Another week, another one-point win. This was an ugly, bloody and basic victory, as pretty as Steve Borthwick’s broken nose, but funnily enough the 80,000-odd England fans inside the stadium didn’t seem too fussed about that when England bundled the ball into touch at the final whistle. It’s been eight years since they last saw England win a Calcutta Cup game here at Twickenham, and if it was Scotland who filled the highlights reel, and outscored England by three tries to one, well, England’s one workaday try, along with a conversion and three penalty kicks, added up to more than enough to shout about.
It was a match that was characterised, in the large part, by the dogged efforts of England’s proud pack of forwards. They crushed every scrum, clattered into every ruck and reached, over and again, right down into the dark and nasty places, returning, often as not, with the ball in hand. They won 14 turnovers in all the chaos, and a couple of them, by Ben Curry and Maro Itoje, were crucial in turning back the course of the match at points when Scotland were threatening to run away with it.
It was, truth be told, meat and potatoes rugby: England had all the wit and verve of a wet sandbag. But it worked for them, and after the year they have had, that’s all that really matters. It has been 12 months since the last time they won two matches back to back, against Wales and Italy in last year’s Six Nations. They have lost so many close games in the inbetween that watching them close out two matches in the past fortnight has been like seeing a toddler learn to walk. They are progressing, one tentative step at a time.
Borthwick has certainly turned them into a tough old bunch, like one of those iron-chinned boxers whose most notable talent is their ability to make it to the 12th even after they have been repeatedly punched in the head. They did not throw so many blows themselves, apart from the odd lumpen haymaker. Their one try, scored off the back of an attacking lineout in the first half, was a real piece of sledgehammer work, an endless series of short passes and full-steam ahead charges into whichever sorry Scot happened to be standing in front of whoever was on the ball.
It was Tommy Freeman who eventually bashed his way through to score. Freeman was superb, again, at almost everything he turned his hand to, as he seems to be every week. And he needed to be, because the men around him spent most of the match being run ragged. In the first half England seemed to have armed themselves with a gameplan that was expressly designed to play to Scotland’s strengths. They kicked the ball 36 times altogether, and made only 101 passes. They do say it’s the trend these days to play the game without the ball, but it’s surely a sight easier to actually score when you have it.
And Scotland are just about the one side who don’t need a second invitation to come running. In the first half England played like a man handing a plank to the bloke who was trying to hit him around the head. “Here, try this.” Every time they booted the ball downfield they ended up scrambling to try to fill the gaps in their defensive line as one of Blair Kinghorn, Duhan van der Merwe or Kyle Rowe came charging back at them. Ollie Sleightholme, yanked off after 45 minutes, set up Scotland’s first with a lumpen chip straight to Kinghorn in the Scottish backfield.
The plan also exposed the weakness of England’s defence out wide, where Joe El-Abd’s system was tested and found failing, over and again. Ollie Lawrence missed a tackle on Van der Merwe in the run-up to Scotland’s first, then Marcus Smith slipped off him like a wet towel as he tried to take him down when he came barrelling down the wing before their second. All in all, England spent a hell of a lot of time trying to exit from their own 22, like 15 men looking for the way out of a revolving door.
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Truth is that if Finn Russell had only made any of the three conversions he missed, Scotland would have won, just as if Damien Penaud had only been able to hold on to the ball, France would have too. England seem to be on the right side of the ifs and buts at the minute, and maybe they deserve it after they were on the wrong side of a few last year. But then luck, as they say, is mostly what you make of it, and if this England aren’t a handsome team, they’re surely a hell of a determined one.
