England: Our time has scrum
Owen’s heroes’ World Cup bid
ABACON bap with a pint is truly a pairing made in heaven – as millions of us joyfully rediscovered this morning.
You could forget the delight of that mouth-watering combination as we settled down, before elevenses, in front of big screens in bleach-smelling pubs across the land for football’s World Cup in South Korea and Japan in 2002.
And a year later, we did it all again when England last lifted the Rugby World Cup against the host nation Australia with Jonny Wilkinson’s last-gasp drop goal.
The fact Japan’s Rugby World Cup is the perfect excuse to go to the pub for breakfast is one reason rugby fever is bubbling at a boiling point for the final between England and South Africa.
And that’s even for those of us, ahem, who don’t really have a clue what’s going on and find ourselves humming Baddiel and Skinner’s Three Lions (a dead giveaway, by the way, for actual rugby fans).
But there’s something deeper behind what has fast developed into a really beautiful national mood illuminating these grim autumn days.
And didn’t we need it... Maybe, it’s because at a time of hostility and division in our politics, there is an unexpected unity and hopefulness bouncing off England’s quietly confident bruising backs and forwards.
That surprisingly self-assured V-shaped response to New Zealand’s semi-final haka definitely helped. But there’s something else more deep-rooted.
If you attended a state school, rugby probably didn’t make much of an impression.
That weird egg-shaped ball wasn’t round. And it wasn’t ours.
Rugger belonged, and still belongs, on the whole, to a Harry Potter land of prefects and fags.
But this current England team shouts something different.
Here, unlike the Cabinet, the winning team aren’t all privileged, posh boys reeking of Bullingdon Club-style initiations.
Captain Owen Farrell hails from Wigan, where his Rugby League player dad was just 16 when he had him.
Kyle Sinckler is from a Tooting housing estate, where he saw pals end up in gangs.
Jack Nowell’s dad is a Cornish fisherman. In fact, 22 of the squad led by Eddie Jones were at state schools for the bulk of their secondary education.
And perhaps it’s the ever-so polite, sweetly enthusiastic Japanese crowds who have rubbed off, but there’s not been a whiff of entitled bad behaviour in sight.
They’re an ethnically diverse squad, too. More than a third of the players are from BAME backgrounds. As such, they have gifted opportunity to us all.
Maro Itoje lit the touch paper when he said: “No man is an island, whenever you want to make positive strides forward you always have to do it together.
“Dividing people never works... unity is always the best way forward.”
That sentiment, digested with a rasher of streaky and washed down with a foamy top, is why we’re all suddenly so enamoured with the egg-shaped ball.