But it will sort itself out soon enough and then we’ll see whether the Five Nations is a waste of time.”Rob Wainwright, capped 31 times by Scotland and a Test Lion last summer, is equally offended at being labelled an irrelevance. Until they start refereeing according to the charter agreed by the International Board, we’ll get these daft scores. Rather like William Webb Ellis at Rugby School, they are showing a fine disregard for the rules of the game. They have handled the transition better than us and it’s showing in their results. However, big scores are quite common at the moment and as the Super 12 tournament down south has proved, it is perfectly possible to reverse them.”Cobner quite rightly believes that the latest trends among international referees, particularly those New Zealanders and Australians cutting new teeth on the try-laden candy-floss of Super 12, are directly responsible for many of the hopelessly lop-sided scorelines.

We may have conceded 60 points but we don’t need pity, least of all from those we used to see off year after year.”I think the most passionate Welshman realised, even back in the Seventies, that once the English got themselves organised and started to use the vast resources at their disposal, they would become a force in world rugby. It’s very hard to defend these days because there are referees who stack everything in favour of the side in possession. “I can’t say I enjoy seeing 12 tries and 80-odd points a game and some of my contemporaries would turn in their graves at the very thought of it,” he says.”We’ve been brought to this situation by people whose overriding concern has been to provide a mass audience with what they assume they want to see. As Finlay Calder, the former Scotland and Lions captain, remarked this week, no one enjoys parting with pounds 30 to watch a turkey shoot rather than a rugby match.Unlike today’s alleged contest between France and Ireland in Paris, this one is too close to call with any confidence. Sure enough, they have adapted well to professionalism – at least, they have in terms of what happens on the pitch. “I know a lot of English rugby folk – I even mix socially with them now and again – and I’ll tell you the one thing I can’t stand about them It’s their bloody sympathy.

Now director of rugby across the bridge, he insists the Five Nations is alive and kicking.”Look, we didn’t hear people bleating about the state of the championship when we were beating England in our sleep, did we?” he snaps. Depressingly, the odds on Les Tricolores sticking 100 points on Ireland in Paris this afternoon are a miserly 16- 1.But at least the cocksure jibes from the Twickenham terraces are having the right sort of effect on the poor cousins from the north and west. Terry Cobner, the Pontypool flanker who once reduced a strong Lions pack to tears with his inspiring dressing-room rhetoric, agrees that Wales have ground to make up but flatly refuses to accept the mantle of also- rans, despite that 60-point mauling at Twickers a fortnight ago. Wales versus Scotland at Wembley? Make way for rugby’s first So What? international.And on the face of it, they have a point; England have lost only six of their last 30 matches against Ireland, Scotland and Wales and what is more, they have registered record victories over each in the twinkling of a calendar year.

France, the only other European power remotely capable of giving the All Blacks or Springboks a game of anything more physical than crazy golf, are equally rampant. The Celtic nations might just as well stay at home and save themselves 80 minutes of ritual humiliation, for they have about as much future as a Kuwaiti ski-jumper. It was nothing out of the ordinary for Wales to win five off the reel and a 30-point victory left no one in urgent need of shock therapy. You could set your clock by Wales’ annual plucking of the wan and withered red rose.
Yet now that the pluckers are themselves being plucked sideways, the prophets of doom are shouting the house down The Five Nations is dead, they say Expired, gone to meet its maker, an ex-championship. “We must have been playing England the next day.”

Back in the late Seventies, a Welshman had good reason to assume it would be ever thus. The ancient foe engaged in 16 Five Nations jamborees between 1964 and 1979 and in all that time, England scraped one win and a couple of jammy draws. “We were messing about in training one afternoon,” he would say, a cheeky grin working its way across his darkly angelic features.