Perhaps ‘sending people homeward’ is simply the wrong sporting message?

Jonathan Brocklebank

AT the conclusion of one of the most satisfying rugby matches I have ever watched, the England coach Eddie Jones was asked for his thoughts on Scotland’s victory.

Jones was magnanimity personified. Scotland, he said, were the better team and deserved their convincing win. His congratulations to his opposite number Gregor Townsend and his men on taking back the Calcutta Cup for the first time in a decade were warm and sincere. In short, in defeat, Jones was a credit to the world of sport.

And, in victory, depressing numbers of Scots were a disgrace to it.

Some may consider it naïve of the England coach to imagine that, the day after such a fixture, he could get on a train at Edinburgh Waverley with a standard class ticket and enjoy a peaceful journey to Manchester to watch a football match at Old Trafford as the guest of Sir Alex Ferguson.

They may conclude that, as an Australian, Jones just doesn’t get it – that this is Scotland v England we are talking about, that this goes back hundreds of years to unfinished business on battlefields beyond the antipodean’s ken.

But Jones gets it fine. It is the mob in his midst who don’t.

‘I’m a human being,’ says the coach. ‘I don’t consider myself any different from anyone else, so for me to travel on public transport I thought was OK.’

That it was not OK for this dignified man to travel on a train in my country makes me ashamed to belong to it. His resolution never again to use public transport in Britain is an appalling indictment of the malignant forces at work in the minds of far too many socalled sports fans. And it should act as a nationwide wake-up call.

On the Edinburgh to Manchester journey Jones is said to have been abused both verbally and physically and to have feared for his safety. When he disembarked in Manchester he was swarmed by a boozy group of Scotsmen demanding selfies. When he obliged, they launched a torrent of abuse at him. One called him a baldy f ****** c***. Then they all did.

Foolishly

As he dived into a car, they surrounded it, banging it and barracking him, and one thug who tried to get into the car with him had to be manhandled away.

What drives people from this country to shame it so? We Scots are not exactly overburdened with sporting gratification. Why must the limited success the nation does enjoy in the games department be sullied time and again by morons determined to portray victory as something it is not?

One reason is that people who should know better behave foolishly.

‘Scotland 25 .... Them 13’ was the lamentable tweet at full time by Angus MacNeil MP. It was designed to promote the ‘Us and Them’ mentality among SNP supporters whose antipathy for our neighbours in England is as thinly concealed as this oafish MP’s is. It was designed to foster division.

Does it occur to him that many thousands of ‘Them’ live in Scottish households? I watched the match in St Andrews with my mother’s husband, who is one of ‘Them’ from Yorkshire. We drank beer and, as always, got along famously.

It is Mr MacNeil who just doesn’t get it.

Nor, I’m sorry to say, does former Scotland and British Lions captain Gavin Hastings get it when he says boisterous Scottish fans just wanted to ‘rub [Jones’s] face in the dirt’.

If they really did want to do that, then sport has taken them to a poisonous place in their heads. And once again, the imagery of ancient battlefields is conflated with a team game played on grass in peacetime for supporters of both sides to enjoy.

Of course we badly wanted to beat England after a decade of defeats. We wanted our team to be superb, to outplay the English side who were selected from a far greater population than ours and are currently ranked two in the world. We wanted spectacular tries, a decisive win and perhaps, as a cherry on the cake, to hear the revered Eddie Jones admit that he and his players would indeed need to think again.

But we don’t seriously wish them ill, do we? We do not, in our heart of hearts, subscribe to the view of Scotland prop forward Simon Berghan who asserted before the match that ‘everyone hates England’. Do we?

Pretentions

That may be a question to consider the next time we puff our chests like pigeons and bellow the words to Flower of Scotland, that unofficial national anthem which does more to conflate sport and politics than even the crassest Nationalist parliamentarian.

If we seek a grown up attitude to our sporting endeavours, it may be that prefacing our efforts on the field of play with a folk song about the time in 1314 when the Scots taught the English a lesson at Bannockburn is not the place to start.

Possibly, in the light of Jones’s rotten train journey south (not to mention our nation’s pretentions to multiethnicity) sending people homeward is the wrong message for stadiums full of Scots to be putting out.

Personally, I am fed up with this wretched dirge and more impatient still with the assumption that it somehow captures our character as a people and our condition as a nation. If it does, we are parochial, vengeful smalltimers.

And that’s not a team I want to cheer on at all.