Scots ready for England juggernaut & historic home crowd

We've known for many months now that the number of tickets sold for Scotland against England at Murrayfield on Saturday is a record for the home team. What we're waiting to know is how towering a record it's actually going to be.

Scotland's previous high was the 7,774 they attracted for England at the Hive in 2024.

The way things are going you can take that 7,774, add in the next four highest home Hive crowds for Six Nations contests - France 2024 and Ireland, Italy and Wales 2025 - and still the crowd for this coming Saturday may be greater.

They're talking now about 28,000 tickets sold - and counting. For Scotland, this will be an historic day.

Some of the older stagers in this team remember all too vividly what it used to be like, with an audience of one woman and her dog.

These are seismic times for everybody, but for the seasoned campaigners in particular - Lana Skeldon, Emma Wassell, Rachel Malcolm, Helen Nelson, Chloe Rollie and Rhona Lloyd, all 60, 70 and 80-cappers who know what the dark side looks like.

"It's a bit of a pinch me moment," says Malcolm, the captain. "We've come from having empty stands or not many fans to be in front of a historic crowd and it's something that we are just so proud of.

"The performances have improved over the last few years and that's the reason for it but also the work that the team behind the team have done to get our stories out there."

To put this into a greater context the biggest crowd the national women's football team has ever drawn is 18,555 for the visit of Jamaica in 2019.

In comparison to the rugby players, the footballers get a ton of coverage and yet come Saturday night the rugby team will be well clear of the biggest ever crowd for a women's football game in this country.

There's no doubting that among the Murrayfield crowd there will be a very healthy English contingent.

This is not 28,000, give or take, Scotland supporters, but it does represent a 'moment' in the women's game.

They are in the main stadium for the first time, which is a big call, and a huge number of people are coming to watch this Test. The big call was the right call.

For the visitors, of course, this is nothing flash. England's last two home crowds have been 81,885 for the World Cup final and 77,120 for last weekend's Six Nations opener against Ireland. Eye-popping numbers even for men's football not to mind women's rugby.

'You learn about the beauty of little victories when playing England'

Image caption,

England beat Scotland 40-8 in last year's World Cup

We all know how Saturday is going to turn out.

England will win and, barring a sensation, they'll win extremely comfortably. Frankly, Scotland will do well to keep England to 40 points, as they did at the World Cup last autumn.

In the seven meetings before that, England's points totals against Scotland were 59, 46, 58, 57, 52, 53 and 80.

Against Ireland last weekend, the world champions were missing a raft of players and didn't deliver anything like their best stuff, but they still won 33-12.

Only seven of their World Cup starters are starting at Murrayfield and only 12 of their famous 23 are involved. Will it make much difference? Not likely. Not when the ones who are coming in are so impressive.

England have won 34 Tests in a row and are looking for their eighth straight Six Nations title.

When it's England you're playing you learn about the beauty of little victories - the number of chances you can create and finish, the amount of time you can keep them scoreless, the strength of your set-piece and the resilience of your mind as the white waves start to crash in on you.

It's not about the pursuit of victory - let's be honest - it's about how many shots you can fire. Against England, the answer is usually 'not many'. In their seven Six Nations titles on the spin only France have troubled them unduly - losing by one point last season, by five in 2023 and by six in 2020.

Across the span of those Six Nations seasons the closest any other country has come, before last weekend, was Ireland in 2020 - when they lost by 27 points. As in, 27-0. Ireland's 21-point defeat at Twickenham in round one of this season's championship now stands as the best of the rest.

So for Scotland it's about performance, about how they stay in the fight, how the older players lead and how the younger players learn, how they fix some of the issues they had in victory against Wales - the lineout, especially.

Head coach Sione Fukofuka talked on Thursday about using the energy of the crowd on Saturday.

He also brought it back home a little when he said, charmingly, that his four young sons back home in Brisbane tried to stay up to watch the game from the Principality, with a 01:40 kick-off time in Australia.

Two conked out, one put in a gallant effort but was a casualty early on and one made it through. This game starts at 22:30 in Brisbane so the numbers might be higher this time.

"I'm not going to lie, there's an edge, absolutely," Fukofuka said. "Last week there was a slightly different prep in terms of the emotional rivalry that exists between Wales and Scotland.

"This one, the edge is around performance. The pressure's on England. There's an expectation on them to win every game."

Malcolm says her team is ready to embrace the biggest challenge around. "It's about being the best Scotland team that we can possibly be," she says.

"Last week we tripped up in different areas and Saturday is about taking opportunities when we get them.

"We know what we're faced with, we're not going to have the same number of opportunities that we had last week. It's important that when we have them we're accurate. We need to be brave, we can't play within ourselves."

A record home crowd against the best team in the world - a stage they could only have dreamed about, an occasion to live long in the memory.