SPECTATOR SPORT
Nice try
Frank Keating
TO THE loser, certainly the romantic spoils for posterity. England fully deserved their first clean-sweep rugby union cham- pionship for 11 years at the end of a tumultuous dogfight at Twickenham on Saturday, but only after France had rattled the rafters by scoring the best try in history — or, okay, if that's a bit much, the finest in an international match at Twickenham since the stadium was opened 80 years ago. It was a 17-second passage of glittering panache from line to line — Blanco, the captain, opening up behind his own posts to set alight a coruscating, full-pelt prog- ress by his confreres, which riddled the spine and ended with the partisan throng of 60,000, to its warm-hearted and chivalrous credit, on its feet in hipflasked hooray- manship and thanksgiving. Only afterwards in the car-park quag- mire, with the water getting into the wine, did old men begin to doubt their exhilara- tion of just a couple of hours before. Ah, m'boy, but you never saw Obolensky's try against New Zealand in 1936, they chal- lenged with the rheumy, bloodshot certain- ty of age.
What about Jackson's dragonfly dart against Australia in '58, said another? Or Sharp making fools of Scotland that day? Or Andy Hancock's defiant, last ditch, dash in the dusk one teatime more than a quarter of a century ago? Oh, sure, you dear old slippered panta- loon, but they were all solo things, one man one-offs — and my time has seen a few of those as well: and, offhand, I gave them Bennett and Gareth against Scot- land, Mourie against Wales in 1980, and Kirkpatrick against the Lions in '84. But the essence must surely be the team score, the collective — and the very nature of the game has altered only recently to have forwards as fast as three-quarters and backs as tough as scrummagers. The two, generally accepted, grandest tries in the all-time canon were scored by the Barba- rians at Cardiff in 1973, and the British Lions at Potchefstroom, high on the Trans- vaal veldt, in 1980. I saw them both, and every replay on television still takes the breath. But both were in, to all intents, 'friendly' matches, and certainly not over- whelmed — as on Saturday when Blanco and the French dared with such brio and opulence — with the safety-first intensity of a championship decider. I left the car-park and went to find Blanco fussing over his team in the Twick- enham dungeons. He had changed and was, as ever, chain-smoking. He shrugged. How can you explain such things in sport? The try? 11 est communion. Ii est spontane instante, instinctif.' That, to be sure, is all there is to be said on such occasions. Sportsmen should never be asked to ex- plain — to `talk Brian through it' as the soccer men ask — a spontaneous, instinc- tive flare that they suddenly find them- selves igniting.
One of Twickenham's best and most ebullient individual tries I remember was in 1972 when that quicksilver centre from Ireland, Kevin Flynn, unaccountably, but joyously, burst through England's defences in the final minute to win the match. Afterwards, we all jostled round the de- lighted wee fellow and cross-examined him about the call he had made to his fly-half, Barry McGann, which had helped wrong- foot the English. He had shouted 'inside!' but had gone outside. 'Sure, lads', he said, 'our system is based totally on McGann doing exactly the opposite of what you want him to do.' Then his face creased into a beguiling, toothless smile — 'to tell you the truth, fellows, at a time like that, to score a try like that, nobody knows what the hell is going to happen, or remotely how it happens. It just happens.'
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