Another week, another one-point win. This was an ugly, bloody and basic victory, as pretty as Steve Borthwick’s broken nose, but funnily enough the 80,000-odd England fans inside the stadium didn’t seem too fussed about that when England bundled the ball into touch at the final whistle. It’s been eight years since they last saw England win a Calcutta Cup game here at Twickenham, and if it was Scotland who filled the highlights reel, and outscored England by three tries to one, well, England’s one workaday try, along with a conversion and three penalty kicks, added up to more than enough to shout about.
It was a match that was characterised, in the large part, by the dogged efforts of England’s proud pack of forwards. They crushed every scrum, clattered into every ruck and reached, over and again, right down into the dark and nasty places, returning, often as not, with the ball in hand. They won 14 turnovers in all the chaos, and a couple of them, by Ben Curry and Maro Itoje, were crucial in turning back the course of the match at points when Scotland were threatening to run away with it.
