Twenty-five years on from Italy's big entrance, the Six Nations' pizazz never fades

The Guardian

27-01-2025

It is more than 140 years since England beat Wales in the very first match of the old Home Nations championship, 2-0 at St Helen's in Swansea in 1883, and there is an old man in the back bar of the Kings Head who will tell you that the English winger's foot was in touch when he scored the winner.
Even the modern-day championship's getting on. The Six Nations is 25 this year. The tournament brought in Italy and they marked the occasion by beating Scotland 34-20 in their first game. Diego Domínguez, their little wizard of a fly-half, kicked three drop goals and 29 points in total, and Scotland have not had a relaxed flight out to Rome since.
The year 2000 was also when Ireland picked a skinny kid called Brian O'Driscoll at outside centre, only just out of Blackrock College. He scored a hat-trick in Paris while Scott Quinnell became the first player in the tournament to be sent to the sin-bin after he smashed head-high on Christophe Lamaison with a tackle so late it might have been scheduled by LNER.
It was the year that England put 50 on Ireland, 40 on Wales, and then blew their shot at a grand slam in the last round, as they often used to do. This time they went down by six to Scotland, who were winless thus far, on a filthy day in the mud and oomska at Murrayfield. Lifting had just come in, rucking had just gone out and the players' shirts still flapped in the wind and looked better for it.
Every Six Nations marks a transition, it begins in the winter and finishes in the spring. One of the reasons it is loved so much is that it fills the bleakest weekends of the year and we know that once it is over the sun will be coming along soon enough.
Over those 25 tournaments, the sport itself has been through a transition. In 2000, most of the players had come up in the amateur era; today, most of them were not even born during it. Back then, rugby union still had a dash of amateurishness about it, especially when it came to workloads and player welfare. The plan, in most places, was to do the same thing they had always done, only seven days a week.
England and France had more resources and greater strength in depth, which was enough to give them an edge while everyone was figuring out how to go about professional rugby. Between them, they had won seven of the previous eight before Scotland's victory in the last Five Nations in 1999 and they would win seven of the eight after it.
There were three grand slams in this era, one for Martin Johnson's Orcs in 2003, a couple for Fabien Galthié's fabulous French either side of it, and the biggest worry was that the tournament was going to become a two-team competition.
You would have got long odds, then, on the likelihood that England would win one grand slam in the next 21 years. But here we are in 2025 and the only other they have enjoyed was in 2016, when Eddie Jones flogged the survivors from the squad who had been humiliated in the World Cup the previous season through 18 straight victories.
There were five titles, but they tend to be remembered, often as not, for the one game that was lost along the way – especially the three they won in 2001, 2011 and 2017, when England won four out of four, then went to Dublin and were beaten in the final round.
England's expectations always appear to exceed their achievements. We seem to forget they have been so mediocre for so much of the 21st century. France, on the other hand, have done things by extremes. Galthié's team gave way to that of Fabien Pelous, who won back-to-back titles in 2006 and 2007, the second on one of the tournament's great days, when Elvis Vermeulen's last-minute try put them ahead of Ireland on points difference.
There was another grand slam, for Thierry Dusautoir's 2010 side and then diddly-squat for more than a decade, when the game there seemed to be in a perpetual shambles. France were flat last in 2013 and stuck in the bottom three seven years out of eight in the 2010s.
It has taken Galthié, and the grand project, to bring France back to life. Given what he did as a player, and what he has done as a coach, he has a claim to be one of the most influential men in the history of the competition.
It was Mike Ruddock's Wales who finally broke the Anglo-French duopoly in 2005. There is Gavin Henson, shaved legs, silver boots, hair swept back with a slick of gel, lining up that penalty from 45m to beat England in the 76th minute.
'If he kicks this,' Eddie Butler said on commentary, 'he can shave whatever part of his body he wants.' And then Gethin Jenkins tumbling up the middle of the pitch after a charge down to score in the opening minutes against Ireland in the decider.
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Wales being Wales, they somehow managed to drum Ruddock out of his job 18 months later. Fortunately for them, they replaced him with Warren Gatland and won the slam all over again in 2008.
Gatland's old side, Ireland, were right behind them. In 2009, they won their first grand slam since 1948, Ronan O'Gara's drop goal in the final minutes against Wales. It was overdue, for the talent they had, O'Driscoll now well on his way to becoming the competition's all-time leading try scorer, with O'Gara inside him, Rob Kearney behind and Paul O'Connell at the heart of the ornery, horny-handed pack ahead.
They took their time but it was Ireland, in the end, who got professionalism right. They have won the title seven times in the past decade, which is as many as they managed in the previous 50 years of playing the Five Nations.
Under Joe Schmidt and then Andy Farrell, Ireland became the epitome of a professional rugby set-up, in which every last detail from schoolboy level up seems to have been designed with the needs of the national team in mind. Wales, on the other hand, always seemed to be performing wonders despite the state of their domestic game.
They were, as Gatland often said, a side apart from the system. While he was a great innovator in his day, an early adopter of the rush defence among other things, Wales's successes always seemed to owe something to something older, more elemental forces, like his ability to persuade his players to give every last breath for the team.
And Scotland? There have been plenty of famous victories, but they are still waiting for their first Six Nations title, or even, amazing to say, their first runners-up finish. This even though they have gone about playing the game every which way, from the era when they would refuse to run the ball in the opposition's 22, to the one where they would insist on running it in their own. They live in hope of jam tomorrow and the perpetual expectation that this year might finally turn out to be theirs.
It is more than Italy's fans have to work with: 25 years after that famous first, you can still count the number of games they have won in the tournament on your fingers and toes.