Six Nations: England narrowly overcome France in a close weekend of rugby

If anybody had convinced themselves that England vs. France was going to be some sort of exuberant display of flowing rugby, they’d have been sorely disappointed. As expected, the game was far from beautiful, as the two very equal teams clashed and battled it out at Twickenham. England may have come out victorious (17-9) from the highly physical encounter, but there was certainly nothing between the two sides at half-time (the score was 9-9 at the break).

The French were effective at shutting down England’s star players of the Championship so far, including Chris Ashton and the halfback pairing of Ben Youngs and Toby Flood, and both teams defended fantastically. The tide turned in England’s favour after half-time, with Ben Foden scoring a try and Jonny Wilkinson kicking over a penalty to put the home team in a more comfortable position. France kept it tense until the end, though, and while the game was refereed remarkably well, there were a number of decisions that could have seen this game having a drastically different final score.

Earlier in the day had been the contest between Wales and Italy at Stadio Flaminio in Rome (which the Welsh won 16-24). For the first time in a while, I felt that Wales showed some real development and actually looked like they had ideas in attack (one of their tries, the one scored by Sam Warburton, was very well-executed). Italy challenged rather well, but they often just provided Wales with too much room within which to play. All things considered, though, these two teams are playing rugby of a significantly lower standard than the rest of the competition, and there were tons of errors and sloppy play throughout this 80 minutes.

The last match of the weekend was Sunday’s game between Ireland and Scotland. With the Scots’ previous performances, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d written them off as real challengers, but they set out to prove themselves against the Irish and they stayed in the game even whilst Ireland scored all the tries. Ireland did come away victorious (18-21) in the close-run match, scoring three tries from Jamie Heaslip, Eoin Reddan and Ronan O'Gara. Currently, a lot of the problems with Scotland stem from the fact that they begin matches quite weakly and then struggle to fight their way back into it. The whole game was filled with indiscipline, however, and didn’t put either team in very strong positions going forward.

There aren’t any Six Nations games coming up this weekend, but on March 12th, we’ll see Italy take on France and Wales face Ireland. On the Sunday after, England will play Scotland at Twickenham and potentially further their chances of securing a Grand Slam - something they haven’t managed to achieve since 2003.

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