THEY do say that history is written by the winners, so it should be no great surprise that there has been a tartan tinge to most accounts of what happened at Murrayfield on 17 March, 1990.

Scotland's 13-7 victory over England that day clinched the Grand Slam and made legends of everyone involved, cementing Ian McGeechan's reputation as the greatest coach of the age.

But what of the losers? And what, particularly, of Roger Uttley, McGeechan's English counterpart? The two men are near contemporaries, and forged a successful coaching partnership with the 1989 Lions in Australia, but while McGeechan maintains a high profile with many interests in and around rugby, Uttley has faded far into the background.

In rugby, he stayed on as England coach until the 1991 World Cup. He returned, briefly, as England manager as few years later, but the job was axed as a cost-cutting measure. Professionally, he carried on as head of PE at Harrow before retiring in 2009. For a while he lived in a remote part of Northumberland, but recently returned south to be closer to his grandchildren.

So as its 25th anniversary looms, how does he reflect on that Murrayfield defeat now? The question provokes a wince. "It wasn't the best moment of my life," he says. "It was on a par with running the London Marathon and feeling rather bad at the end of it."

The pain lingered at the time as well. England's travel arrangements that weekend obliged them to hang around in Edinburgh before catching an evening flight south. As the locals were all but dancing in the streets of the Scottish capital on the Sunday, it was an excruciating experience for Uttley and his players, most of whom hid away in the team hotel on Princes Street. They would have been perfectly happy to head homeward to think again - if only they could.

The Scottish narrative of the game has tended to cast the English players as arrogant and over-confident. They certainly had a right to feel good about themselves that year. On the road to Murrayfield, they had trounced France, Wales and Ireland by an average margin of 23 points, scoring 11 tries in the process. Scotland's winning average was nine, their try tally just five.

But Uttley dismisses the suggestion that hubris played any part. "These games were always finely balanced back then," he says. "I know we were favourites, and probably deserved to be, but we certainly did not take Scotland lightly. A lot of the English players knew the Scots from the Lions tour the previous year and they knew how good they were.

"We had trained in Galashiels on Friday morning. There was a lot of media there and afterwards we had a press conference and everyone agreed that it was the best training session that anybody had seen from a northern hemisphere side. It bore comparison with anything the All Blacks were doing at the time. In retrospect, I think we just peaked 24 hours too early.

"Historically, a lot of teams, particularly Scotland, seemed to think that if they beat England then they had had a decent season. That's the thing that we in England have always had to cope with. On that occasion I genuinely think we weren't overconfident or arrogant, we were just slightly over the top preparation-wise.

"Scotland, on the other hand, could have been reading those reports at the time and thinking that they really had to be at their best to beat us. In rugby, you might not be the best side, but if you can go out there and stop the other side from playing, which was relatively easy to do back then, then you have a chance. Scotland have always been great at spoiling."

There is probably little consolation for Uttley now in watching a video of the game that shows Tony Stanger's famous try to be a tad suspect as he appears to touch the ball down on his leg and then lose control of it before the actual grounding. In those pre-TMO days, things like that were not picked up. But it was somehow typical of a day in which almost nothing went right for England.

"It was just one of those games where things didn't run for us," says Uttley. "It was a massive disappointment. And as Scotland got their tails up it became more and more difficult."

Was there a single moment when he realised things were not going according to the script? Uttley smiles. "When they walked out," he replies. "That was interesting.

"Scotland were a good team. They had a lot of players with the Lions in 1989, so I always knew it would be a competitive match. On the day they just got it right and that's just one of those things."