The onliest Frank Keating, late of these pages, used to have wicked fun writing about England. When the Wasps wing Simon Smith scored against Scotland in March 1985 it was England’s first try – imagine this – in a championship match at Twickenham for the best part of three seasons.
Keating described this astonishing event as being accompanied by “a noticeable ruffle from under the tartan travelling-rugs, as colonels and crusty captains found themselves inspired to seek out the parchmenty-white flesh under the sheepskin skirt and, for the first time in years, give a playful tweak to the thigh of the haughty but faithful old battleaxe next to them”. You might struggle to sneak a line like that into the papers today, even if you had the wit to think of it. Unless you did it in direct quotation of course (thanks, Frank). His sympathies always did seem to lie with the Welsh.
Keating surely received a few green ink letters splattered with spit tea after that particular piece. But if he had written it now he’d likely have had to skip the comments and log off social media for a few days to avoid all the England fans he had upset. In an era of hot takes, hard news, talking points and statistical analysis, everything seems a little more earnest than it seems to have been back in his day. Which is a shame. Because, let us be honest about it, idle chauvinism is a large part of the Six Nations’ appeal. It is an annual opportunity to exercise all those old antagonisms between the competing teams, for us all to indulge the stereotypes we hold about each other. It is a privilege of our long neighbourly acquaintance.
Last week we had Jim Telfer taking his annual shot southward. “If you ever think about wanting separation from England just sit 10 minutes in Twickenham and listen to them,” Telfer said. “They think they’re superior and a lot of them will come from the south-east, bags of money and bags of this and bags of that.” Eddie Jones has promised to buy him a ticket for the next home game. Then Ronan O’Gara got stuck into the Scots. “I hope Ireland hammer Scotland today for the way they behaved in the week,” he said on Saturday morning. “Too mouthy, they can’t back it up. I was brought up with a mentality that you work hard and talk about it afterwards.”
Gregor Townsend, who takes over as Scotland coach in the summer, could not help retweeting the clip of O’Gara saying this after Scotland had won. It has always been this way. In the second edition of the home nations tournament, in 1884, the match between England and Scotland was interrupted by an argument over whether the match-winning try was legal or not, because England’s Richard Kingsley had scored it from a knock-on. The game stopped for 30 minutes while the honourable secretary of the RFU, George Rowland Hill, walked on to the field with a copy of the laws and explained at length why his team were in the right. Which went down very well with the Scots. They were still arguing about it at dinner that evening and, stuck in high dudgeon, refused to play the fixture the following year. Likewise, the Welsh and Irish were in dispute and would not play against each other in either 1885 or 1886.
All this squabbling led, in the end, the Irish to have the bright idea of creating an international rugby board to act as rule-maker. The English, not untypically, complained that because they had so many more clubs and players than the other nations they should have more representatives on the board, and were duly blackballed for the next two years while the Irish, Welsh and Scots went off and played against each other. All of which ancient history has been folded into the rich mix of the tournament, along with Phil Bennett’s infamous speech about what bastards the English were, Brian Moore’s baiting of the French, Martin Johnson’s refusal to budge for Mary McAleese and all the other after-dinner standards.
The Six Nations has, as statistics released last weekend by Uefa reveal, the highest average attendance of any sports tournament in the world. It works out at 72,000 per match, which puts it ahead of the NFL, the MLB and every World Cup you’d care to mention. A large part of that, it should be said, is simply because it happens to be played in sizeable stadiums. The smallest of them, the Aviva in Dublin, holds 50,000. But you still need to fill the seats. And more often than not – the Italians, perpetual underdogs, are the exception – the matches sell out.
It is not necessarily the quality of the rugby that draws the fans in, so much as enjoyability of the occasion, enlivened by those affectionate old antipathies, which grow new shoots each spring.
“An international at Twickenham is more than a mere spectacle,” Alec Waugh once wrote, “it is a gathering of the clan.” The same holds true in the other five cities too. It is a chance for six nations to lord over that lot, the ones we are not.
