Six Nations: it’s early days yet

At their elite levels rugby union football is a very different sport to its association counterpart because of its physicality. Arguably, there is little more delightful to watch than a great soccer team going about its business – not for nothing is it called ‘the beautiful game’ – and bravery too is in plentiful supply as its attackers escape the attentions of scything tackles or score with diving headers among a sea of determined defenders.

However, a core element in rugby’s attraction is the constant and extreme nature of its physical contact. You can have as many classy individual players as you want but to obtain victory every team must first meet and neutralise if not subdue the opposition’s physicality – a challenge that may last the duration of the game if its fitness and stamina should last that long.

It’s why throughout its history rugby’s journalists and fans have often used quasi-military terms and metaphors to preview its contests and analyse the entrails afterwards.

How often have individual matches in the annual Five (now Six) Nations campaigns been described or regarded by supporters of both countries as opportunities to ‘get one over’ the other? Rugby might have been invented to exemplify the adage that sport is the continuation of war by another name.

By its nature – with team spirit and leadership to the fore – the Establishment regarded rugby players as perfect officer material when war with Germany was declared in August 1914. Within a month the RFU had cancelled all fixtures and encouraged its players to enlist.

Ronald Poulton Palmer, the England rugby captain killed in 1915, was one of the first to do so.

Despite some rugby historians stating that he was a warmonger – he had written home to his parents that he was ‘frightfully keen on soldiering’ whilst attending a territorials’ camp in 1912 – in fact via his Quaker background on his mother’s side he was a pacifist by inclination and volunteered out of a sense of leadership duty rather than anything else.

This contrasted – perhaps unfairly at a time when enlisting was entirely voluntary – with the attitude of other sports authorities: soccer, for example, continued to be played as per normal until the FA Cup Final of 1915.

Which brings me to consideration of the opening of this year’s Six Nations.

Despite the inevitable temptation to draw conclusions from the evidence of the first of a six weekend campaign, especially those of ‘I told you so’ nature, it is premature to do so.

As with a five-match Test cricket series, it is dangerous to assume that the first skirmish of a five-battle war will tell you much about the eventual outcome.

Conditions and circumstances at Trent Bridge, for example – the state of the pitch and how it played on the fourth and fifth days, the vagaries of the weather, the fact a leading spin or pace bowler was absent through injury or half-way through was rendered hors de combat by one – may be very different from those later at Lords or the Oval.

So it is with rugby.

For example, both last year and this, after an encouraging autumn international series, Scotland entered the Six Nations with hyped anticipation of great things to come.

In 2017 they began in fine style and yet in week four they travelled to Twickenham and were thrashed by England by a forty point margin (61-21).

And last Saturday the wheels fell off big-time in Cardiff where – with a first-ever Six Nations victory allegedly in their sights (Scotland were last champions in 1999, the last year it was still the Five Nations) – they were humiliated 34-7.

Being one myself, I am remain of the opinion that the Jocks still have plenty to come this term.

As it happens over the weekend the only game I was able to watch ‘live’ on television was yesterday’s Italy versus England so I have scant wherewithal with which to personally compare the different countries’ performances and will not attempt to do so here.

In ending I would return to my opening topic – the physicality of rugby.

At some point last week I saw one newspaper’s Six Nations preview that mentioned rugby union’s growing crisis with attritional injuries. If memory serves at the weekend, across all six nations competing, there were over fifty players who would otherwise have had justifiable claims to be squad members who were unavailable for selection due to injury.

Another reason why it is still far too early to be making predictions about who will lift the 2018 Six Nations title.