My most searing memory of the Five Nations? Sheesh, where do we start? It’s a little like rocking up at Merchu’s ice-cream parlour on Libertador Avenue in Buenos Aires and being asked to pick a flavour. ‘Hey, Merchu, you got a cone big enough for all of them?’
I’m going with Thomas Castaignede and France against England at the Parc des Princes in Paris in 1996. The game was a slugfest; two mammoths wrestling in a pit of tar. No tries, no sizzle, just eighty minutes of blitz and bloodshed and uglier than bowling shoes. But the occasion and the atmosphere will forever remain etched in my memory. It was like being pitch-side for the Lions against the Christians.
We’d arrived in Paris on the Friday. Like Remy in ‘Ratatouille’ I had a room which, if I climbed onto the wardrobe, gave me a restricted view of the Eiffel Tower. I wasn’t complaining. That afternoon, Miles Harrison and I yomped to the offices of ‘France2’ to pick up our passes - the lovely Dominique had them in her drawer: we would have stayed and flirted for longer but her English was even worse than our French – and that evening Jamie Salmon, Miles and I ate out on ‘La Rive Gauche’, which despite being several courses short of a banquet, still came to £150 for just the three of us. We spoofed for the bill and I lost.
The following morning, we took a metro to the Parc des Princes only to find it completely cordoned off by the CRS, guys with granite chins, four miles of bootlaces and expressions that suggested they’d shoot first and ask questions afterwards. We were five hours from kick off and the ambience was already incendiary.
It was my debut at Le Parc, an avante-garde, elliptical design and a bear-pit of a stadium which gave you goose-bumps even when it was empty. The sweep of the roof seemed more like a lid that'd been left slightly ajar so that at pitch level you almost felt there was no way out; a ‘caisse de resonnance’ - a box of sound – so they said, the best sporting acoustics anywhere in the world. They weren’t wrong.
In a concourse restaurant, a ten-piece Dax band was giving it some stick and the diners were jammed in like sardines. I remember England arriving to sniff the crew-cut turf & catching up with Head Coach, Jack Rowell. He was his wont; he was looking tense. 'It'll either be a humdinger or else we'll ship some points' he muttered. His team came out to warm up and ran head-first into a whirlwind of boos; this from a half-empty stadium. Kyran Bracken lobbed a practice ball to Jon Callard who dropped it. The whistling rained down from the stands like six-inch nails. I’d have never heard anything like it. It was utterly fabulous.
The English anthem was jeered to the rafters, drowned and all but swept away on a wave of Gallic derision: the French anthem would probably have been heard loud and clear back in Dax. Every hair on my head was on its feet, this back in the day when I actually had some. It almost felt as though the rugby was incidental. This was about history - Agincourt, Crecy, Waterloo - and more specifically about the eight years that’d passed since the French last beat the English in Paris. As ‘L’Equipe’ had put it that morning, 'Huit Ans: Ca Suffit'.
The stadium was a riot of colour; in fact, it was a riot full stop. Even the line-outs were deafening. Rory Underwood looked to have scored but was denied by an unsighted referee; Paul Grayson and Thierry LaCroix swapped penalties. The intensity and the speed of the exchanges were frightening. The entire ground seemed to be shaking. LaCroix dropped a goal to give France a 9-6 lead. Grayson, playing superbly, dropped one of his own. 9-9.
With three minutes left, England gave away a penalty on halfway. It was within LaCroix's range. Down in the mouth of the tunnel, I looked up to see Jack Rowell walking towards me. 'Can you believe it?' he spluttered. 'What a time to give away something like that.' (Obviously, I’m paraphrasing here.) As LaCroix took his run up, Rowell looked away down the tunnel. The noise told him all he needed to know. LaCroix stood planted in the middle of the pitch - feet wide apart, arms upraised - his own roar of celebration lost amid 45,000 others. Rowell turned round and hustled back to his seat.
England looked done for but, Grand Slam Campions that they were, back they came. Ben Clarke flipped a ball back from a ruck and Grayson - a good forty yards out - took aim with yet another drop. The ball seemed to be in the air forever. Side-on as I was, I couldn't judge the flight so I whip-panned to Paul who was already jogging back for the restart amid a storm of whistles and catcalls. 12-12. In the penultimate gasp, England – surely - had salvaged a draw.
Except there was still time for a restart and for France to drive deep into English territory. From a shambles of a ruck in the 22, Philippe Carbonneau fired a pass out to LaCroix who, in all the confusion, wasn't there. Thomas Castaignede however was. Plucking the ball from the sparse turf, he dropped it onto his right boot, swung a tired leg and watched it wobble drunkenly over the bar. Never in my life have I heard a noise like it. Ears apart, every other sense felt totally overwhelmed. It was like standing in the middle of an explosion.
Castaignede turned and broke into a jig, arms pumping, for all the world as though he were in the gym doing bicep curls and – bizarrely – his tongue sticking out. I asked him afterwards what had prompted the cheeky celebration. He couldn’t explain: just the sheer delirium of the moment. David McHugh blew his whistle and that was that. France had won it 15-12.
It hadn't been fancy, no wit or flair, but not a Frenchman in the ground gave a ‘merde’. Ironically, they'd won by playing the English at their own game - if anything ‘plus Anglais que les Anglais’ – but the irony was lost on the Parc des Princes. They'd won and done so at the death; all the more exhilarating for them and all the more painful for the English.
Wrapped and ready to go an hour or so afterwards, we headed to the metro to find the crowd still in full voice outside the stadium and in the streets; bars had spilled into the middle of boulevards, French supporters were dancing with passing cars and the blare of car horns and klaxons made your eyeballs vibrate. The detritus of the day – balloons, tickets, plastic glasses, paper flags, drunks – littered the surrounding area like the dead from a battle.
Still buzzing three hours later, Team Sky and Team BBC Radio 5 Live met up for dinner; Alastair Hignell, Brian Moore and a young producer called Sonja MacLaughlan. As my diary recalls, ‘Higgy was quiet and amusing, Moore was rather louder and Sonja was just loud full stop’. Nothing changes. I can’t remember who lost the six-way spoof for the bill, only that it wasn’t me.
Memory added on July 4, 2021
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