Scotland happy to let England play favourites before Calcutta Cup clash

Among the many questions hanging over the 132nd Calcutta Cup, the hardest to answer might just be exactly how many times you need to beat the English before they stop thinking of themselves as favourites for the next game. Since Gregor Townsend took over as head coach, Scotland have been unbeaten in six out of seven matches, including, count them, the last one, two, three, four in a row. And yet England have contrived a way to arrive at this fixture, which could yet be a record-breaking fifth defeat, as odds-on favourites with every bookmaker, and on a wash of pundits’ promises about how their forwards are going to “monster the auld enemy”.

Well, Townsend knows exactly what those laurels are worth, and is happy enough to let England have them.

“They’re favourites, there’s no denying that,” he said on Thursday. “I think playing at home is important, on the back of a very good win. We’ve seen the performances of England over the last 12 months, pushing New Zealand very close, home and away, those could easily have been victories, the South Africa game was close, Australia won in the last minute, and then their start against Ireland.

“We know England have been playing well, and I’d imagine in their camp they’ll see that victory last week and think ‘right, this is us, we’re going to now go on a real run of victories’.”

There was the smallest hint of a smile around the corner of his mouth as he spoke. No one ever won one of these by underestimating the overconfidence of the English. And with reason, despite the recent run of results, with their 10 professional teams, 350,000 registered players, £200m in revenue, and hundred-and-some years of competitive edge. The overall score in the series is still 71 to England, 44 to Scotland, with 16 draws. Townsend played in 10 of them himself, and won exactly one, against the odds in 2000. Truth is that there were a couple of generations of English players who hardly saw the oldest rivalry in the sport as a rivalry at all.

Townsend’s greatest achievement as a coach has been changing that around. Whatever else he’s failed at in these seven years – and his team still haven’t managed to make it to the final weekend of the tournament with a chance of winning it, or made it to the knockout rounds of the World Cup – he’s understood how to take on the English better than anyone whose ever had his job. And underneath all his respectful talk about how impressed he was by England’s performances in a run of five consecutive defeats last year, there’s a hard kernel of conviction. Unlike most of those old Scottish teams, Townsend’s know how they want to play, and, more importantly, that when it works they can win.

“You’ve only lost once in this fixture, why do you think that is?” asked the reporter from the BBC.

“Well,” Townsend said, smiling again, “it was raining that day.”

He still thinks of the first win in the series, 25-13 back in 2018, that pass to Huw Jones and all the rest of it, as one of his side’s best performances. “Each game is different,” he says, but that first one taught them they were right about how they could get at England. “We certainly came in with a plan to move the ball wide and the players executed it so well.”

It’s not a coincidence that Scotland started to become more sure of themselves, and their style of play, at the same time as England were starting to lose their own sense of those same things. You could argue that the English have been trying to find them again ever since they made the World Cup final in 2019.

“Move it wide, and do it well,” has served Scotland brilliantly in these contests ever since, and those six games, five wins and the one 38-all draw at Twickenham in 2019, have been studded with spectacular tries. By Ben White, Jones, and again, and again, and again, Duhan van der Merwe, who sometimes seems like a man who was put on this earth for the express and only purpose of humiliating the England defence. The game in 2023 was Townsend’s favourite, “two years ago was an absolute classic, with great tries, ebbs and flows and a brilliant team try for us at the end. So we know that that’s the level we’ll have to deliver, and we know we have done it in the past, and will have to again on Saturday.”

A lot of Townsend’s talk this week has been about how he wants his team to “keep calm amid the chaos”, and you can tell by the way he says it that it’s something he’s been drilling into the team while they’ve been away training in Spain. “The game of rugby is not won by who’s up for it more,” he says, “sometimes it’s lost by being up for it too much.” Let the English worry about righting old wrongs. Scotland are long gone past the point where they need to tap into the pain and humiliation of losing. Townsend’s leaving that to Steve Borthwick, who has been making his players watch clips of all those previous defeats in the run-up to the game.

So while English talk as if they think they ought to win, the Scottish act as if they know they can. It doesn’t mean they will, only that if, or when, they’re up against it in the second half, they’ll know in their bones that they can come through, whoever the pre-game favourites are.