The Ultimate Try

Over the years, the game of rugby has seen many fantastic tries. From Andy Hancock’s 85 yard dash to snatch a draw from the jaws of defeat, to Philippe Saint-Andre’s own piece of Twickenham magic in 1991 voted Twickenham’s try of the century, and of course via ‘that try’ scored by Gareth Edwards in the opening minutes of the 1973 New Zealand-Barbarians match, we don’t even have to delve into the reams of amazing tries at club level to experience a vast cavalcade of sporting excellence and excitement when it comes to crossing the whitewash. And this has got me thinking; what is the recipe for the perfect try? The ideal, the pinnacle, the best, most exciting and most exquisite possible way to to touch down for five points?

Well, it seems logical to start at the beginning, the try’s inception. To me, a try should start from humble beginnings, a state where the crowd are not excited, and then build to a fantastic crescendo of joy and amazement; so our start point should be humble as well. The job of our first play is to prick the crowd’s attention, to give us the first sniff of something to happen, to offer potential to a situation where, apparently, nothing is on. Surprisingly few situations on a rugby field can offer such innocuous beginnings, but one slightly unusual example was to be found in the buildup to Chris Ashton’s famous try against Australia at Twickenham two years ago; Australia were on the offensive, but England won a turnover ruck. The pressure eased off; now, surely, England would kick it safe. A brief moment of innocuousness, before Ben Youngs spotted a gap.

But the classic in this situation, and the spawn of many a great try, is the moment of receiving a long kick. Here, again, we expect a responding kick, and thus have our period of disinterest before the step and run that begins our try. It was such a reception from Phil Bennett, along with two lovely sidesteps, that precipitated Gareth Edwards’ 1973 try, and I think this may prove the ideal starting point for my try.

Now, to the midsection of this try, which should be fast and fluid. Defender after defender should come and be beaten; and although many a good try has been scored with a ruck halfway through it, the best are uninterrupted start to finish as we build and build both tension and excitement. Here, the choice to begin by receiving a kick plays in our favour, since this naturally produces multiple staggered waves of defenders to beat one at a time as we advance up the pitch. Another key feature for success during this period is variety, for this is when a team shows off its full breadth of skill; possibly the only flaw with the 1973 special is that all defenders are beaten by simple passing. By contrast, Saint-Andre’s try featured everything from slick passing through individual speed and skilful running, capped by a lovely chip to finish things off; it is vitally important that a kick is not utilised too early, where it may slow the try’s pacing. A bit of skill during the kick collection itself helps too, adding a touch of difficulty and class to the move whilst also giving a moment of will he/won’t he tension to really crank it up; every little helps in the search for perfection. A good example of a properly good kick collection occurred in the Super 15 recently, with a sublime one handed pickup on the bounce for Julian Savea as he ran in for the 5 points. For my try, I think we’ll have a bit of everything; a sneaky sidestep or two, some pace to beat a defender on the wing, a bit of outrageous ambition (through-the-legs pass would work well, I think), some silky hands and a nice kick to finish things off; a crossfield would work nicely, I feel.

And the finish, the finish- a crucial and yet under-considered element to any great try. For a try to feel truly special, to reach it’s crowning crescendo, the eventual try scorer must have a good run-in to finish the job. It needn’t be especially long, but prior to the touchdown all the great tries have that moment where everybody knows that the score is about to come- the moment of release that means, when the touchdown does eventually come, our emotions are ones of joy at the moment rather than relief that he’s got it down. However, such an ending does not follow naturally from a crossfield kick, as I have chosen to include in my try, so there will need to be one finishing touch to allow a run in.

Well, we have all the ingredients ready, now to face the final product. So everyone reading this, I invite you to sit back, fill your mind with a stadium and a team, and let Cliff Morgan’s dulcet tones fill your ears with my own little theoretical contribution to the pantheon of rugby greatness:

(I have chosen for my try to be scored in the 2003 World Cup final for England against Australia, or at the least using the teams that finished that match because… well why the hell not?)

“And Robinson collects the kick, deep in his 22… Roff with the chase… Oh, and the step from Robinson, straight past Roff and off he goes… Steps inside, around Smith, this is great stuff from Robinson… and the tackle comes in from Waugh- but a cracking offload and Greenwood’s away up the wing! Greenwood, to Back, flick to Catt… Catt’s over the halfway line, but running into traffic… the pop to Dallaglio, and *oof*! What a hit there, straight through Harrison! Nice pop, back to Greenwood, it’s Greenwood on Larkham… the long pass, out to Cohen on the left… Cohen going for the ball, under pressure from Flatley- and oh, that’s fantastic, through the legs, to Wilkinson! Wilkinson over the 22, coming inside, can he get round Rogers? Wilkinson the golden boy… Oh, the kick! Wilkinson, with the crossfield kick to Lewsey! It’s Lewsey on Tuqiri, in the far corner, Lewsey jumps… Lewsey takes, Lewsey passes to Robinson! What a score!- Lewsey with the midair flick, inside to Robinson, and it’s Robinson over for the try! Robinson started the move, and now he has finished with quite the most remarkable try! What a fantastic score…”

OK, er, sorry about that, I’ll try to be less self-indulgent next time.

