All’s fair in love and war? In Wales v England rugby matches that’s invariably the case.
Cut to the World Cup match between the pair at Twickenham in 2015.
Wales' players walked into their changing room and found the heat positively tropical.
“I’m not pointing my finger at the RFU, but our changing room was boiling hot,” Sam Warburton relates in the book Beyond the Dragon: Playing Rugby for Wales.
“So much so, that I was starting to feel drowsy and lethargic. You’re usually in there for about an hour, so we thought someone was trying to mess with our heads. Then the lights went out, leaving us in pitch darkness”
Call that trying to make home advantage count.
Of course, it’s a two-way street and English players haven’t had rose petals thrown at their feet on arriving in Cardiff. They've had supporters head-butting their team bus, but never have rose petals been involved.
And we haven’t even mentioned the sledging. Ah, the sledging.
It goes on every year. Maybe, it is written into the fabric of the fixture.
Sometimes, even supporters get involved. Warburton has told how in 2012 he was walking through the Twickenham car park with his headphones on but no music playing, because he wanted to take in the atmosphere.
It wasn’t exactly welcoming.
The fun and games continued once the action started, with England's players not holding back. “They were getting into us verbally from the off. I remember one breakdown when we gave away a penalty for not releasing and I stood up to a chorus of ‘Have some of that you Welsh c**ts’. I realised then that they did not like us,” said Warburton.
Last year Dewi Lake found himself in the thick of the exchanges, prompting a post-match debate on social media about how Courtney Lawes, Maro Itoje and Nick Isiekwe had taken it in turns to heckle him as he waited for his team-mates to come in for a lineout.
Some complained that was no way to welcome a young player to the fixture.
But Lake has thick skin and he had been busy trading verbals with his opposite number Jamie George almost from the moment he joined the action.
It started after England won a scrum penalty, the two packs broke up and home hooker George appeared to pass comment, prompting Lake to offer his own take on matters with the pair then going nose to nose.
Seconds later, George offered himself as a carrier and was promptly halted, offering his Welsh opponent — who, as a schoolboy, had looked up to Richie McCaw — the chance to to swoop for a perfectly executed turnover.
George glared at him as he rose to his feet and soon after ran around 10 yards with a smile on his face to shout something in the direction of Lake after a Welsh lineout throw had gone awry. There’s a reasonable chance he wasn’t saying: “Unlucky, pal. It happens to us all. I’ve been there myself. Better luck next time.”
But Lake appeared to give as good as he got. “He’s more an oak tree than a shrinking violet,” quipped his coach at the Ospreys Toby Booth days later. “He’s a very combative, competitive guy and I think the fact they have gone after him he should take as a compliment. He certainly won’t shy down from any challenge.”
Sometimes, sledging does seem to affect certain players, though. The former Wales forward Brian Thomas was a master of the art.
Time-travel back to 1969 and the annual rugby joust between Wales and England, with the Welsh pack leader that day having been passed some useful intelligence on a key member of the opposition team.
Thomas had heard that the visitors’ scrum-half Trevor Wintle could be less than steely nerved. So at the first line-out the call was to go up — “Trevor!”
The whole Welsh pack was then to descend on this diminutive figure.
Everything went to plan and Wintle was duly buried beneath a mound of Welsh forwards. Nor did it go well for him thereafter.
“He had a nightmare,” one Wales international later reported, “and we won 30-9, with Maurice Richards scoring four tries”.
Maybe it would have been a difficult afternoon for Wintle, anyway, with the Welsh class of the 1970s starting to assemble.
But Thomas’ call appeared to plant a seed of uncertainty in his mind. “Brian was good at that,” the international quoted above added.
Maybe this weekend will be different. Maybe everyone will get on swimmingly.
Maybe not.
There will be barbs, as there always are, because the fixture is never one for sensitive souls.
Rewind to that 2012 England v Wales game when Warburton was barracked. A young fly-half was playing his first Test at Twickenham that day and the expectation might have been that he’d ease his way into proceedings.
But that’s not Owen Farrell’s style.
Even so, even Welsh players were taken aback by the then youngster's aggression and lack of self-doubt.
There was one moment, in particular, which startled a Welshman who had been playing international rugby for close on a decade at the time.
Adam Jones had pretty much seen it all by then, but he still found himself with eyebrows raised amid some of the stuff Farrell came up with.
In his book Bomb, he recalls: “I’ll never forget one carry when Alun Wyn [Jones] picked up from the base and charged forward, Farrell stood there shouting at him. ‘Come on, then! F*****g run at me, you c***!’
“Language aside, I couldn’t help but be impressed.
“It was his first appearance at Twickenham, and he was deliberately provoking a Lions colossus who was twice his size.
“He backed it up, too, smashing into Alun Wyn with all his might — not knocking him backwards exactly, but certainly stopping him in his tracks.”
If Farrell still has room to improve his tackle technique, he continues to be renowned for his competitiveness and willingness to walk towards the sound of gunfire.
“He’s feisty,” says former Wales prop Paul James, on the bench for that match in London.
“Whenever you’d come up against him, you’d know what you were going to get.
“But it’s Wales-England: there’s always an edge to it and a bit of banter. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to be there.”
‘Twas always thus.
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