The Grudge - Part II: A Walk on the Wild Side

Published on Saturday 20 February 2010 20:23

JOHN JEFFREY had something on his mind. A secret dread. Out there somewhere, in a folder in a library in a newspaper office in rural England, there was a photograph of him in an England shirt. Him, the iconic Scotland flanker, playing for the England university team against Scotland while he was a student in Newcastle. Him scoring a try for England Universities against Scotland – and looking delighted.

• David Sole walks Scotland on to the Murrayfield pitch

That photograph in the wrong hands was dynamite. Imagine if Mooro saw it. Imagine the slagging he'd get from the England hooker.

Here he is, John Bull Jeffrey.

Ah, come on, Mooro, it was only a universities international.

Pictures don't lie, JJ. That's you in an England top.

It was a long time ago. I was only a boy.

Doesn't matter. You turned your back on Scotland. You're one of us now.

"I was checking the newspapers, petrified. Jesus, the thought of it."

JJ rifled through the morning papers for the photograph. Not a sign of it anywhere.

He kept flicking through. Lots of Bannockburn. The words to Flower of Scotland printed yet again. A column from Ally MacLeod, the former Scotland football manager, saying: "Scotland is a downtrodden nation and this is a chance to avenge a lot of things. It's Bannockburn all over again."

The first of the team meetings was scheduled for 11am but Jim Telfer was there early, pulling the chairs into a semi-circle around him, dragging some tables across the room and spreading 15 jerseys on top, fronts up, so that the players could see the thistle.

When the team arrived, he was ready. Told them to sit down. Paused for a moment and then began.

"Look boys, you're going to get hammered today, you're going to get crucified, there's no way you lot can live with this juggernaut England eight that I keep reading about.

"If I believe what I read in the English papers we've got no f****** chance at all. We may as well pack up and go home to our families. Are we wasting our time? Are the English media right about you? Journeymen! Not in England's class! Lucky to get this far! That's what they're saying. Are they right? Only you can answer that question

"But here's what I think. You're better than they are. You're fitter, stronger, hungrier and cuter. You've worked harder than they have. You want it more than they do. Days like this don't come around very often, boys. Take it from me, I know. I can only imagine what it must be like to be in your shoes today. To play for a Grand Slam in front of your own people! What an opportunity. What a privilege."

Scotland captain David Sole and winger Iwan Tukalo returned to their room in silence. Tukalo switched on the TV just in time for the opening credits of Grandstand, only it wasn't the usual beginning, it was a special Grand Slam package of great sporting battles between the Scots and the English.

There was Jim Baxter and Bobby Moore, Jim Clark and Stirling Moss, Sandy Lyle and Nick Faldo and Ken Buchanan beating the head off somebody, presumably an Englishman. And a picture of Eric Liddell. All the history was there.

"Myself and Soley stopped in our tracks and just stared at it," said Tukalo. "We looked at each other and went, 'F***!' We were almost in denial about the hugeness of the occasion up until then. Not now."

Telfer: "England were waking up to the fact that everybody was against them. There's no doubt that fellas like (Will] Carling and (Jeremy] Guscott can be cocky devils and they're not afraid to give opinions. Richard Hill and (Mickey] Skinner and Brian Moore, they could all be anti-Scottish. Fine players, but they'd rub you up the wrong way.

"I'm not one to go along with this English arrogance stereotype. Considering where I'm from, I have more in common with people from the north of England than I do with people from the north of Scotland. But there's a certain type of Englishness that provokes this reaction in the Celts, a particular type of southern Englishness. I use the word supercilious. If it's snowing in London, it's a disaster. If it's snowing anywhere else, it doesn't matter. That type of thing. They're a bit like the Americans in that they are so wrapped up in their own importance, nobody else is any good at all.

"They don't think Scotland is relevant. Ten years before, they won by five tries, slaughtered us and took the Grand Slam. I think they thought they were going to do that again."

Brian Moore: "We left our hotel in Peebles on Saturday morning. Everyone was really nice to us down there. It was, 'Hello, Mr Moore. Play well at Murrayfield, sir'. And we were going, 'Oh, very kind of you'. When we got to Edinburgh, it was edgy on the streets. Every f***** hated us all of a sudden. It didn't take me long to figure it out. There was something different about the atmosphere right away."

