Wales all washed up with nowhere to go...

Every living English Grand Slam captain, from Sir Bill Beaumont to Dylan Hartley via Will Carling and Martin Johnson, shares another common denominator. They all know what it’s like to be blown away in the cyclonic fury of Cardiff on big-match day.

- PETER JACKSON

Other occasional England captains to have lost their bearings in the maelstrom which used to howl around the Taff include a trio of World Cup winners: Jason Robinson, Mike Catt and Lawrence Dallaglio, most famously of all from a Welsh perspective as a victim of the day Scott Gibbs comandeered their temporary London home and turned it into Wembley-am-byth.

When it came to enduring a Cardiff nightmare, no Red Rose captain can have suffered more than Chris Robshaw. This very weekend 12 years ago, he led an all-conquering team expected by all and sundry to walk off with a Grand Slam.

Sam Warburton’s Wales stripped them naked that night, their victory so emphatic that the damage extended beyond smashing the Slam to picking the title out of English pockets for good measure. The Mayhem at The Millennium left such an indelible mark that Robshaw was honest enough to confess pre-match: “I’m nervous about this one.’’

A lot of Welsh ghosts had been swirling around in a lot of heads, including arguably the hardest-headed of all Robshaw’s predecessors, Old Beetle Brows himself, Martin Johnson. That he, too, confessed to having been ‘nervous’ underlined England’s historic suspicion of this fixture more than any other.

The fear was that they would find themselves trapped in a Welsh revival of biblical proportion, swamped by another flood of emotion which left more than a few old English teams wishing they’d had the foresight to hire Noah’s Ark.

The way the Red Dragon brotherhood saw it, England had pushed their luck so far in scraping one-point home wins over France and Scotland that they wouldn’t have any left. And if a reborn Welsh team could almost stop the hitherto unstoppable Ireland, then why wouldn’t they be good enough to see off an England team supposedly in the throes of an identity crisis?