Great Uncle Fred? In the last 19 Calcutta Cup matches, Scotland have only beaten England four times, in 1990, 2000, 2006 and 2008. Why?(Anonymous, Autumn 2008)

Well, anonymous person, your question was on my mind when I went into the post office to send a parcel so I put it to Mrs Mactavish. Her reply? "Because we don`t want to hurt their feelings". Will that do? If not, well, I suspect that you are a sad Scottish person forced by circumstances to live elsewhere and the lack of success shown by your country`s rugby team is an almost annual source of irritation? Well, there are 50 million English people and 5 million Scots... No, that is not convincing: there are fifteen against fifteen on the field... The game, though, it has undergone two major changes in the time since Scotland`s fabulous victory in the 1990 Grand Slam decider. Firstly, rugby has gone officially professional and secondly, and connected to that first change, the nature of the game has changed so that it is now much more like rugby league than it used to be, with both teams often to be found strung out across the field as if they were playing a giant game of fox and geese. Scotland has not yet got to grips with professionalism, partly because it is a less rich country and partly because there are far fewer rugby players, and this new game of grind and break does not suit the smaller, wilier, more unpredictable Scottish player. The game, you might say, has got more boring and this suits some country`s styles more than it suits others. One more thing: during this period, England were often led or otherwise inspired by Martin Johnson who was such a good, even magical, player that Scottish rugby supporters could not help liking him. Without him, England would not have won so many of those matches. Still, never give up hope. Always play to win. The matches we, I mean Scotland, did win, were the matches that rugby remembers.

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