Half-time came and a vicious rumour began circulating around the North stand, section L15. It went roughly as follows: on the 1st of December 2012 England beat New Zealand. A very quiet, very humble man told us this. He had been sitting just over there, on that fateful day, and he pointed at the tunnel.
- By the New Zealand bench, said the unassuming Englishman.
- Were you?
- Yep, I was. And at half-time we all said they’ll come back, they’re the world champions.
- How self-deprecating of you. They are the world champions after all.
He wasn’t listening. I could have insulted his mother’s mother and he would have kept at it. He went on.
- And they did come back!
- They certainly did.
- Then we scored two, just like that! And do you know what I heard Richie McCaw say?
- What did he say?
I played along, my eyes rolling around my sockets like a pinball machine on ecstasy.
- He said, and I quote, “What the fuck do we do now?”
- Did he really?
- Upon my life, good sir. And you know when you hear Richie McCaw the captain of the world champions saying that…! Well!
- Absolutely!
- And it was good for the game.
- Yes, good for the game, absolutely.
- Showed all you lot, the rest of you, that they could be beaten.
- And we are grateful, we really are.
But what of Twickenham, Twickers, “HQ” (for the total berk), I hear you ask.
A silent, corporate, boozy blanket of hush for most of the afternoon. Twickenham, a stadium that resembles a cathedral in its size, scope, and self-importance, was often awkwardly silent. Sure, it rose to crescendos with two minutes to go but the deal is more, “you play well, then we’ll cheer you”, as opposed to the Welsh who prefer a more jovial and helpful “We’ll cheer you to help you play well”. The Stade de France is often silent like Twickenham, but the Gallic silence is more in protest. They are a public that pays attention, knows its rugby, and knows what it wants and expects. If the team doesn’t perform, the fans withhold their labour. The English silence is a deafening racket of apathy; uneducated and sedated apathy.
There are no separate stands, just one all-encompassing coliseum-esque stand, overbearing in its uniformity and distance from the pitch. Not as steep as the Millennium Stadium and with none of the decibels. Every stand is the same, suffocating: there’s no escape. (These are good things, most of them, exactly what you want in a stadium.)You’re packed in – the seats are smaller than Murrayfield. The drinking is more obvious, too, than in Edinburgh, and while booze makes the Scottish fan more boisterous, it makes the English fan more sedate. The crowd, controlled by the TV, takes that little bit longer to react to the referee than at Murrayfield where every penalty to Scotland and opposition knock-on is whooped and hollered. This tells you more about the quality of the teams than the fans.
This Calcutta Cup match never had the fizzle or edge that the return fixture has in Edinburgh where it’s the biggest event of the season. It’s probably just not approached with the same excitement as England versus Wales or France which often have more of a bearing on the Championship, an outcome that rarely concerns Scotland. For example, the fan to my left supped his way through the first half all docile and dopey, and only piped up when England were well clear at which point he felt it was okay to start praising everything Scotland did, gushing with patronising platitudes. When Farrell kicked for the corner with 2 minutes remaining he proclaimed, “thank god, the Jonny Wilkinson era is over!” When I pointed out that the era that he hated so much was England’s most successful ever he supped his pint and shook his head. “It was boring, mate.” I rest my case. Richie Gray was “blondie” or “long hair”, as was Denton. There was a disappointing lack of knowledge or insight or humility in the English folk to my left and right, no subtlety of appraisal or appreciation of nuance. Everything was either “Absolutely bloody bwilliant!” or “absolutely atrocious!” The Scottish man in front of me did a good line in self-deprecation though, which must be a particularly Scottish trait.
So we left Twickenham shaking our heads, rueing the bits and bobs that can be improved here and there, the tweaks in selection and the approach in both attack and defence. All the humour that I could see, all the wit, was with the Scottish fans. “One Andy Murray, there’s only one Andy Murray, one Andy Muuuurray!” was belted out as we left the stadium by one Famous Groused fan with a solid grounding in the art of irony, honed over many, many crushing disappointments.
