A glorious cocktail of sun, beer and a French defeat

Matthew Norman
16 Mar 2009

Any of you turning to these pages for expert analysis will, I know, be thoroughly sated by the adjacent words of Chris Jones. So let me confess not only that I understand the finer points of rugby union half as well as I understand quantum gravity, but that yesterday's international was the first rugby union match I have ever attended.

It may not be the last, though, because while the pleasures of observing 30 men engaging in legalised psychopathy remains something of a closed book, a jaunt to Twickers on a warm spring day is a delight.

Now that the professional lobotomists of the Barmy Army have made live Test cricket such a trial for the ears, this must be as close to a slice of 1950s gentility as mainstream sport can offer.

They're all such thoroughly decent, bloody nice chaps, these rugby fans, that the walk to the ground is an unnerving time-warp experience.

So powerful is the conditioning from 35 years of walking to football grounds that in the concourse, where the fish and chip vans style themselves "gourmet", I was alarmed by the sight of a Frenchman in a beret.

Poised to warn him that it mightn't be wise to antagonise the home supporters, and that he should think about hiding the headgear, I looked down and saw he was wearing an England shirt. My God, I thought, these people actively try to make visiting fans feel welcome. What is the world coming to?

On the pitch, thankfully, there was no such entente cordiale, with France's finest moment behind them before the first whistle. In global sport, there is no more embarrassing national anthem mismatch than France vs England (or vs any British team). We have the absolute world's worst, even when sung by new nation's sweetheart Faryl Smith, and they have infinitely the best. Every time I hear La Marseillaise, I well up at the memory of the scene in Casablanca when Victor Laszlo stirs the Free French to sing it to drown out a touching Nazi ditty.

No sooner had the game begun, however, than it was the French who had cause to sob. I may know next to nothing about rugby union, but I know what I like . . . and what I like is our boys giving the cheese-eating surrender monkeys the mother of all hidings.

Mark Cueto began the rout after barely a minute, and once Riki Flutey had added a second try, France's mistake was obvious even to this ignoramus - they were redeploying the Maginot Line strategy that wasn't a tremendous success the first time round.

They may have been impregnable in the centre, but this didn't stop us doing what the Hun did to them in 1940, and invading them through Belgium. Or in this case through the flanks on either side, where Les Bleus seemed content to look on with classical Gallic indifference.

As England added two more tries just before the interval, and when Flutey made it 34-0 with yet another early in the second half, it was much like watching our footballers demolish Holland in Euro 96. Knowing how third-rate these players tend to be, the sight of them dismantling major opposition with such unwonted flair and style lent a touch of mystification to the excitement.

Just as Terry Venables's lads allowed the Dutch a consolation goal after going 4-0 up, so the rugby XV did the compassionate thing and took their foot off their gas. In fact, despite the prospect of recording the heaviest ever defeat of France, they even applied the brakes, and permitted the old enemy a couple of tries.

I wouldn't quite say that this was Muhammad Ali stopping himself whacking George Foreman again as he sank to the canvas in Zaire, for fear of ruining the elegance of the knock out, because by no stretch of the imagination can a fairly meaningless Six Nations game be compared to the 'Rumble In The Jungle'. But magnanimity in victory is always a thing of beauty, and this show of sympathy towards a vanquished foe strengthened the sense that this day belonged a distant and more innocent era.

No one familiar with the ways of English sport will get too carried away because, apart from securing Martin Johnson's job for a while, this win implies nothing about the future.

A few days after destroying Holland the footballers reverted to type with a hideously disjointed, anaemic display against Spain, and it will be no surprise if the rugger chaps do the same when they return to Twickers on Saturday to entertain the Scots.

But as a self-contained vignette of sporting glory, yesterday w as sublime. The sun beat down, the nice-but-dims supped their beer in delirious good humour, and the French were made to look like clueless buffoons. So guided by the principle that you should always leave on a high, perhaps this was my last match after all. For the proudly Jingoistic rugby union virgin, this was as good as it's ever likely to get.