Scrum down with a beer, it’s time for the World’s Greatest Rugby Championship
Only three sleeps before the world’s greatest rugby tournament, the Six Nations, kicks off again.
Those teams in the southern hemisphere might regularly pummel ours up here into submission – but they all wish they had a competition to match the one in the north for excitement and partisan passion.
They have the Rugby Championship, played between Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina, which used to be the Tri-Nations until they admitted the South Americans.
It’s fine. Spectators enjoy some great rugby. But it lacks the edge of the Six Nations. Why? Well, history.
Our tournament launches on Friday when France play Wales in Paris. Plenty of history behind this one.
The bowmen who won the Battle of Agincourt for the English were in fact Welshmen. Henry V’s army was heavily outnumbered by the French but his archers – most of them from Monmouthshire – won him a famous victory.
The French warned before the battle that when it was over they would cut off the fingers of the longbowmen. But they trapped the French knights in a clearing and slaughtered them.
Afterwards, they waved their bow fingers triumphantly at the French survivors, which is said to be the origin of our rude V-sign.
On Saturday, Ireland play England in Dublin. When Caelan Doris treats the England fly-half to one of his trademark vaporising tackles, I’m not suggesting there’ll be some old Paddy in the crowd thinking, “Hah! That’s for the Black and Tans/the potato famine of 1847/the Croke Park massacre.”
No, the world has moved on. But events such as those have coloured how we see each other and why our rivalries are so fierce and ever-lasting.
England play France at Twickenham on February 8. There’s a bit of history there, too (how long have you got?). And then, on February 22, Scotland come to Twickenham.
They will line up to sing Flower of Scotland as if their lives depended on it; and when play starts, they will treat it as a reenactment of the Battle of Bannockburn, though after 80 minutes they sometimes have to concede that it was more like Culloden.
And so it goes on, festering grudges between old enemies that inflame passions on and off the field but are generally forgotten as beer fosters brotherhood in the bars around the grounds.
I love the Six Nations, have done since I first played rugby as an 11-year-old grammar school boy. Three of my sports masters played for Northampton Saints, my boyhood team, and one was on the fringe of the England team.
One of the international tries that sticks most vividly in my memory was scored by Andy Hancock against Scotland in 1965. He ran 70 yards down the left wing, through a quagmire, twice feinting to go infield, then skinning the cover defence with a dummy to Budge Rogers and a change of pace.
Hancock, another Saint, who died in 2020 aged 80, admitted much later: “The truth is, I should have kicked it.”
He won only three caps and in those days, when the game was strictly amateur, he worked as a chartered surveyor and town planner. They were different times. Players played for fun, and for their country.
Two of the legendary Pontypool front row, Charlie Faulkner and Bobby Windsor, worked in the South Wales steel mills. The other, Graham Price, was a farmer’s son who went to grammar school and later studied civil engineering.
Those three cost me a lot of money. In the Seventies, when Wales had the finest rugby team ever to take the field, I had a standing £5 bet with Mike Hughes, of this parish, on the outcome of their match with England. I seldom won.
The bet still stands and though I win much more frequently now, I don’t see Mike often enough to collect.
The Six Nations has also granted me treasured memories of days out at Twickenham, Cardiff Arms Park and Parc des Princes in Paris, shared with dear old friends such as Roger Watkins, Les Diver and even Lord Drone himself. Happy days indeed.
I read an obituary last week of a Scotland player, John Douglas, who won 12 caps for Scotland in the early Sixties. He was a forward who once played for Edinburgh at Murrayfield, then later that same evening knocked out a policeman to win the East of Scotland heavyweight boxing title.
Hard to imagine that now, when sport is a multi-billion pound business and rugby players spend their lives honing their bodies to a state of perfection while their minds disintegrate under the pressure to win.
So, on Friday night, I’ll break out the cold beer and put my feet up to watch the tournament opener. Might even have a half-time pasty.
Meanwhile, here’s the team I’d like to see represent England the day after:-
Genge, Cowan-Dickie, Stuart; Itoje, Martin; Cunningham-South, T. Curry, Willis; Mitchell, F. Smith; Sleightholme, Dingwall, Lawrence, Freeman; M. Smith
*****
The clamour for the Southport killer to serve a whole life term has me puzzled. After all, he got 52 years.
I understand why the parents of the three little girls butchered by Axel Rudakubana, as well as the people of Southport, want him to serve the maximum possible sentence.
Their agony will last a lifetime, so why not his?
The problem is that Rudakubana was nine days short of his 18th birthday when he committed a crime that will live in infamy, like those of the Moors Murderers.
That means he is classed as a child at the time of the killings, not an adult, and so cannot be locked up for the rest of his life.
Patrick Hurley, Labour MP for Southport, has called for the law to be changed to allow the key to be thrown away for killers such as Rudakubana.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, advised by his Attorney-General Lord Hermer, has of course found a UN convention protecting children’s rights that bars Britain from keeping Rudakubana behind bars for the remainder of his natural.
I think those two sometimes care more for the law than they do for justice.
Still, those are the rules. And he did, after all, get 52 years – which would put him in his seventies before he became eligible for parole.
The trial judge, Mr Justice Goose, suggested that even then, Rudakubana might not get it.
I’d be surprised if he lived that long. The moment he mixes with other prisoners, his life is in jeopardy. He must also, I suggest, be considered a suicide risk.
Me? I would hang the little scrote, ease the pressure on prisons, save us the cost of feeding him. But that’s not allowed either.
*Incidentally, did you know that the word scrote – short for scrotum – was invented by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais for their TV series Porridge? They couldn’t in those days use the kind of language that is common in prisons – so they made up a word that suggested the vulgarity instead.
*****
Gen Z youngsters, we learn, yearn for a dictator to run the country. Well, look, I’m not generally one to blow my own trumpet but… I am that despot!
I’ve got the qualifications and everything. Ask anyone.
For a start, I used to be a night editor, which is pretty much the same as being a tyrant – barking orders, flaying the newsdesk, making random decisions such as sending Colombian criminals back to Colombia.
One of those phone surveys of the people I used to work with would elicit comments such as “bastard”, “slave driver” and, my favourite endorsement, “Best keep your head down after he’s had his 9 o’clock bucket of Chardonnay.”
Same at home. Who “owns” the TV remote? That will be me, squire, thank you very much. I decide whether we watch Strictly or Harlequins v Northampton Saints.
So, all you young acolytes, you’re about to get your wish. I take over next week. There will be elections, of course, but like my old chum Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, I shall emerge victorious with 86.8 per cent of the vote.
I promise to be a Dicktator for our age. We’ll Make Britain Great Again.
*****
“Every day people are straying from the church and going back to God.” – Lenny Bruce
RICHARD DISMORE
28 January 2025