England-Ireland was a good match. But it didn't look good for the nations of the North

It was odd to find myself overtaking the Irish Rugby Football Union team bus on the M40 this morning. I was heading towards Oxford and my mother’s; it presumably for points West, into Wales and a boat for Ireland. In the meantime, I was just another Englishman pulling ahead of the Irish Rugby Team, just as happened on the turf of Twickenham yesterday.

Another Englishman posied to leave Irish Rugby behind

We fans of England tend to be rather a lonely band: no non-Englishman is every likely to join us, since England is the team everyone loves to hate. “Anyone but England” is a pretty standard position to take.

That tends to put chips on our shoulders, and with the way the England team has been playing of late – and “of late” in this context means the last twelve years or so since it won the World Cup in 2003 – those chips get knocked off our shoulders with monotonous regularity. Rugby fans, however, unlike their counterparts in that villainous game with the round ball, are supposed to resist provocation, so we try to smile through the gloating and show that we’re bigger than that.

A win over Ireland, winners of the last two Six Nations Championship titles, is therefore satisfying. Still more satisfying, though, would be to see England playing well. Sadly, we’re not there yet: England’s victory against an injury-bedevilled Irish side was hardly the sparkling triumph we might have liked.

It’s a sad truth on the rugby world stage that the teams from the Northern hemisphere tend to be weaker than those from the South. That’s been historically the case, but in my experience it’s never been truer than now. Last year’s World Cup took place in England, giving the North home advantage, but not only did the hosts, England themselves, fail to make it to the quarter-finals, not a single Northern team was among the four in the semi-finals.

Admittedly, one was denied in the most galling circumstances: Australia overcame Scotland in the dying moments of their quarter-final, but only due to a penalty awarded in a terrible refereeing error. However, had Scotland progressed, it would have been a fluke, as the Scots have proved themselves yet again this season to be one of the weakest teams even in the weak Northern Hemisphere.

Funnily enough, that weakness however makes the great competition of the North, the Six Nations championship, more interesting. At least the teams are all much of a muchness. There don’t tend to be easy, run-away wins. Several times this season matches have been won by teams which were behind at one point – notably in yesterday’s England-Ireland game, where Ireland was 10-6 up before ultimately losing 21-10.

So the weakness of all the teams involved has made for more gripping games and better entertainment. But they remain weak. Often, in the most trivial way. Again and again, promising England moves were frittered away in penalties conceded for avoidable and silly infringements. These are professional players and they should know better than to make life so much easier for their opponents.

Why, two England players committed infringements so serious that they had to spend ten minutes off the field, in the sin bin. Terrible self-inflicted injuries...

So the match was fun to watch. And I enjoyed overtaking the Irish team bus. But overtaking a Southern team would be far more satisfying, if unlikely to happen any time soon.

Try, try and try again said the spider. But the spider isn’t always right.

The time-honoured story of Robert the Bruce is especially popular in Scotland, where there is considerable taste for any tale in which the plucky Scots ultimately kick the stuffing out of the dastardly English. Sadly, in most of the historical confrontations, the outcome was the opposite. But Robert was one Scottish leader who did eventually pull off the trick.

Robert the Bruce, who led the Scots to victory over the English
But he cheated: he was helped by a spider

On his way to what my Scottish friends assure me was a highly desirable achievement, he encountered some terrible reverses. According to legend, at the low point of his life, he was in a cave which a spider kept attempting to span with her web. Each time she failed, she started again. Robert watched this struggle with great interest and, instead of reaching the obvious conclusion that, since one side of the cave was pretty much as miserable, wet and dank as the other, it was a colossal waste of time, he drew from this spectacle the courage he needed to persevere in his own struggle to win the Scottish crown.

So he tried, tried and tried again, until he won triumphant success.

Great story. And a moral from which we can all learn, no doubt.

Except that there is, in my garden at the moment, a spider from the Bruce school of strivers. She has chosen the garden’s narrowest point, between the house wall and the fence, to weave herself a web. This means that each time I follow the poodle Luci into the garden, after she has done her business (a great illustration of the truth that certain kinds of business often leave the rest of us with a mess to clear up), the first thing that happens is that I walk straight into a web. Which is annoying for me, because the stuff gets in my hair. But it must be annoying for her, because there’s little left of the web afterwards.

In fact, on one occasion, I emerged with the spider herself sitting on my shoulder and giving me what I could only feel was a deeply reproachful look. I tried to reason with her, explaining that unlike many fellow members of my species, I have nothing against spiders – indeed, I value the work they do on flies – and would far rather not destroy her web.

However, she has failed to take my advice to set up her web somewhere less heavily trafficked. So every morning, the experience is repeated. With little pleasure for either of us.

It seems that she truly believes that, if at first you don’t succeed, you should try, try and try again.

So you can fail once more.

That’s an aspect the Bruce legend somehow fails to capture. I’d like to suggest that sometimes it might not be such a bad idea to decide that, if at first you don’t succeed, you might try something else. Or at least, in the case of our spider, somewhere else.

On the other hand, I’d have been delighted if the English rugby team had applied a policy of try, try and try again, in the current world cup. It proved beyond them. 

Alas.