Peter Jackson column: Fans flock to watch match with no meaning

England v WalesEngland against at Twickenham last autumn resulted in the hosts being ejected from the with indecent haste. The next door neighbours had been billed to square up again at Twickenham in late winter, except that by the time the visitors came to their senses with almost an hour gone, their opponents were galloping off to the Grand Slam.
On Sunday, for the first time, the old foes were back at Twickenham on a Whitsun holiday weekend. An unprecedented third match in eight months toke place because those responsible cannot bring themselves to let a good thing go when another £5m or so can be made in gate money.
So, without a title on offer, never mind a World Cup quarter-final, what brought them back last weekend other than a hefty pay day? The sole on-field object of the exercise was as a warm-up for the more serious business of winning a Test series in the Antipodes.
That makes practical sense but it does not justify conferring Test match status and the further devaluation of a symbol which has been battered from pillar to post, the international cap. Given that one third of their first team were otherwise engaged Satudray with in the Grand Final and therefore unavailable, an England XV would have been a more accurate description.
Billing it as an official Test match, of course, allowed the to charge more for tickets. Wales will have no objections on that score, not when they are understood to have collected a seven-figure fee for a work-out they needed as badly for three Tests in as England did for their three in .
WRU chairman Gareth Davies refutes the popular theory that the prime motivation for the third match stems from the RFU's need to raise the £13m they have to pay the clubs as compensation for using their players during the World Cup.
“The idea was first mooted a couple of years ago between the respective coaches,'' Davies told The Rugby Paper. “Stuart (Lancaster) and Warren (Gatland) discussed it purely as a practical rugby requirement immediately before going on tour. It wasn't a case of the commercial guys saying: ‘You have to play this game'.”
Wales needed this match more than England for the simple reason that the vast majority of their players have been out of meaningful action for the last three weeks. Nobody was in more urgent need of match fitness than Alun-Wyn Jones, ready again for the first time since Wales were last at Twickenham in March.
England-Wales always matters, even on a Whit Sunday but, the result of this one didn't matter much. Wales would grudgingly trade their 27-13 defeat if it meant victory in Auckland on June 11 against opponents whom they haven't beaten since the Queen's coronation in 1953.
' laudable attempt to inject a bit of fizz by calling the Welsh ‘red-hot favourites' has fallen predictably flat and not just because he trotted out much the same line during the Six Nations, when it really did matter and when Wales, according to England's Aussie, were just plain favourites, neither red nor hot.
If enthusiasm is in short supply, then it's hardly surprisingly at the end of a long season. It is easy to put England-Wales III down as a suitable case for the RSPCA, the rugby version of flogging a dead horse, easy but wrong.
According to the RFU ticket office the other day, only a few tickets remained unsold. An attendance of 81,128 no doubt about the public's enduring appetite for the fixture no matter how frequently they play it.
At least Sylvester Stallone had the good sense to allow six years to elapse between Rocky I and Rocky III.
At their current unhealthy level of co-habitation, England and Wales will have lined up 18 times between now and 2022.
And if that level of familiarity doesn't breed contempt, nothing will.

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