Oh Flower of Scotland, when will we see your like again...

England play Scotland on Sunday in the 118^th Calcutta Cup rugby match.  For England supporters it’s an important match, but for Scots fans it is the match, the only one that really matters.  It’s always been that way, but back in 1990 the game had an extra edge, and it’s all explained in The Grudge by Tom English – simply one of the best sports books I’ve ever read.

For younger readers let me take you back to 1990.  The country was led by That Bloody Woman, as Margaret Thatcher was known north of the border, and she’d decided to use Scotland as the testing ground for the hated poll tax.  Spitting Image caricatured the situation perfectly, with Thatcher saying she needed somewhere to test things out ‘Somewhere – a long way from my house’.  It also contained the line uttered by the George Young puppet ‘And then there’s our new reciprocal fuel experiment.  We take their oil, they take our nuclear waste.  Very successful.’

England’s rugby captain was Will Carling, son of an army officer, public school educated, a City type, and in Scottish minds, a  supporter of Thatcher.  In other words, everything the Scots detested.  There was always an edge to Calcutta Cup encounters, but this time there was genuine hatred.   I don’t mean a bit of a dislike, I mean genuine hatred, with pictures of Carling’s head superimposed on cartoons of Edward 11, the English monarch beaten at Bannockburn, and a journo telling the England captain at a press conference, ‘You know the whole of Scotland detests you.’

Going into the game the situation was simple.  Both teams had won their previous four games, England brilliantly, and Scotland solidly – in the minds of impartial observers there was no doubt about it, the English would win.

Tom English – he’s an Irishman who lives in Scotland – sets the scene beautifully with interviews with all of the key figures involved in the match.  Read the Scottish coach, Jim Telfer’s, pre-match speech and I defy you not to feel a shiver run down your spine.  You’ll laugh out loud at the story of the pregnancy, and wonder that Brian Moore’s views on all things Scottish didn’t start a civil war!   

Come the big day the drama continued, and I remember it as if it was yesterday.  England ran out at Murrayfield, as teams do, but the Scots, led by David Sole, marched out slowly in single file – it was a statement of intent.   The National Anthem was played and was met with the usual Murrayfield mix of indifference and antagonism, but Flower of Scotland was a different matter, and I promise you it was being belted out in living rooms across the whole of Scotland that day.  At the ground it was very, very special: as the England back Simon Halliday remarked afterwards, ‘…their guys knew the words.  That’s when I knew we were in trouble. Previous years they didn’t sing anything.  I had a little look across and they were absolutely screaming it out.  I thought, this all looks a bit different to other years.’

The result is in the history books so revealing it ruins nothing: Scotland won 13-7 and claimed the Grand Slam, and the England team, in the words of the Scottish anthem, were sent ‘homeward, to think again’.

This Sunday’s Calcutta Cup game will hold no such surprises: it’s at Twickenham and the Scots are surely going to get hammered.  However, the miracle is that the scoreline in the 117 matches played so far isn’t more one-sided than it is – it’s 63-39 to England with 15 drawn.  Ten times the population and 25+ times the number of players to choose from, and the Scots still hold their own on many occasions – it illustrates the power of desire and commitment in sport.

Read The Grudge.  If you can, read it before Sunday’s game, and then sit down and enjoy another historic encounter between the Scots and the Auld Enemy.  It will be a very special day – the Calcutta Cup matches always are.