because he was busy shouting at anyone in earshot, and Itoje, crashing into contact like this was the last game he would ever play. Then, when England’s backs got the ball in hand, they ran hard and straight at the Scottish defence, who were shredded like so much waste paper.
It was Joseph who delivered the stiletto blows, slipping lethally in between Alex Dunbar and Huw Jones. He scored England’s first, second, and fourth tries, and set up their third, so he almost earned his side a bonus point on his very own. Joseph may be the finest finisher England have had at centre since Jeremy Guscott last played for them. He bamboozled poor Dunbar, who seemed to be at a loss to know whether to watch Joseph’s feet, hips, or head, each of which seemed to threaten that his next step could be in any one of three different directions. As for his England team, they are only moving in one, on to Dublin, and the grand slam match against Ireland.
