England v Scotland
As usual, click a pic to see the whole gallery on the Focus Images web site.England had a slightly scrappy win 25-13 against Scotland yesterday at Twickenham, to take them into pole position in the 6-Nations, albeit only on points difference. With Ireland losing to Wales, England are on 6 points with both those teams, setting up an exciting finale next Saturday when England play France in the last match of the day.In the O2 Blueroom after the game yesterday, Geoff Parling was saying how the dressing room was a bit disheartened despite the win, knowing they didn't play as well as they could have done. A shame as well that two tries were disallowed for forward passes which would have made the points difference gap even wider. The first was a cracker by Anthony Watson in a superb spot for my location at the end of the pitch.
How massively annoying. A cracking try and an excellent celebration, but disallowed. Not much point doing anything with those pictures.In the second half the same thing happened again, with Mike Brown going over but being ruled out for another forward pass.
To be hones, I think Brown knew it would be disallowed as he had a bit of a laugh with Stuart Hogg after diving over as if to say that it wasn't going to be given anyway.The mood was raised significantly by Jim Hamilton's split shorts.
Anyway, onto some photographic information. Twickenham has new hexagonal LED lights all around the stadium. These are cracking - really bright and they don't take any time to warm up so they can be flashed on and off in patterns and other fun stuff like that. Their colour temperature is nice as well - nice and white, not warm or too blue.Unfortunately, they still don't illuminate the pitch corners well enough, and they remain a fair bit darker than the main area of the pitch. A good example is Jack Nowell's superb try at the end of the 2nd half. He sidestepped very nicely and powered over in the corner right in front of me. I was at 1/1250th shutter speed, and shot the try at that, but managed to twiddle the dial back to 1/640th to expose correctly for the celebration afterwards.
It took a fair bit of Lightroom work to make that image suitable to be wired to the papers. Upping the exposure and shadows, adding a bit of clarity, de-noising then sharpening. I've seen how Chelsea have put their new LED lights lower down around the stadium - perhaps Twickenham could think of this, or at least get a bit more light onto the corners from the existing lights in time for the World Cup later this year.I struggled with pitchside comms all game again. Come on O2 - sort out 4G bandwidth and your O2 Wifi!! I could only get pictures out using EE's 4G service, and then only 4 or 5 per half which is hugely frustrating. I had to pile back into the photographers' room at half time to zap away my first half's haul.And that picture of Watson's disallowed first half try? After finishing my edit I thought I might as well send it anyway so put it out as my final shot of the day, correctly captioned as disallowed. Happily the Sunday Telegraph seemed to quite like it.
Next Saturday should be a cracker. England will go into their game with France knowing what they've got to do to win the title. Where will the 6-Nations trophy be? They'll have to have 3 copies and take one to Rome, one to Edinburgh and one to Twickenham. An England win will be fantastic - they have a 37 point difference and Ireland have 33, so it's going to be very very tight.