Six Nations Anthems Compared: What Each Team Sings and Why It Matters

There is a moment on any Six Nations weekend when the noise stops and becomes something else. The teams are lined up, the referee has stepped back, and the first bar of an anthem goes up. Everything after it will be argued about for a week. The anthem is the one part nobody disputes.

Except they do dispute it, constantly. These six teams do not sing six straightforward national anthems. One side sings two. One sings in a language its governing body does not use for business. Another argues with itself every few years about whether it picked the right song.

Here is what each team sings, where the songs came from, and how to hold your own in the stands.

England: A UK Anthem Sung by an England Team

England walk out to God Save the King, which is not an English anthem at all. It belongs to the United Kingdom and does duty at state occasions; Scotland and Wales have their own songs, which leaves England borrowing from the shared shelf.

That has kept a long conversation going about whether England should have an anthem of its own. Jerusalem, Hubert Parry's setting of William Blake, is used by England at the Commonwealth Games, and Land of Hope and Glory is raised every few years. The RFU has stuck with the familiar arrangement, partly for the occasion of it and partly because changing an anthem guarantees an argument.

England's real anthem is not played by any band. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, a nineteenth-century African-American spiritual, has been a Twickenham staple since the crowd took it up in the late 1980s, and it is the one song the whole ground knows.

Ireland: Two Songs for One Team

Ireland's arrangement is the most unusual in the championship, because the team draws on two jurisdictions. The compromise, in place since 1995, is Ireland's Call, written for the purpose by Phil Coulter. It is played at every Ireland match, home and away.

In Dublin it comes second. Amhrán na bhFiann — The Soldier's Song, the anthem of the Republic — is played first, then Ireland's Call. Away from Dublin, only Ireland's Call is heard.

Critics have called Ireland's Call a committee song. It does the job it was written for, though: it gives players from Belfast and Ballymena, Cork and Coleraine something they can all sing without caveat. Where the alternative was an awkward silence, that counts.

Scotland: Bannockburn in Four Minutes

Scotland sing Flower of Scotland, written by Roy Williamson of the folk duo The Corries and adopted by the rugby team in 1990, replacing Scotland the Brave.

It is a ballad about Bannockburn in 1314, when Robert the Bruce's army saw off Edward II, and it makes no effort to be neutral: the closing line about sending the English "homeward tae think again" is sung with feeling at Murrayfield. It is also one of the easier anthems to sing, a slow melody with a repeating chorus.

Every few years somebody suggests Scotland the Brave, Caledonia or Highland Cathedral instead, and every few years Murrayfield answers by singing Flower of Scotland loudly enough to postpone the debate.

Wales: The Oldest Song in the Championship

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau — Land of My Fathers — was written in 1856 by Evan James and his son James James, both of Pontypridd. It is sung in Welsh and is older than the tournament it opens.

Wales also has a strong claim to the tradition of singing anthems at sport at all. When Wales hosted New Zealand at Cardiff in 1905, the crowd answered the haka with Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau — a moment often credited as the first time an anthem was sung before an international fixture. Historians quibble; the habit stuck either way.

Modern Wales matches have their own ritual. The band often drops out near the end and leaves the stands to carry the last lines alone, which is the loudest few seconds of the afternoon. In recent years Dafydd Iwan's Yma o Hyd, first adopted by the football team, has been heard at rugby grounds too.

France: La Marseillaise, Taken Over by the Crowd

La Marseillaise started life in 1792 as a marching song for the French army, written by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, and became the national anthem in 1795. The tune is a call to arms and the words are about as belligerent as that suggests.

French crowds treat it that way. At the Stade de France the anthem is less a performance for the audience than the audience itself: a soloist may begin it, but by the chorus the whole ground has joined in, and the noise often rolls on past the final note.

Italy: Mameli's Hymn and the Long Game

Italy sing Il Canto degli Italiani, better known as Fratelli d'Italia from its opening line, or Inno di Mameli after Goffredo Mameli, who wrote the words in 1847. Michele Novaro wrote the music that year. It was a Risorgimento marching song long before it was anything official: a provisional anthem from 1946, formally adopted by law only in 2017.

Italy joined the championship in 2000 as the newest of the Six Nations, and the players sing their anthem hard, belting it rather than mouthing it. For a side that has spent two decades being told it does not belong, that lands differently.

The Six Anthems at a Glance

• England — God Save the King, a UK anthem, with Jerusalem used elsewhere and Swing Low as the crowd's own song.
• Ireland — Ireland's Call everywhere, plus Amhrán na bhFiann at home in Dublin.
• Scotland — Flower of Scotland, in English, about Bannockburn.
• Wales — Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, in Welsh, written in 1856.
• France — La Marseillaise, from 1792, sung by the whole ground.
• Italy — Il Canto degli Italiani (Fratelli d'Italia), from 1847.

How to Sing Along Without Getting It Wrong

You do not need the whole song. Learn the first line and the chorus of each anthem, and you will be in the right place when the crowd swells. Nobody has ever been ejected for mumbling the middle verses.

• Check the running order. Two songs are played in Dublin, and the Republic's comes first. In Cardiff, wait for the final note before you sit down.
• Stand, and stay quiet. The anthem is the one moment in the afternoon when the ground is asked to be silent. Talking through it gets noticed.
• Do not boo. It happens, and it always sounds worse from inside the ground than it does on television.
• Watch the players, not the big screen. Who is singing and who is staring at the turf tells you something about the next eighty minutes.

Get the words half right, stand when everyone else stands, and you have the best four minutes of the warm-up. The rest is rugby.

Photo: romain109 / Pixabay