History hangs heavy over Calcutta Cup but England’s young side can turn tartan tide

In one of sport’s weirder coincidences, England are about to play must-win games against Scotland in both rugby and cricket on the same day. The forecast 3C temperatures for the Calcutta Cup encounter may be cooler than in Kolkata – appropriately the venue for the T20 World Cup group fixture – but a white-hot contest inside a chilly Murrayfield can be absolutely guaranteed.

Because this particular collision, the 144th since the sides first met at Raeburn Place in 1871, looks set to shape the Six Nations prospects of all involved. To say Scotland are under additional pressure following their defeat by Italy in round one is to state the obvious. And England, too, will take the field knowing the time has come to demonstrate whether or not they are the real deal.

With 12 successive Test wins already banked, that might feel like a superfluous aspiration. But there is a difference between playing and winning at home and going away to places like Murrayfield on weekends like this. Particularly when there is a real crackle of expectancy in the malty Edinburgh air. English presumption has been exposed in the north before and history hangs heavier over this fixture than any other.

So no matter that England, under Steve Borthwick, have already won in Wales, Italy, Argentina, the US and Japan. To date they have still to conquer any of the other hostile arenas that tend to sift the great sides from the merely good ones. Scotland may have a tendency to blow hot and cold but put a white shirt and a red rose in front of them in the Six Nations and rare is the day they fail to turn up.

The mind spools back to 1990 and 2000 and 2024 and all the other examples of bagpipe-accompanied chaos when, for whatever reason, the visitors froze tactically when it mattered. England have won only two of the last eight meetings between the two nations and even the last edition at Allianz Stadium was a game Scotland would have won had Finn Russell brought his goal-kicking boots to south-west London.

The tartan tide has to turn at some point, though, and this might be that moment, for a couple of reasons. The first is that England are in a more stable, confident mood than for a good while. Admittedly Wales last week was not a match upon which to base many sweeping conclusions, so poor were the visitors in the first 40 minutes, but this is no longer an English side that shrinks in adversity.

George Ford at fly-half has brought a level of control and order that is increasingly enabling England to navigate their way out of tricky corners and they have ceased to be a team routinely edged out in the final quarter. A 6-2 forward-dominated bench split means Borthwick’s team now keep on coming and the pace of Ben Earl and Henry Pollock asks further questions of defenders once the game breaks up.

Which leads us to the second underlying reason why England are becoming a different proposition to the teams previously eaten alive in Edinburgh: a sizeable chunk of the squad are totally unscarred by past Murrayfield maulings. Just eight of the starting lineup and 10 of the matchday 23 were involved two years ago when a Duhan van der Merwe hat-trick propelled the hosts to a 30-21 victory.

For good, sharp younger players such as Pollock, Guy Pepper, Henry Arundell and Alex Coles there is, instead, a greater sense of possibility and opportunity. It is four years now since Arundell, playing for England Under-20s in Edinburgh, scored a scorching length-of-the-field try that announced him as something special. His hat-trick against Wales last Saturday is unlikely to be the only time he crosses the try-line in this season’s championship.

So when Borthwick talks about England embracing the occasion for what it is, rather than anticipating ghosts around every corner, it is not by chance. It is less about portraying Murrayfield as just another stretch of grass with goalposts at either end as embedding the mindset that this upwardly mobile England squad can become the Martini men – anytime, any place, anywhere – of world rugby.

It makes the first 20 minutes particularly fascinating. That was effectively Scotland’s undoing in Rome, with Gregor Townsend suggesting his team were also then ambushed by the atrocious weather that made the second half a game of water polo. Any repeat against a bright-eyed England side will deliver a similar result as Townsend has already spelt out. “I think the start of the game sets the tone of who we are,” he emphasised, while simultaneously cautioning against going full Braveheart without the necessary accuracy and deft execution to match.

Those “smarts” were frequently lacking in Rome where it was Italy who craftily engineered space in the Scottish backfield, which Louis Lynagh exploited for the Azzurri’s first try. With a dry ball, though, Scotland still have the backs to cause problems with Russell no stranger to the challenge of wrongfooting England.

Keeping Russell quiet and shutting down Scotland completely tends to be easier said than done but against Italy the Scots made precisely zero line breaks, a stat they cannot afford to replicate this time.

The hosts will also have to eradicate the lineout problems which helped to destabilise them in round one and, in one or two cases, repay Townsend’s selectorial faith on the occasion of the head coach’s 100th Test in charge. Leaving out Van der Merwe, such a thorn in English sides in the past, is one thing but the absence of the tall, versatile Blair Kinghorn from the matchday 23 will quietly delight the visitors, whose aerial chasing game is now a conspicuous strength.

What are the odds, furthermore, on the decisive dagger being applied by an Englishman with a Scottish bloodline? Tom Roebuck, Fin Smith, Fraser Dingwall, Pollock and Bevan Rodd were potentially all eligible for Scotland either through birth or parentage, with Arundell and Sam Underhill – who has a Scottish granny – also possessing some dark blue heritage.

Either way, the former England captain Courtney Lawes has been wondering aloud in his Times column if Scotland’s unhealthy obsession with beating England is actually holding them back and advising them to think bigger. It simply adds more fuel to a passionate affair which will define both teams’ tournaments. Valentine’s Day massacre or not, a sweet Kolkata cup double for England is definitely doable.