The brigadier has been a Twickenham fixture for as long anyone can remember. He has a regular spot in the seats behind the press box. He has one of those voices that makes you duck your head every time he shouts out, it carries clean across the ground and sounds as if he is drowning in gravel.
After 25 years of coming here I have no idea if he is a brigadier, mind, or has a rank, or whether it is even the same person in every Test or just any one of a number of interchangeable Twickenham men from the home counties. On Saturday he began by shouting: “Bloody hit him” as Immanuel Feyi-Waboso went haring downfield after George’s Ford’s first kick from hand. This was followed with a full-throated “Yes” when Feyi-Waboso clattered into whichever Australian it was who caught it.
The brigadier isn’t a complicated sort. He doesn’t need the Rugby Football Union to employ a DJ to spin Hey Baby on the decks in a live set at half-time or a rackety brass band to parp out Sweet Caroline whenever the clock stops during the match. He just wants to see England score some tries and smash some people; if they can bully the scrums and bash out a couple of rolling mauls so much the better.
For the first hour of this year’s Autumn Nations Series, he did not have a lot to shout about. About the 60-minute mark, Twickenham was so quiet that if you shut your eyes it sounded more like a summer afternoon at Lord’s.
The place had picked up when Steve Borthwick brought on his first round of replacements on 50 minutes: Tom Curry, Ellis Genge, Will Stuart, Henry Pollock and Luke Cowan-Dickie entered together and for the first time you felt like Borthwick had his first XV on the pitch. Or something closer to it, anyway, because Fin Smith, who surely ought to be his starting fly-half, was made to wait another 20 minutes before he was brought on to join them.
Borthwick is in the rare position of having three fine fly-halves to pick from, with a fourth, Owen Farrell, waiting off-stage. It is not clear if he knows which is the best of them or whether he plans to keep switching them according to whatever the gameplan is for the opposition that week. This time last year Marcus Smith was starting, eight months ago Fin Smith had replaced him, Now he has gone back to Ford, who was allowed to lead the team out in honour of his 100th cap, which he won on tour in Argentina in the summer. Twickenham man gave him a good cheer, but he was even louder when Fin Smith replaced him.
Ford’s rugby is the sort of subtle game that makes Twickenham man pick up his second screen. In these late days of his career, Ford has honed his play to such a fine point that you sometimes have to squint to see what he is doing. Look for the action, then look 15 yards away from it, and that is where you will find him, ambling away on the edge of the play, watching, mind whirring.
Often as not he will have one arm up, ordering one of his teammates into a different position. At this point, he is practically a player-coach: it is Ford who does the large part of the talking in the team huddles when the other team scores and Ford who swaps messages back and forth with the coaches before and during the game.
Ford never flaps. He doesn’t sprint unless he has to and you guess his post-match GPS stats are something like those a shepherd clocks up during a long day whistling at his sheepdog. But it is a treat to watch him when he does spring into life. He carries the ball out in front of him, like he is a butler rushing a tureen-full of hot soup up from the kitchen. His passes never fly to the spot where the man is, but always to the spot where he will be in however many split seconds it takes the ball to travel the distance between them. It is like watching the cogs in a Swiss clock.
Ford made every tackle, too, even when Australia kept sending Hunter Paisami barrelling down his channel. Paisami caught him three times, but Ford is one of those rubbery players who just bounces back to his feet and gets back in the line after he has been flattened.
You guess he could kick to pick out whichever square inch of the grass you asked him to, it is just a shame he only shows them off when the team has advantage. But then Borthwick does not want his fly-half to take risks, otherwise he would be playing one of the Smiths.
