Peter Jackson: Six Nations 2020 proves the best team doesn't always come first
England captain Owen Farrell lifts the Guinness Six Nations Trophy with his team. Picture: INPHO/Andrew Fosker
And so another Six Nations title slips from the grasp of the team playing the best rugby, leaving France as empty as their flying saucer of a stadium.
England’s off-stage crowning as champions, feet up in a biosecure hotel in downtown Rome watching the remaining contenders eliminate each other in Paris, added to the emptiness of the finale. How ironic that one ancient English foe should conspire with another to festoon the trophy in white ribbons before handing it to them.
Nobody, perhaps not even Eddie Jones, although that may be stretching the point, will disagree that France would have been worthy winners.
They almost certainly would have been had Mohamad Haouas not punched the lights out of the Grand Slam at Murrayfield the week before Willie Mullins cleaned up at the Cheltenham Festival.
Having waited almost eight months for their next match like everyone else, France came up tantalisingly short, the latest to learn that scoring more tries than the winners counts for nothing in the final analysis. It keeps happening – four times in the last six seasons.
Last year Wales took it to the extreme, winning a Grand Slam despite scoring fewer tries (10) than their major rivals and as few as Italy. The runners-up, England, scored more than twice as many, a role-reversal of four years earlier.
In 2016, Wales out-tried the rest only to finish second to the team they love to hate. Twelve months earlier, Ireland under Joe Schmidt topped the lot despite the lowest try-count of any Six Nations champion, a miserable eight.
Defence, reinforced by a strict adherence to risk-aversion, ruled, okay? Fabien Galthie’s courage in challenging such perceived wisdom has been the great plus of this, the strangest and longest tournament of all.
Paradoxically, France have managed it despite hiring the arch-apostle of the blitz defence, Shaun Edwards. His job of locking the back door is made all the more important by a philosophy in the finest Gallic tradition of invention.
Galthie is doing now what the greatest of all Brazilian football teams did in winning the World Cup 50 years ago: ‘No matter how many goals you score, we’ll score more.’ Except for the aberration in Scotland, France did exactly that from start to finish:
3-2 on tries against England in Paris, 5-3 against Italy, 3-2 against Wales in Cardiff, 4-3 against Ireland on Saturday night. They did it, what’s more, in exhilarating style.
The choreographer-in-chief, Antoine Dupont, is a scrum-half in the finest French tradition, of Jacques Fouroux, Jerome Gallion, Pierre Berbizier and Galthie himself. Not since the early days of Thomas Castaignede during the last century have they had a fly-half as mercurial as Romain NTamack.
France missing in action for so long had been the biggest blot on the rugby landscape. The sentiment may not be appreciated in the Irish camp this morning but their rediscovery is a joy to behold, early notice of their intention to win the World Cup they picked out of Ireland’s pocket.
Richie McCaw bowed out on top of the world, taking delivery of the Webb Ellis pot of gold at Twickenham on the occasion of his 148th and final Test.
Compare and contrast that to Alun-Wyn Jones overtaking the New Zealander as the world’s most-capped player.
The Welsh Assembly had refused to allow Jones’ family to be present, not unreasonably given the country’s state of lockdown. He walked out in Llanelli with the other 22 players maintaining a discreet distance before realising there was nobody to break the sound of silence.
Jones, not a man to suffer fools gladly, looked distinctly uncomfortable, as if fearful that the non-occasion would go downhill from there. It did, at such a rate of knots that his team barely fired a shot in losing at home to Scotland for the first time in 18 years.
Instead, they offered startling proof that what goes up, must come down, going from Grand Slammers one season to bottom but one the next.
Such a slump had been done only once before, by Wales during a volatile period 14 years earlier when Mike Ruddock quit as head coach.
JJ Williams scored 352 tries in 438 matches for Bridgend, Llanelli, Wales, the Lions and Barbarians but he never forgot the one denied him at Twickenham shortly before Willie John McBride’s invincibles assembled for their rampage through South Africa.
The Welsh wing’s death last week at 72 will have been of more than passing interest to an octogenarian in Cork, John West.
His refusal to award Williams the try which would probably have won Wales another Five Nations title moved the troubadour Max Boyce to turn the controversy into a hit record – Blind Irish Referees.
Boyce, then all the rage, wrote the lyrics:
Of all the concerts I’ve done for the homeless overseas the one that pleased me most was not for refugees Was for a home in Ireland that stands amongst the trees The Sunshine Home in Dublin for blind Irish referees.
It went down a storm in the valleys, not that Williams ever saw the funny side.
He swore he touched the ball down a split second ahead of the opposing wings, David Duckham and Peter Squires.
Without recourse to technology, Mr West made his decision as he saw it and Wales lost 16-12. JJ claimed he could not have seen it.
"To be fair to him, he did send me a Christmas card for the next 10 years or so," he said.
"But I never quite found it in me to reciprocate."
A muted weekend of Test rugby being better than nothing, the organisers deserve credit for completing the championship no matter how long it took.
As a result they were able to show, even in straitened times, that there’s still no business like Six Nations business.
England players will earn a bonus of up to £30,000-a-man in addition to their £25,000-a-man match fee which amounts to a maximum of £185,000-a-man.
Their 25% salary cap takes effect from the so-called Nations’ Cup, kicking off with Ireland-Wales in Dublin on November 13.
15 Anthony Bouthier (France).
14 Jonny May (England).
13 Virimi Vakatawa (France).
11 Gael Fickou (France).
10 Romain NTamack (France).
9 Antoine Dupont (France).
1 Rory Sutherland (Scotland).
2 Julien Marchand (France).
3 Kyle Sinckler (England).
4 Maro Itoje (England).
5 Bernard Le Roux (France).
6 James Ritchie (Scotland).
7 Justin Tipuric (Wales).
8 Greg Alldritt (France).
