Peter Jackson: Trust me, Cardiff jinx waits for Lancaster!

At a dinner in London some years ago, the English defined their rugby relationship with the Welsh as one based on “trust and understanding”. Dudley Wood, the RFU‘s urbane secretary during the dying days of amateurism, told guests assembled from the hierarchy of both Unions.
“We don’t trust them…and they don’t understand us…”
It has forever been thus, never more riotously so than the last time Wales ended a Championship campaign at home to an England team careering away to a seemingly inevitable Grand Slam. Much will be made in the coming week of what happened at Wembley one sunny spring Sunday 14 years ago.
Wales, no matter how implausibly, can usually be trusted to upset the most formidable of English apple carts. It would be no surprise were Sir Clive Woodward still trying to understand why his hitherto imperious team ended up being ambushed in north London at the end of the last century.
Once they have finished with Italy at Twickenham this afternoon, England will be back in Cardiff next Saturday where they were for the last match of the last Five Nations.
This time Wales will be spared the inconvenience of relocating the fixture 150 miles away while the roof was being put onto the new Millennium Stadium.
With the notable exceptions of Scott Gibbs and Scott Quinnell, they will also have a better team than they had at Wembley, one fortified by the sort of unshakeable faith which comes from winning three Slams since England won the last of theirs ten years ago.
They also know that, deep down, the next door neighbours do not relish the Cardiff experience.
During the barren period from the late Sixties to the early Nineties when they managed nothing more there than a solitary draw, successive England management teams tried different ways to break the hoodoo.
They based themselves 30 miles away on one visit, then moved to within shouting distance of the old Arms Park on the next.
Former manager Geoff Cooke went to the trouble of issuing his players with what were fancifully called ‘desensitisation’ treatment, a tape of the Welsh anthem being sung at full blast by 60,000 Welshmen.
One England player thought so much of the idea that he chucked his tape into the rubbish bin of his hotel room without bothering to play it.
Nothing back then worked, least of all a public pre-match rant.
Keith Fairbrother’s commands a supreme place in Anglo-Welsh folklore, the Coventry prop having sounded off strongly enough to inspire a back-page headline which left little room for doubt: “I hate those bad-losing Welsh.”
The interview appeared on the morning of what became one of the most famous matches between the countries, the 1970 duel when Ray ‘Chico’ Hopkins replaced an injured Gareth Edwards and almost single-handedly turned a lost cause into a momentous Welsh win.
“I respect the Welsh for their playing ability and hardness,” Fairbrother said in the paper. “But I HATE them and can’t stand to lose against them. Welshmen are bad losers. If they win, they gloat. If they lose, they moan. I don’t think we rub it in enough when we win.”
The only rubbing in done that day was confined to the visitors’ dressing-room where Wales coach Clive Rowlands, never one to miss a trick, had pinned Fairbrother’s blast to the dressing-room wall.
There have been times, of course, when there has been no substitute for English class. Their superiority was never greater than during successive Cardiff visits in 2003 when Wales lost 26-9 to England’s first XV and then suffered a worse beating by their second XV six months later, 43-9.
Three England coaches-cum-managers have since paid for those heady days under Woodward. Andy Robinson, Brian Ashton and Martin Johnson all left Cardiff empty-handed in turn, something which will not have escaped the notice of the current head honcho, Stuart Lancaster.
Trust and understanding…