RBS Six Nations Championship 2010

This was last year - will we hold the Calcutta Cup this year?

Calcutta Cup 13/3/2010 – Murrayfield Edinburgh

Scotland vs. England

“We’ve been here before.” These are the words of Frodo Baggins at the start of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, upon realising that he and Sam are lost. Confused and disoriented, only the recognisable stench of a nearby bog alerts the young hobbits to their predicament. Cut and bruised, tired, and with less food, water and time than they had before, they are back in exactly the same place they were before. And it stinks.

Here’s the scene. An England coach is roughly two years into his tenure having limped along with a win/loss record of about 50/50; a series of false dawns and pyrrhic victories has been pockmarked by the occasional record defeat; and the rugby is still as dull as a new Snow Patrol record.

And now, it’s High Noon. For Andy Robinson, it was Argentina at Twickenham, for Brian Ashton, Scotland at Murrayfield. Each the penultimate game in a series, and each a game that England were expected to win comfortably. Sound familiar?

Defeat in this game would be the last straw where the public and the press would finally lose all patience and call unanimously for change. Robinson resigned, Ashton was fired, and now it’s Martin Johnson’s turn.

Allow me to put this as simply as possible: England can not lose to Scotland and expect to carry on as they have been doing. Scotland are in a horrible mess, winless in the tournament and fresh from defeat to Italy, thanks to a performance that was bafflingly devoid of basic technical proficiency. Their backs ate up space like an over-zealous property developer in the Green Belt. They were terrible.

Johnson and co. have emphasised a win-at-all-costs mentality. It has been jammed down our throats since he took charge in 2008 and yet the manager, the coaches and – to a lesser extent – the players continue to exist in a consequence-free bubble like it’s some sort of coaching Woodstock. This has been done to death. This is D-Day. Or rather, it was for the last two head men. Will it be this time? I doubt it.

In preparation for this seminal moment on Johnson’s fledgling coaching career, he and his staff held “a marathon selection meeting, our longest ever”, which resulted in just the one forced and one unforced change. Lewis Moody is replaced on the openside by Joe Worsley, while Simon Shaw’s injury paves the way for Louis Deacon to make his first start of the tournament.

It seems to me that this selection meeting may in fact have been so long that it started before the Six Nations tournament began. Progress be damned!

Scotland, meanwhile, have brought Nick De Luca back into the midfield to solve their geometry problems, with Max Evans moving out to the wing. Dan Parks gets a chance to build on the bizarre Man of the Match performance he delivered in Rome.

This match will be won and lost in two areas. First of all, the breakdown, where the sheer size of the combatants in the back row should lead to an intimidating physical contest between the emerging Scottish trio of Brown, Barclay and Beattie and England’s rather more sluggish collection of ballast.

Second of all, the counter attack – specifically England’s. Parks will kick everything. Parks, Cusiter and Southwell are vastly superior tacticians to Wilkinson, Care and Armitage, and if they kick everything straight back, they will find themselves avoiding eye-contact with a group of disgruntled forwards growing tired of playing in their own half. This may have been the perfect game for Ben Foden, and many will be hoping he gets more than a cameo before the final whistle blows.

England have a title to chase and Scotland have a Wooden Spoon to avoid. Make no mistake, the Scots will be fired up beyond belief. Just like they were the last time England came to Murrayfield and lost, just like the time before that, when they lost.

The England camp doesn’t seem to realise the dispiriting effect that their performances are having on rugby around the country. I have never spoken to so many people who feel they’ve wasted their money going to Twickenham this season. I have never seen so many message board posts declaring apathy towards the outcome of this fixture. The condescending media displays denouncing the opinions of the public and the press give the camp the PR of modern-day politicians and bankers. What happens after this game may well be many times more interesting than what happens during it.

Scotland: H Southwell (Stade Francais); S Lamont (Scarlets), N De Luca (Edinburgh), G Morrison (Glasgow), M Evans (Glasgow); D Parks (Glasgow), C Cusiter (Glasgow, captain); A Jacobsen (Edinburgh), R Ford (Edinburgh), E Murray (Northampton); J Hamilton (Edinburgh), A Kellock (Glasgow); K Brown (Glasgow), J Barclay (Glasgow), J Beattie (Glasgow).
Replacements: S Lawson (Gloucester), G Cross (Edinburgh), N Hines (Leinster), A MacDonald (Edinburgh), R Lawson (Gloucester), P Godman (Edinburgh), S Danielli (Ulster).

England: Delon Armitage; Mark Cueto, Mathew Tait, Riki Flutey, Ugo Monye; Jonny Wilkinson, Danny Care; Tim Payne, Dylan Hartley, Dan Cole; Louis Deacon, Steve Borthwick (captain); James Haskell, Joe Worsley, Nick Easter.
Replacements: Steve Thompson, David Wilson, Courtney Lawes, Lewis Moody, Ben Youngs, Toby Flood, Ben Foden.

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