Winner of the Best Best Rugby Book category of the British Sports Book Awards 2011.
Shortlisted in the Best Biography category of the British Sports Book Awards 2011.
Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2010.
This is the real story of an extraordinary game, told with astounding insight and almost unprecedented access to key players, coaches and supporters on both sides. The Grudge brilliantly recaptures a day that has gone down in history. Tom English has produced a gripping account of a titanic struggle that thrusts the reader right into the heart of the action. Game on.
Murrayfield, the Calcutta Cup, March 1990. England vs. Scotland - winner-takes-all for the Five Nations Grand Slam, the biggest prize in northern hemisphere rugby. Will Carling's England are the very embodiment of Margaret Thatcher's Britain - snarling, brutish and all-conquering. Scotland are the underdogs - second-class citizens from a land that's become the testing ground for the most unpopular tax in living memory: Thatcher's Poll Tax. Fifteen men in blue jerseys are plotting the downfall of the English oppressors. In Edinburgh, nationalism is rising high - what happens in the stadium will resound far beyond the pitch.
Tom English was born in Limerick, Ireland. He writes for Scotland on Sunday. He is the brother of Alan English, whose Stand Up and Fight was a Yellow Jersey rugby bestseller.
