Nicky Campbell: Twickers learning from us Scots as petty tyranny crosses border (original) (raw)

The menu for the Scotland team was always prawn cocktail, goujons of sole or steak and chips, followed by apple pie and cream. There was barely time for a fag before they left the hotel, headed for Twickenham and two hours later faced the auld enemy. The last time the Scots won there was 1983 but the world has changed since then. Need I mention the D word and the P word? Diet and Professonalism? Devolution and Parliament. Scotland has one and according to a recent poll, England wants one too.

With the lamented demise of domestic football international rugby is the last great sporting proxy for the dysfunctional British family to have it out in an 80-minute group therapy session and we have never been as unsure about who we are and what we mean to each other. It has always been intense but there is an added edge now. Five Live rugby pundit Matt Dawson is as evolved a soul as ever darted up the blind side and even he used to feel the hand of history tapping at his ankles. "Now I am finished I see it all in a different light", he told me. "But when you put on the white shirt you feel like you are representing hundreds of years of what has gone before."

It does funny things to people. "What has gone before" often as not comprises half history and half Hollywood hokum. We Scots are world champs at swilling beer and swallowing myths. I was at Twickenham in 1995 and had severe doubts about my female companion when she launched into Swing Low Sweet Chariot with the Barbour shop choir. It was bad but it didn't quite stop me marrying her. Mind you, not long before that, I'd been singing Flower of Scotland with a mawkish tear crawling down my pasty Scottish face. Beside me, a shockingly companionable Gordon Brown was belting it out like the Caruso of Kirkcaldy. He'd be more prudent now, what with middle England breathing down his neck and he down theirs.

Dawson, a true vaudevillian, tells me he used to actually hum along with the Scots' chanson de coeur. "I think it's brilliant. Then you listen to what they are singing and you think it's hilarious." God Save the Queen and Flower of Scotland both. Send Helen Mirren victorious? She's certainly got a decent chance. We can still rise now and be a nation again? Dear Mel Gibson, please could you fix it for us to be free from the yoke of injustice, oppression, free health care for the elderly and no tuition fees.

When the first ever rugby international took place in 1871 at Raeburn Place in Edinburgh, 4,000 middle class beneficiaries of Empire's munificence turned up to scream on the home side in a fractious encounter. Their great grandfathers fought for (and against) Bonnie Prince Charlie; their grandsons died on the Somme and on that memorable afternoon their team won with a hugely disputed try. Good old video ref. For the English, the whole experience came as a frightful shock. The North British had hammered their effortless sense of superiority deep into the Edinburgh mud.

Thus was the template for sporting relations between the two nation-ettes set in stone for years to come. Facts, like that outrageous knock-on, were always best ignored by the Scots if they sabotaged a cherished sense of grievance. Alan Hansen recently described it beautifully as "we hate them, they quite like us". We are petty; they are patronising. It was an imbalance that made for a perfect sporting equilibrium reflecting history, if not reality. The ecosystem remained stable but then a few years back the planet got warmer and Gordon Brown knows it. He can't shut up about Britain these days. Is he singing anymore?

In two days' time the Five Nations champions (in perpetuity) visit the world champions (in memoriam). The great No8 John Beattie played for Scotland's victorious side of '83. Like Dawson, he is a cultured and intelligent man who told me Twickenham "is much more anti-Scottish now". He is right. It's tangible. I can see it in my texts, emails and I can hear it in the calls to Five Live. The days of unilateral pettiness are in the past and in the past they will remain. It's bloody unnerving seeing our small minds mirrored back at us. John says: "I used to sing Flower of Scotland and go along with all the hype and play it up but inside I was going 'this is crazy'. The problem is, we were like marauding banshees, but now they are waiting for us. They have stopped to our level."

Television's theme of dreams deserves a truly Grandstand finish

Brassy and strong, humming along/

I can't believe Grandstand has gone/ BOING

Life is a bitch, 70s kitsch/

funky and rich - flung in the ditch/

BOING

I just can't believe that I'm not/

ever going to/

hear that tune again

Saturday afternoons are never going to be/

the same/

Some people think that it's a/

great shame

Not me though (we've stopped singing now). The time has come for the programme to go. The BBC brass are right; the great pity is losing the other brass, luscious strings, pulsating bass and white guy funkster groove, "incorporating wonderful, extended and rich chords that often move through unexpected and beautiful progressions", which is how the oeuvre of composer Keith Mansfield, King of Library music, has been described. Can we not still hear it anyway at 5.10 every Saturday without the curate's egg that went before?

The tune, always inspiring, has lifted me out of many doldrums over the years. It soothed my despair after emotionally draining rugby defeats, my misery after financially crippling Grand Nationals and my sanity after the near narcolepsy of the previous four hours. The soaring melody set me up beautifully for an evening with Dr Who, Bruce Forsyth's Generation Game and the Duchess of Duke Street. We can't let it go the way of plate spinning and performing poodles.

Do ya think I'm sexist?

Samuel Johnson was a wag, not in the sense of one with a moronic predilection for ghastly handbags but in the delicious provocation of his wit and wisdom. He said: "A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks Greek." Mike Newell would appear to agree. This week the Luton manager spoke to the Mail about his objections to female officials, concluding: "If that sounds sexist it is because I am sexist." A dear colleague of mine wondered: "Do you think he takes a bung - to shut his face?" Women! So touchy.

At least Newell is honest and knowing. Will the outgoing Uefa president Lennart Johansson be remembered for his administrative genius or for the slavering suggestion that women's football could benefit financially by promoting the image of "sweaty, lovely looking girls". Remember that thing Vic and Bob used to do with their knees? Well, substitute Johansson and Sepp Blatter. In response to the howls of protest the big Swede countered: "All I was saying is that women are more marketable than men. I would never want to upset or criticise the women's game." Keep digging Len.