Captain’S Blog: Training Today, Twickenham Tomorrow!

Scotland Women’s captain Susie Brown looks ahead to the fourth of five Six Nations games, the Twickenham dream – and a club team mate’s nightmare dress sense!    These are the occasions you dream of as a kid – playing against this hemisphere’s best in one of the biggest and best know venues in the world. England’s record speaks for itself – 35 home matches in the Six Nations since 1996 and 34 victories. It will be an awesome challenge for us but I always relish the opportunity to play the best. Last Saturday we were back in camp working on our defence. In the afternoon we had a bit of a break and had a forwards v backs defence challenge. Now, from a purely non-biased stand point of course, while the backs may have beaten us out wide a few times, I think even they will have to agree we showed them a thing or two about direct running with some fancy footwork and devastating lines from the front 8. This week I was back at club training with Richmond. As the majority of us have international commitments, club training has been reduced to allow us to concentrate on our Six Nations campaigns. We had a good session concentrating on exposing the corner of the defence and working on our handling and the entertainment was provided by Ireland centre Lynne Cantwell who showed up with an eclectic mix of training gear. As neither the Scottish or English teams had been announced to the press yet we departed unsure whether we would be facing each other on the Twickenham turf. Committed team mates in Richmond colours I’m sure there will be no love lost between us come Sunday! Looking ahead to the game we are thrilled to welcome back Caroline Collie and Tanya Griffith who were both unavailable for the Ireland match. I have been lucky to have played at Twickenham before in the 2005. Slightly fresher faced in my first ever Six Nations, I came off the bench and promptly ran into England’s then hooker Selena Rudge. I became very quickly and very acutely aware of just what international rugby feels like after that tackle! For those who can’t make it along to Twickenham (entry is free after the men’s game) the game is being shown live by the BBC 1 on their red button – kick-off is 5:15pm.