‘We’re in France and the crowd is going to be hostile,” Marlie Packer says as she looks ahead to Saturday’s Six Nations grand slam decider in Bordeaux with relish. “But we know that can flip on its head because of the French crowd. If they’re not happy with the way their team are playing, they turn on them and give them a bit of a hard time.”
Packer will win her 104th cap and, as captain, she also knows England have not lost a Six Nations match in six years. She played in that last defeat, away to France in Grenoble in March 2018, and so she has an acute awareness of the light and shade in rugby and life. Packer has lost two agonising World Cup finals, to New Zealand, but she helped England win the tournament in 2014.
