It seemed to start raining in the final minutes at Twickenham, a shower of fat drops of beer from the clear night sky. They fell as the fans up in the gods leapt to their feet and threw their pints above them. Given what they charge for the stuff around these parts, it is probably not something you would do unless you had lost the run of yourself. But then it has been a long time since Twickenham has seen anything like those crazily helter-skelter final minutes, when England peeled off one, two, three tries in the space of seven minutes, and turned an infamous defeat into a feted draw.
It was as if, Eddie Jones said later, someone had “thrown magic dust” over them. Could they have pressed on again and tried to win the thing? Marcus Smith decided to kick the ball dead and kill the game instead. Owen Farrell explained later it was a call they had taken together, because they did not think the team had enough forward momentum off the ruck. The bigger question is how the hell they ended up in a position where they even had to make the decision. You would have to watch the match back to begin to figure out exactly how they did it. It was undoubtedly a game of two halves, just that one of them was 70 minutes long!
