‘Old dogs’ find their bite to script an unlikely plot twist

The post from Jamie George on social media was typically wry. “There’s life in the old dogs yet,” George quipped beneath a snap of the England hooker and old mucker Elliot Daly, with the pair good mates, club colleagues and international stalwarts.

- HARRY LATHAM-COYLE

Across the best part of 200 combined caps, the duo have seen just about everything there is to see in Test rugby, plenty of highs, plenty of lows, and plenty in-between.

Yet even George and Daly’s sage heads might have struggled to make sense of it all on Saturday evening. It had been an entirely curious, at times incomprehensible contest, France seemingly seconds from accelerating out of sight repeatedly yet each time contriving to drop the ball. On another day, none of Antoine Dupont, Damian Penaud or Peato Mauvaka fumble with the line in sight and France would have continued on their grand slam march.

But England have come out on the wrong side of such hypotheticals so often in the last 12 months that they might feel that such luck and opposition profligacy was overdue. Twice now in two years they have derailed the tournament favourites at Twickenham when few gave the hosts a hope.

From scenario to scenario late on, the problems of the past kept threatening to reappear, images and ignominies of the seven near misses resurfacing: the no-arms tackle in Lyon, the maul falling inches short in Auckland; the spilled restart against Australia; that lineout misfire against South Africa. There were so many situations where things could, and have previously, gone wrong – but at last, they didn’t.