R D Kernohan
The big game

Saturday's Calcutta Cup match at Murrayfield may now seem one of the less important entries in the international rugby calendar. So it could appear to the casual TV watcher or the half-initiated one struggling to cope with the laws of the game. It is between the bottom side on the six nations table, pointless Scotland (played three, lost three), and the most disappointing one. Despite their talents and resources, England are not the great power in rugby that deservedly won the World Cup in 2003 and came close again in the last final.  The fixture, like the trophy made of melted-down silver rupees from a defunct Victorian club in Calcutta, might seem a period-piece. We are even supposed now, in strict political correctness, to speak of Kolkata. But appearances are deceptive.
     The Scotland v England game at Murrayfield carries on a tradition and has become not just an event but an institution and a symbol. Some of its symbolic importance has been enhanced by events and trends outside rugby's control. And the traditions that make it an institution are among those which repair and sustain the fraying link between rugby as it was and rugby as professionalism has changed it. They are a reminder of what sport once was and still ought to be.
     The Calcutta Cup game is not only the direct descendant of the first rugby international (when Scotland won at Raeburn Place near Stockbridge in 1871, eight years before the cup arrived) but is the world's oldest significant and surviving international sporting team-fixture: it is older than test cricket and the Ashes, and many years senior to football's World Cup, never mind rugby's. It is older than the modern Olympics and Wimbledon. Among even the great occasions of individual sport, only golf's Open Championship goes back further.
     It may even be claimed, rather shakily, as the first major international and representative team-sports fixture. The claim is arguable, for the 1871 Raeburn Place match was partly a reaction against a 'so-called England v Scotland' football game in London the previous year. Rugby men claimed it had been played by the wrong rules and other Scots also criticised it as less than representative, for that first 'Scotland' team was mainly drawn from London at a time when Queen's Park dominated the Scottish game. The first 'official' Scotland v England match under association rules was not till 1872, but the earlier unofficial promoters and pioneers may still have to be credited with inventing international sport. The only earlier claim appears to have been a cricket match in New York in 1844, advertised at the time as USA v Canada and more notable for betting than batting.
     Yet the football people who dispute the rugby fixture's seniority have indisputably enhanced its present prestige and emotional importance by abandoning their Scotland v England fixture in the 1980’s. The great traditions of Hampden roars and Wembley wizards counted for nothing. The associations wanted to focus on the world and European competitions, even though ever since they have fared indifferently or failed to qualify. The English FA may be due more of the blame but the SFA don't seem to have put up much resistance.
     The result is that, at a time when Scottish identity has become very assertive, in good ways and bad ones, the minority sport has been left in unchallenged possession of the most significant sporting encounter of the two nations. For 80 minutes (plus stoppage or injury time) it expresses the hopes and pride of Scotland, as well as all the difficulties and dilemmas that come from sharing an island with a kindred, different, but much more numerous people. There is talk, maybe just talk, of a resumption of the football encounter but, having lost its tradition and continuity, it can never be the same again.
 
