THERE was a time when Scotland regularly went down to Twickenham in search of a Triple Crown - or at least, more regularly than has been the case these past couple of decades. When there was no need to count up the years since they had last tasted victory there, because you could have done it on the fingers of one hand. When the gap between wins was not so large that not a single member of the playing squad had been born the last time.

In 1975, for example - although Scotland had last won the Triple Crown way back in 1938 - only four years had elapsed since their last victory at Twickenham. That had been part of a unique double-header, in which Scotland won 16-15 in the Five Nations Championship, then beat England again at Murrayfield just seven days later in a match to celebrate the centenary of the Rugby Football Union.

The intervening visit in 1973 had been a fairly close contest, when, bidding for a Triple Crown in their own centenary season, Scotland went down 20-13. In 1975 the same prize was on offer, and this time the result was closer still, with England winning 7-6.

Scrum-half Dougie Morgan had twice given Scotland the lead either side of a Neil Bennett penalty, and even after an Alan Morley try had put England ahead, the visitors were still in the game - and that was despite having lost Nairn MacEwan to a broken jaw after only four minutes. In the closing stages of the game, Morgan had two chances, both penalties, to put Scotland in front, but missed both times. Ian McGeechan was off target too with a drop-goal attempt, and the chance of the Calcutta Cup, the Triple Crown and a share of the Championship was gone.

Andy Irvine later insisted that he had beaten Morley in a race for the ball, but that the referee awarded the Englishman the try. “Andy definitely touched the ball first,” was the verdict of Ian Barnes, who had come on for the injured MacEwan. Interviewed in the book Behind The Thistle decades later, Barnes also recalled the terse verdict of Jim Renwick as he looked at a disconsolate Morgan in the dressing room after the match: “Hell Dougie, I could have back-heeled a chest of drawers over from there.”

In 1979 Scotland got a 7-7 draw thanks to a John Rutherford try and an Irvine penalty, but they had already lost their opening game of the Championship at home to Wales a fortnight earlier. After the 1983 triumph had taken the Triple Crown north of the Border at last, Scotland next played for that prize at Twickenham in 1987, in a match postponed from January to April because of snow. England won 21-12.

It was a margin that flattered Scotland, for whom Keith Robertson scored a late consolation try, converted by Gavin Hastings. “If we had played them then [in January] I’m sure we would have smashed them,” the full-back said later. “But we played appallingly and lost.”

In 1989 the journey to London was for the second match of the tournament, so there was no Triple Crown on offer there and then. The match was drawn 12-12, with Scotland’s points coming from a John Jeffrey try and two penalties and a conversion from Peter Dods. But Scotland, who had already beaten Wales at home, would go on to defeat Ireland too - meaning in retrospect that there was just one solitary point separating them from the mythical prize.

Although Scotland led 9-6 at the break and went further ahead in the second half, England had more than enough opportunities to win. Rob Andrew, normally so reliable, was off target with a late penalty attempt that would have won the game for the home team, while full-back Jonathan Webb also suffered an off day with the boot. Between them, the two English backs missed seven penalties, and it was perhaps frustration with those failures that led Geoff Cooke, the England coach, to label Scotland ‘scavengers’.

Cooke’s implication was that the Scots had killed the ball whenever they could instead of doing anything creative - far from the only time in which an English player or official has bemoaned a successful bid by opponents to stifle his own team. From a Scottish perspective, the reality was that England’s backs had failed to capitalise on the fact that their forwards had the upper hand. If anything, those backs were the ones lacking in creativity, while Scotland, of course, had every right to defend as vigorously as possible within the laws of the game.

There was another ‘one that got away’ in 1991: a Twickenham match which, in retrospect only, would have been part of a Triple Crown but for the small detail that Scotland lost it. Having beaten Wales 32-12 in the opening match of the Championship, the Scots headed south with high hopes of emulating their historic victory of the previous year - the 13-7 win at Murrayfield that had given them the Grand Slam. Instead, they lost 21-12 as the English pack took a stranglehold on the game.

In 1993 Scotland headed south with wins over Ireland and Wales already in the bag, although a defeat in France meant they had no chance of another Grand Slam. Although they were twice in the lead, they were behind by half-time and went down to a convincing 26-12 defeat.

Two years later, as recalled elsewhere in these pages, one more tilt at a Twickenham Triple Crown - this one for a Grand Slam too - ended in failure. And so, skipping neatly over a mere 22 years, to Saturday.