Telfer: "It was Bannockburn and Culloden rolled into one. The press hyped it up. You had Margaret Thatcher and the poll tax thrown in. There was no escaping it. Was it different to a normal Calcutta Cup? Oh, aye."

Moore: "Half of England hated Thatcher but most of Scotland despised her. I understood why we were hated. I got it. There's always an anti-Englishness in Scotland but this was of a more virulent strain. Thatcher was desperately unpopular for a variety of reasons, not least because of the poll tax. She used the Scots like they were experimental rats. That's how it looked anyway. That's how it felt to the people and they hated her for it and we were English and so came along with that. And you could feel all of that in the atmosphere. You could. They saw us as Thatcher's team. We drove straight into something powerful."

• Will Carling: 'They said I was Thatcher's captain'

Carling: "If you'd told me a week before that I'd have Margaret Thatcher, the poll tax, Butcher Cumberland and Bannockburn thrown at me, I'd have told you that you were on drugs. They said I was Thatcher's captain. The Scottish media stuck that label on me and everybody bought it."

Moore: "It was nasty and hard. Hatred is not the wrong word. Not on that day. It wouldn't have gone into physical violence, but it was total enmity."

Jeffrey: "I got off the bus and all I wanted to do was get started. I hated that hour before a match."

Ian McGeechan: "The England wives and girlfriends were on the pitch taking pictures. Those are the bits that irritate you. They felt they only had to turn up and it was theirs."

Jeffrey: "I'd had enough. I looked at them taking pictures of each other. Jesus. There was a voice in my head telling me what they were saying. 'And this is where I'm going to score the winning try.' And . . . click! I thought, 'You're not quite switched on here, are you boys? You're not totally focused. Do you believe what you've been reading in the papers?'"

Scotland planned to walk out.

David Sole: "There's a gradual slope at the entrance to the pitch, so if you start jogging at the top you'll nearly be sprinting by the time you get to the bottom. You wanted to sprint. Everything in your body and the noise of the crowd was telling you to sprint. But we couldn't. We were walking.

"We emerged and a big roar went up and then a weird thing happened. It just subsided for a second or two. It was almost as if you could hear the thought process of more than 50,000 people. 'Hey, they're walking.' Then the roar came back and it sent a shiver through me."

Scotland lock Chris Gray: "I looked over at the English and they were going, 'Bloody Nora!'"

Moore: "No we weren't. People said we were quaking in our boots. Urban myth."

Carling: "I was talking to the guys, so we didn't see their famous walk. I heard the reaction to it, though. Jesus, did I hear it."

Ian McGeechan: "Myself and Jim missed it. We were walking under the stand – and the whole edifice shook. It was like a train passing overhead."

England flanker Mick Skinner: "You know how the first row of the stand down by the pitch is normally kept for kids? Well, before the anthems, I looked at some youngsters and they were screaming and roaring and they had Saltires painted on their faces and See You Jimmy wigs on their heads. Little nutters, everywhere."

Tony Stanger: "The crowd were feeding off something. Something powerful was unleashed."

Simon Halliday: "The hostility from the Scottish players was major. Scott Hastings was verbally and physically very aggressive. He was very vocal, trying to piss us off."

Chris Gray: "Before the anthems started one of the bandsmen's music sheet blew away as he was marching past me. I picked it up and gave it him. 'Thanks very much,' he said. 'Now get stuck into the bastards!'"

Simon Halliday: "The real panic was when Flower of Scotland was played and their guys knew the words. Previous years they didn't sing anything. I had a little look across at them and they were absolutely screaming it out. I thought, 'This all looks a bit different to other years'."

Referee David Bishop: "When the pipers started on Flower of Scotland the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My God, it was powerful. Haunting and moving. The two touch judges were Derek Bevan and Les Peard and I remember at the end getting a dig in the ribs from Peard, a big Welsh copper. 'Hey, boyo, if you didn't know you had a game on your hands, you f****** got one now'. I said, 'Thanks, mate, but I had kinda figured that out for myself'."

The Grudge - Part I: Telfer driven to success by a fear of failure

The Grudge - Part III: England sent homewards as Scots make Grand Slam history

• Copyright Tom English 2010. Extracted from The Grudge: Scotland vs. England, 1990 by Tom English, published 4 March, Yellow Jersey, 12.99.

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