SPECTATOR SPORT
The moment of inspiration
Simon Barnes
THERE is a line in Kipling's tale of polo and its ponies, The Maltese Cat, that I have always liked. 'It was then that Powell, a quiet and level-headed man as a rule, became inspired and played a stroke that sometimes comes off successfully on a quiet afternoon of long practice. He took his stick in both hands, and standing up in his stirrups, swiped at the ball in the air, Muni- pore fashion. There was one second of paralysed astonishment, and then all four sides of the ground went up in a yell of applause and delight as the ball flew true.'
Sport occasionally brings us these extraor- dinary moments when an athlete, in the stress of the most testing competition of his life, seems to step beyond not only his own abilities but his own nature. Such a moment came last weekend, when the British Lions, apparently in the midst of a bruising and los- ing battle against South Africa in Cape Town, turned the game on its head because a quiet and level-headed man became inspired and tried something — well, he said after- wards that he had not tried anything so ludi- crous, so utterly outrageous since he played for RGS High Wycombe. His name is Matt Dawson, considered by some a fourth choice for the position as Lions' scrum-half. He was in the middle of a game of violent and conta- gious passion, and then came his moment of inspiration. Now a dummy — a faked pass — in either code of rugby is normally a little double-handed movement accompanied by a sharp look in the wrong direction. But this was a dummy of demented propor- tions. Dawson half-stopped and looked to play a huge, arching, looping pass over his head, basketball (rather than Munipore) fashion.
In the post-mortems, some have won- dered audibly whether it was intended as a dummy. But the point is irrelevant; the pass would have been more extravagant even than the dummy. The fact is that Dawson hung onto the ball and three, four, five South Africans stopped in their tracks to cover the consequences of the pass that never came. They, in the jargon, bought the dummy. And because of it Dawson was able to move gently between the briefly statuesque South Africans and touch down, the Lions were able to steal an extraordinary victory, and Dawson was able to spout all the usual stuff about the team effort and the for- wards doing all the real work. So they did, so they always do, but it was Dawson's extraordinary moment of inspira- tion that won the damn thing. What made it perfect was the way the inspiration came from so unlikely a source. There seems to be little of extravagance in Dawson's make- up. He is a man whom nature and his own hand have conspired to rob of most of his hair; truculent, curmudgeonly, combative, with much of the poison dwarf about him. That, after all, is what scrum halves are supposed to be like.
I have seen such moments before, such heady inspiration and so unlikely a conduit. I remember N.M.K. Smith, an unextraordi- nary off-spinner chiefly famous for being the son of M.J.K. Smith, belting a last-ball six to win a cup final for Warwickshire. I remember Billy Bates, who came onto the roster as an afterthought for the Cincinnati Reds, and then won them the second match in the 1990 World Series. 'Sometimes', he said, 'it is better to be lucky than good.'
But it is not precisely luck, nor is it quite abut seizing the moment; it is more a matter of having the moment seize you. The cre- ation of that 'second of paralysed astonish- ment' is not something that comes to the great names, the great achievers. With them, these things happen as a matter of course. The great astonishments of the Dawson kind are created by the perfect unlikeliness of the source. It is an achievement beyond the reach of genius — that is its beauty.
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