Alex Massie Alex Massie

To Murrayfield…

No blogging here until Monday: it’s Calcutta Cup weekend and I’m off to Edinburgh today for the festivities. It’s an odd feeling this, the notion that England aren’t the obvious and heavy favourites. Two average sides will meet tomorrow and it’s quite possible they will produce the worst match of the championship. How grim that would be depends, naturally, on the actual outcome. It can’t be any worse than the 1988 fixture which was, quite possibly, the worst game of rugby I’ve ever attended.

Really, we should have a better anthem than Flower of Scotland. It’s a pretty rotten and, in some senses, sentimental dirge. Just occasionally, however, it aspires to be something bigger and better than that. March 17th 1990 was one such day:

This weekend, for sure, the stakes aren’t nearly as high.

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