George Ford kicks 14-man England to a terrible beauty of a World Cup win

MAGIC BOOT: England's George Ford scores a drop-goal.

England 27 Argentina 10  

If ever a game resembled its host city then here it was. Marseille is a hot, steamy mess of a place where anything can happen. 

It’s a Babel of parties and poverty stewing uneasily in the same pot and this giddy edge that permeates the waterfront carried seven clicks down the Metro tracks on Saturday night to the stadium normally known as the Velodrome.

The atmosphere before kick-off was full-on carnival, the South Americans making all the noise, bringing all the colour and the calimocho, and the bulk of the expectation. 

The English were less conspicuous in their vanilla white kits and with their reserved doubt carried over from a horrendous Six Nations and a deeply troubling summer.

The nervy undercurrent came with them.

Three yellow cards had been shown in the four World Cup games preceding this one but it seemed almost inevitable that Marseille should be the stage for the first big controversy of the World Cup. 

Iffy tackles, card bingo, bunkers missives: we knew these were all in the post and they arrived all at once, like a batch of letters sent too late for Christmas.

Tom Curry saw yellow and then red for banging heads with Juan Cruz Mallia as the latter came down with a high ball. Yes, Curry was upright when they made contact but it seemed as if Mallia’s descent from the clouds might have spared the forward further punishment. It didn’t. Red it was.

Minutes later and Santiago Carreras sped in on George Ford as the latter of those two tens hoofed another one skywards, his leap and half-turn catching the Englishman high and sending him to the turf. Yellow, but it wasn’t high enough to earn an upgrade and he returned from the sin-bin to the inevitable boos and whistles.

All this in the opening exchanges.

Everything was happening but the game was going nowhere. 

It took 18 minutes to reach ten on the play clock with Carreras and Ford having shared two penalties. The paucity of the attacking play on both sides was a quilt that covered the entire game but the drama was only beginning and things began to turn slowly and inexorably in England’s favour.

Ford seemed stuck on a loop as he sent ball after ball up towards the cantilevered stands, and England butchered two overlaps on their right-hand side, but who needs fluid play through the hands when you have an out-half who can slot over three drop goals in ten minutes and add six penalties with his boot?

Metronomic doesn’t have to be negative.

If the first drop was a bolt from the blue, and the second a case of ‘okay, you’ve had your fun now’, then the third had everyone trying to recall that Springbok who kicked five against England all those years ago. 

It was Jannie de Beer, by the way. Rob Andrew, Jeremy Guscott, Jonny Wilkinson and now George Ford: in fairness, the English have previous themselves.

Argentina, playing with a man extra, looked thoroughly spooked and never more so than when Carreras tried his own drop from halfway. The catcalls as it veered left and wide reverberated around the three-quarter full 80,000-seater stadium. So did ‘Swing Low’ as England took a 12-3 lead into the break.

The third quarter continued to suck the marrow from Argentinian bones. Ford kicked three penalties in a row, missed a fourth as if to show that he may still be more human than robot, and then righted himself to dissect the posts again. Argentina conceded 13 penalties on the night. It felt like 23.

Argentina finally found it in themselves to earn a try through Rodrigo Bruni as the game took its last laboured breath but England’s 14 men had squeezed the life out of it long before that. 

They never once looked like claiming a five-pointer of their own, but they still stemmed a run of five losses in their last six games.

Cup rugby is a needs-must affair, and maybe this is the road they need to take after all the grief and negativity, but it is surely far too reductive a recipe for long-term success in this tournament. 

None of them, or their fans, cared much about that here. They needed a win. Any win. A terrible beauty of an evening.

England: F Steward; J May, J Marchant, M Tuilagi; G Ford, A Mitchell; E Genge, J George, D Cole; M Itoje, O Chessum; C Lawes, T Curry, B Earl.

Reps: W Stuart for Cole (50); J Marler for Genge (55); D Care for Mitchell and G Martin for Chessum (both 64); L Ludlam for Lawes (65); O Lawrence for Tuilagi (69); T Dan for George (72); M Smith for Ford (76).

Argentina: JC Mallia; E Boffelli, L Cinti, S Chocobares, M Carreras; S Carreras, G Bertranou; T Gallo, J Montoya, F Gomez Kadela; M Alemanno, T Lavini; P Matera, M Kremer, JM Gonzalez.

Reps: M Moroni for Mallia (3-9) and for M Carreras (63); GP Pagadizabal for Gomez Kadela (HT); J Sclavi for Gomez Kadela and R Rubialo for Lavini (both 50); R Bruni for Gonzalez (59); E Bello for Gallo (63); T Gallo for Sclavi (68); A Creevy for Montoya and L Bazan Velez for Bertranou (69).