After a long week with nothing much to write about as the tournament was going a week before Scotland played, you could hardly blame the travelling press pack from looking gleeful on Tuesday.
First of all, they’d suffered a week in Gloucester, which seems to be the only place in Gloucestershire where no-one wants to live.
Secondly, Vern Cotter, while occasionally a good talker about rugby things, and very occasionally able to give a slice of his philosophies, is just as his public persona projects.
It’s as if the recently retired Euan Murray, who would always ponder long over the simplest question before nearly whispering the simplest answer, had adopted a Kiwi accent and baseball cap.
No nannies (nanny goats=quotes) has been an issue for the scribes. So when Eddie Jones came in to Kingsholm then we were like addicts starved of our fix.
Eddie rarely disappoints. He gives every impression of naturally coming up with great lines off the top of his head for the media but of course it’s carefully practised and he knows exactly what he is doing. On Tuesday in a big tent in the little Kingsholm car park he tried to put the wind up Scotland.
I have to say we loved it. There were grins aplenty as we retired to our laptops, because there was a line several actually – for the next days’ papers and bulletins.
Some were indignant, but with the Scots. Ross Ford, a great guy but guarded in formal interview situations, and WP Nel, for whom English is a second language, were put up at their pre-match presser.
The Scots didn’t even try to match Eddie’s delights. Because, of course, they didn’t want to.
After a week in the undergrowth of the tournament, the Scots didn’t want to emerge until they absolutely had to. They were perfectly content to let Eddie take the spotlight, and ignore everything he said while we were all lapping it up.
Cotter had even predicted it was coming the previous week. “Eddie?” he said. “He tries that with everyone, doesn’t he?”
Our memories are short. It’s not that long since we had a loquacious head coach who was brilliant with the one-liners and gave you a story every time he sat down with a bunch of recorders in front of him.
Scott Johnson was great for journalists, but less good for the Scotland team. Even though it’s my profession, I’ll take fewer good nannies for a winning team every single time.
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Gloucester is a “spiritual home” of rugby, and Kingsholm the shrine. Empty, The Shed looks no more foreboding than the Mart End at Station Park in Forfar, but full of hostile Glawstermen it takes on an entirely new life.
Yet the atmosphere for the game was probably the best thing about being in the town that week it seemed as if most Scottish fans attending the game didn’t show up until the actual day.
The large fanzone in the Docks area being refurbished piece by piece with bars and restaurants from haunting old red brick warehouses only had people in it for one night I was therewhen it was borrowed by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust for an awards ceremony.
Up in Leeds, things are very much different, although there were four teams playing in the city this weekend, all with fans – and many more than you’d expect – following them. It’s maybe just the bustle of a big city, but it feels as though Scotland are properly in the tournament now.
And they’ll play at famous old Elland Road, although why they haven’t got round to renaming it Bremner Park yet you can’t quite grasp.
Every single thing in the ground seems to have the former Leeds United and Scotland captain’s name or photograph on it, although the less said about the memorial “coloured in” statue in the East Stand forecourt the better.
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Other than Japan’s victory over South Africa, the TMO has been the talk of the tournament. Among the notable achievements of the system in the first week were disallowing the try of the tournament – Niko Matawalu’s against England – and spotting Saint Richie McCaw, the peerless and blameless captain of New Zealand, sneakily tripping an Argentinian.
I hear a lot of people, soccer acolytes mostly, claiming the use of the TMO causes “chaos” and it could never be repeated in that game. To which the only reply is, do you seriously not want to be right?
Rugby has some TMO issues because not even endless TV replays are crystal clear at times when you’ve got ten bodies on top of one another. No such issue in soccer, where everything is pretty much in plain view of the cameras.
Work the technology to NFL standards where the replays are almost instantaneous, and you won’t get terribly long delays – no longer than those when the game has to stop for players writhing in apparent agony after being brushed by a passing opponent, for example.
But by all means, stay in that 1980s mindset and ignore the ways technology can help your game. Keep on being wilfully and perversely wrong.