After the US invasion of Panama in 1989, it took their army 10 days to persuade the dictator Manuel Noriega to come out of his hiding place in the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See. Their soldiers famously surrounded the building with loudspeakers and played, among other things, AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long, Van Halen’s Panama, and Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up day and night, until Noriega lost the will to resist. Five minutes into the half-time interval at Twickenham last Saturday, the thought occurred that they could perhaps have got the job done a lot quicker if, like the RFU, it had hired stadium DJ Tony Perry instead.
Which is nothing against Perry, whose act must be just the thing if you’re four tequilas deep on Ocean Beach in Ibiza. Somehow, though, it doesn’t quite go over so well when England are nine points down against Wales and you and your grandfather are trying to talk about whether or not the referee was right to give that scrum penalty while shuffling through the queue for the loos at Twickenham on a freezing cold afternoon in February.
Rugby union has always had a slightly hit-and-miss approach to matchday entertainment. A friend who played professionally in New Zealand told me that he finally decided to retire when he was warming up for a match against the Crusaders and there were, all of a sudden, three men dressed as medieval knights riding horses up and down the touchline waving broadswords about. His exact thought was: “I’m too old for this shit.” So he quit.
I’m all for the regimental goat, the marching band, and the male choir at the Principality. Ireland at the Aviva are a treat and the atmosphere when France play in Paris or Marseille will make your hair stand on end. A match at Twickenham, though, is becoming a bit of an all-over-the-show experience, mainly because it’s not really clear who they’re trying to please. Do the people who hand over their hard-earned for a spot in the West Stand really want to be blasted with 10 minutes of EDM between halves? Or would they settle for a pee, a pint and the chance to air their peeves about the standard of the refereeing?
Rugby seems to have become another of those sports that feels increasingly confused about how to go about satisfying its existing fans while also drawing in some new ones. You can see it in the Netflix documentary about the Six Nations, which is designed entirely to open the game up to a new audience. You may have noticed, too, that this year, for the very first time, the teams are all wearing shirts with the players’ names on the back. It’s been described as a “move to attract casual fans”. They’ll need opera glasses to make out the minuscule lettering on the French kit. The team made it so small because they don’t really think the names should be there at all.
Among all the other whys, whats, and wherefores lingering in the air after the final whistle went on Saturday, there was the pressing question of why someone had decided to play Oasis’s Wonderwall over the public address system during the pauses in play in the final minutes of the game. It’s on the list of post-match talking points somewhere between whether or not George Ford’s fidgety little step to the left really meant he had begun his run-up ahead of that conversion, exactly what they’ve been feeding Chandler Cunningham-South for breakfast, and that Twickenham ever-present: “Now how the hell will we get back to Richmond?”
Whatever state you’re in that your 2024 is going to be improved by a quick high-decibel hit of Wonderwall, it’s probably not sober. But on Saturday, the RFU was also trialling new alcohol-free zones in the stadium, which, according to reports in the Telegraph, caught some of the fans so short that they were left downing their pints on the concourse. The sober enclosures weren’t meant for families, mind, or for people who’d rather not be exposed to alcohol, but for the sort who wanted to get through the game without having to pop up and down over and again to let people out to the bar.
The England players have been doing a lot of talking recently about what they can do to help improve the matchday experience at Twickenham and, thankfully, they have been honest enough to acknowledge that a large part of it comes down to the way they play. But there were one or two other little improvements on Saturday, too. And you wonder whether that comes down to the recommendations made by their new skipper, Jamie George, and his senior players. George, you guess, remembers what it’s like to pay for a ticket at Twickenham, or at least has plenty of conversations with people who still do.
There was a live band pitchside, and the players’ long walk into the stadium worked well; better, for sure, than it used to when Stuart Lancaster made them do it during the 2015 World Cup. Back then, most of the players clearly hated it, which was why they gave it up when Eddie Jones asked them if they wanted to carry it on. Now, if George could just have a word with them about the half-time music too …
