As a sports reporter you have to take the rough with the smooth

The flight back from Scotland vs England was certainly rough, thanks to Storm Ciara, writes Jack de Menezes

England’s Ellis Genge celebrates scoring a try against Scotland (Reuters)

It has been a unique few months for reporting on rugby union and weather. As sport journalists, the opportunity to add an extra layer of drama in the build-up to a grand event is something we relish, be it the common strands of historic results, pre-match trash talk or an argument about a stadium roof.

But twice in the space of four months the weather has become the big story, and not for good reasons. In October last year, I was fortunate enough that the England squad took drastic action at the Rugby World Cup to avoid Typhoon Hagibis by flying 550 miles south to Miyazaki. That resulted in a hastily booked ticket to follow them and avoid the worst of the deadly cyclone.

Dozens of people were killed as Hagibis struck the Kanto region, where a number of colleagues and fellow writers remained to experience something they had never seen before.

On Sunday morning I was alongside dozens of England rugby supporters as we were among the “lucky” ones able to travel home in the middle of Storm Ciara. While British Airways and EasyJet cancelled numerous flights out of Edinburgh the day after England’s Calcutta Cup victory over Scotland, FlyBe were not so easily deterred.

The sight of our twin-turboprop aircraft did not inspire great confidence inside me when a news alert popped up on my phone warning of the highest wind speeds since a “deadly storm of 2012”. Gulp.

Our co-pilots promised that “we’ll give it a shot” but that hardly eased my fears over a landing. Passengers braced against the seat in front and some vomiting on the way down. As we bounced our way through the final metres, the ground getting ever closer, I’m not afraid to say that it I thought that this could be it, and I’d imagine that I was not the only one. But thankfully those still in control of their emotions were the individuals with our lives in their hands, and the round of applause that immediately followed our landing was richly deserved.

Perhaps it might have been more worth it had the Calcutta Cup not transpired to be a slog of a match, but at that point I can safely say that Eddie Jones’s pre-match comments or Ellis Genge’s match-winning try were not on my mind. England play Ireland and Wales next, back at Twickenham, and their return home cannot come quickly enough.

Yours,

Jack de Menezes

Deputy sports editor