I don't seek to glamorise the rugby fixture, for I don't need to. Its history, character, and atmosphere speak for themselves, and I freely concede that it can often be a disappointment, and not just on the scoreboard. There have been deadly dull games, and unsporting interludes. There has been unseemly, if usually unsuccessful, booing as Englishmen set up their kicks at goal. There have been games settled by dubious penalties. There have been English teams and captains able to be gracious whatever the result (Bill Beaumont for example) and others so surly that even when sent homeward they seemed incapable of thinking again, or even thinking at all. And the emotional atmosphere ensures that good Scottish tries (like the one which settled the 1990 Grand Slam) are elevated to a sublime status and even scrambled victories on kicks or in a quagmire are treated as national triumphs.
     Even if the fixture's atmosphere and excitement had not been enhanced by football's opt-out and  by the diversion to rugby of what Jim Sillars infamously lamented as mere '90-minute nationalism', it would be unique among internationals because of its role in social as well as sporting history, with its sorrows as well as its joys. Eleven of the 30 players in the 1914 match were killed in the First World War. Among the Calcutta Cup men of the inter-war years were Eric Liddell (whose rugby career was shamefully omitted from 'Chariots of Fire') and England's dazzling Russian prince, Alexander Obolensky, another casualty of the second war.
     But there can be happier scrutinies of the team-sheets, showing how the game has developed and spread. In the stud-marked footsteps of the upper-crust Victorian mashers who slugged it out 20-a-side at Raeburn Place in 1871 came a much wider range of players. It started with the Borderers and ranged through many sorts and conditions of Scots to the recent leavening of Antipodeans with Highland grannies. The range would have been even wider and sooner if Scottish rugby had not been damaged by Scottish education – first when local authorities began to level down and split up their schools in the name of comprehensive education and then when Scottish teachers, a generation ahead of Scottish doctors, insisted on a five-day week which sorely damaged sport in the state schools. (My Glasgow east-end council school, which also played football, was putting out four XVs on Saturday mornings in 1948-49.)
     The Calcutta Cup game, especially when it is at Murrayfield, also has distinctive sporting characteristics, linked though they are to its atmosphere and national (but not nationalist) emotions. Form and reputations can be a poor guide to the result. The Scots usually play above themselves, which they so rarely manage against the All Blacks, and sensible English sides know what they are up against. I can think of no other fixtures in recent years, even Ashes tests and Old Firm football matches, in which home advantage seems to count for so much and previous form for so little. Nor can I think of any sporting competition in which a solitary victory counts for so much and emotionally redeems a disastrous season in the way that recent Scottish home victories in the Calcutta Cup match have done. Twickenham, alas, has been a different story, even in good years like 1999 when we last won the championship.
    
But those who watch Saturday's match will also be thinking of the anxieties of the game as well as its glories and Murrayfield’s glorious uncertainty. Changes in the laws which were meant to make the game more 'attractive' have sometimes made it duller, with tedious exchanges of high kicks ahead and forwards as well as backs strung across the field in long, frustrating defensive lines. In scrums, mauls, and rucks laws have even become difficult for old players to follow, never mind for new followers to learn, and some of us long for the days when we had to play the ball with the foot after a tackle.
     We watch in awe at some of the improvements in technique, for example in keeping possession after the hardest tackles and the safe fielding of these high kicks. But we watch in anxiety as harder, fitter professionals thudder into the tackle – I create a new verb to convey the ferocity of impact – wondering whether the injuries that sent two key Scottish players to hospital during the Welsh match were unusually bad luck or the pattern for the future.
     Admittedly, even worse injuries happened in top-class rugby back before professionalism had taken over. I remember the tackle against an All Black that paralysed Danny Hearn, who had played for England in the 1966 Calcutta Cup and later rebuilt his life so bravely, and the even worse injury to an Ivory Coast player in the 1995 World Cup. Though most of the destructive injuries since have been in the far more numerous amateur ranks, it remains hard to watch the international gladiators without worrying about what they may do to themselves – and what their style may do when lesser and younger mortals imitate it. For a few hours while we awaited  news from the Cardiff hospital about Thom Evans' neck injury I wondered if it was time, half a century after hanging up my boots, to stop watching the game. But the mood passed.
     It will be the old mood on Saturday: hope, excitement, anxiety, and obsession with the clock as the second half fades away. I shall pause to remember Bill McLaren and then forget my grumbles about professionalism and over-complicated laws. I'll set aside even my lamentations that internationals aren't what they used to be before they became so numerous and (counting the home countries' tours and the Southern hemisphere's televised Tri-nations) sprawled over the whole year. If things go badly the house will be like a sore-headed bear-garden for an hour or two afterwards, but I shall console myself with the thought that back in the 1950s we lost 17 matches in a row. If they go well I shall have a season's worth of more enjoyable consolation, look forward to the final game against the Irish, and hope (despite this season's form-book) that the English thump the foreigners when they go to Paris.
 
R D Kernohan's other writing includes 'Why has Rugby no Literature?' published in the latter days of Blackwood’s Magazine and reprinted in the classic rugby anthology 'Take the Ball and Run'.