England's rugby stars need to push the 'style' button to see off Ant and Dec

John Inverdale
19 Mar 2010

This Saturday night simply has to be all right for fighting from an English rugby point of view. Fighting for respect from a jaundiced public who see them as one-dimensional and uninspiring — a team perceived as playing with handcuffs on, unable to express themselves and suffocated by expectation.

Well this is it. One last throw of the dice to prove they can cast aside the shackles and enliven a TV audience that will be poised with its fingers on the remote, ready at a second's notice to swop Care and Flood for Ant and Dec.

That is not an issue that will unduly concern Martin Johnson. His ferocious furrowed forehead will become only more intimidating if England lose in a riot of running rugby. That's not his style. He is a winner — it's not how but how many in the Johnson manual.

And yet the responsibility to the game as a whole demands that England have a go. Not in a reckless, Barbarian style which presents the Grand Slam-seeking French with cheap points, but in a heads-up, let's see what happens if we chance our arm a bit kind of way. And for that to happen, they have to be completely confident that the England coaching team will be behind them.

Delon Armitage, a casualty of the cull following the bore-draw with Scotland, reportedly told his London Irish coaches that he couldn't explain why he wasn't allowed to play the kind of exciting devil-may-care rugby on the international stage that he displays for his club. Is it a natural fear of failure, or fear of repercussions behind the scenes?

To be in Paris last weekend and see a buoyant French team play with genuine joy for the sport was to be re-united with a game that had driven its most devoted followers to the depths of despair less than 24 hours earlier at Murrayfield. As Scottish followers pointed out with some relish, their team should have won — and won convincingly — against a nation so rugby-rich it has more referees at its disposal than Scotland has players.

The pitch was good, conditions were fine and the scene was set for England to raise their game from the tedium of offerings at Twickenham and Rome.

Instead we got more of the same, with a midfield centre-pairing so far from the gain line they might as well have handed a note to Jonny Wilkinson saying they were sorry but he wouldn't be in the starting line-up in Paris. But the great thing about sport is that you're only as good as your next game and England's next game is now. Allow Ben Foden to run and, if it goes wrong, encourage him to run again.

Allow Danny Care to take quick tap penalties and disrupt the French defence. Tell Lewis Moody he can go surging towards Francois Trinh-Duc and frighten the life out of the supremely talented outside-half who won't fancy it much when the rest of the cavalry are piling in behind him.

Play with the passion and an enthusiasm for the game which convinced you to play it in the first place. Yes it's international sport, yes it's big-time rugby, as Johnson calls it, but it's also part of the entertainment industry. How much longer will the Twickenham faithful shell out £85 to be fed undercooked fare?

Never mind Ant and Dec's now defunct Saturday night take-away. Tomorrow night cannot be Martin Johnson's Saturday night take-it-or-leave it.

There's more at stake than just the result.

On rugby's biggest stage of the year, England have a golden opportunity to banish the memories of the past six weeks and go out with an exuberant bang. Don't blow it, guys.

Sunk by my Channel slip-up over Christine

What's in a word? Quite a lot clearly if that word is British'. Last weekend, during the BBC's Six Nations coverage, I mentioned Christine Bleakley had waterskied across the Channel to raise money for Sport Relief.

The only problem was that, having been briefed before the England-Scotland game that total impartiality was essential throughout our broadcast, I described it in a moment of mental “better not offend anybody” madness as the “British Channel”.

And you thought it was only the Celts who got upset about these things. Judging by the torrent of abusive correspondence I've received from outraged English folk, if UKIP renamed itself the
EIP, it would be they, and not the Lib-Dems who could be holding the balance of power come May.

So do watch Sport Relief tonight and see Christine's heroics as she takes on and conquers La Manche'. In the spirit of sport and Six Nations unity this weekend, I hope it's okay to call it that.