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Connections

History is a funny old business; an endless mix of overlapping threads, intermingling stories and repeating patterns that makes fascinating study for anyone who knows where to look. However, the part of it that I enjoy most involves taking the longitudinal view on things, linking two seemingly innocuous, or at least totally unrelated, events and following the trail of breadcrumbs that allow the two to connect. Things get even more interesting when the relationship is causal, so today I am going to follow the trail of one of my favourite little stories; how a single storm was, in the long run, responsible for the Industrial revolution. Especially surprising given that the storm in question occurred in 1064.

This particular storm occurred in the English Channel, and doubtless blew many ships off course, including one that had left from the English port of Bosham (opposite the Isle of Wight). Records don’t say why the ship was making its journey, but what was definitely significant was its passenger; Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex and possibly the most powerful person in the country after King Edward the Confessor. He landed (although that might be overstating the dignity and intention of the process) at Ponthieu, in northern France, and was captured by the local count, who subsequently turned him over to his liege when he, with his famed temper, heard of his visitor: the liege in question was Duke William of Normandy, or ‘William the Bastard’ as he was also known (he was the illegitimate son of the old duke and a tanner). Harold’s next move was (apparently) to accompany his captor to a battle just up the road in Brittany. He then tried to negotiate his freedom, which William accepted, on the condition that he swear an oath to him that, were the childless King Edward to die, he would support William’s claim to the throne (England at the time operated a sort of elective monarchy, where prospective candidates were chosen by a council of nobles known as the Witengamot). According to the Bayeux tapestry, Harold took this oath and left France; but two years later King Edward fell into a coma. With his last moment of consciousness before what was surely an unpleasant death, he apparently gestured to Harold, standing by his bedside. This was taken by Harold, and the Witengamot, as a sign of appointing a successor, and Harold accepted the throne. This understandably infuriated William, who considered this a violation of his oath, and subsequently invaded England. His timing of this coincided with another distant cousin, Harald Hardrada of Norway, deciding to push his claim to the throne, and in the resulting chaos William came to the fore. He became William the Conqueror, and the Normans controlled England for the next several hundred years.

One of the things that the Norman’s brought with them was a newfound view on religion; England was already Christian, but their respective Church’s views on certain subjects differed slightly. One such subject was serfdom, a form of slavery that was very popular among the feudal lords of the time. Serfs were basically slaves, in that they could be bought or sold as commodities; they were legally bound to the land they worked, and were thus traded and owned by the feudal lords who owned the land. In some countries, it was not unusual for one’s lord to change overnight after a drunken card game; Leo Tolstoy lost most of his land in just such an incident, but that’s another story. It was not a good existence for a serf, completely devoid of any form of freedom, but for a feudal lord it was great; cheap, guaranteed labour and thus income from one’s land, and no real risks concerned. However the Norman church’s interpretation of Christianity was morally opposed to the idea, and began to trade serfs for free peasants as a form of agricultural labour. A free peasant was not tied to the land but rented it from his liege, along with the right to use various pieces of land & equipment; the feudal lord still had income, but if he wanted goods from his land he had to pay for it from his peasants, and there were limits on the control he had over them. If a peasant so wished, he could pack up and move to London or wherever, or to join a ship; whatever he wanted in his quest to make his fortune. The vast majority were never faced with this choice as a reasonable idea, but the principle was important- a later Norman king, Henry I, also reorganised the legal system and introduced the role of sheriff, producing a society based around something almost resembling justice.

[It is worth noting that the very last serfs were not freed until the reign of Queen Elizabeth in the 1500s, and that subsequent British generations during the 18th century had absolutely no problem with trading in black slaves, but they justified that partly by never actually seeing the slaves and partly by taking the view that the black people weren’t proper humans anyway. We can be disgusting creatures]

A third Norman king further enhanced this concept of justice, even if completely by accident. King John was the younger brother of inexplicable national hero King Richard I, aka Richard the Lionheart or Couer-de-Lion (seriously, the dude was a Frenchman who visited England twice, both to raise money for his military campaigns, and later levied the largest ransom in history on his people when he had to be released by the Holy Roman Emperor- how he came to national prominence I will never know), and John was unpopular. He levied heavy taxes on his people to pay for costly and invariably unsuccessful military campaigns, and whilst various incarnations of Robin Hood have made him seem a lot more malevolent than he probably was, he was not a good King. He was also harsh to his people, and successfully pissed off peasant and noble alike; eventually the Norman Barons presented John with an ultimatum to limit his power, and restore some of theirs. However, the wording of the document also granted some basic and fundamental rights to the common people as well; this document was known as the Magna Carta; one of the most important legal documents in history, and arguably the cornerstone in the temple of western democracy.

The long-term ramifacations of this were huge; numerous wars were fought over the power it gave the nobility in the coming centuries, and Henry II (9 years old when he took over from father John) was eventually forced to call the first parliament; which, crucially, featured both barons (the noblemen, in what would soon become the House of Lords) and burghers (administrative leaders and representatives of the cities & commoners, in the House of Commons). The Black Death (which wiped out most of the peasant population and thus raised the value of the few who were left) greatly increased the value and importance of peasants across Europe for purely economic reasons for a few years, but over the next few centuries multiple generations of kings in several countries would slowly return things to the old ways, with them on top and their nobles kept subservient. In countries such as France, a nobleman got himself power, rank, influence and wealth by getting into bed with the king (in the cases of some ambitious noblewomen, quite literally); but in England the existence of a Parliament meant that no matter how much the king’s power increased through the reign of Plantagenets, Tudors and Stuarts, the gentry had some form of national power and community- and that the people were, to some nominal degree, represented as well. This in turn meant that it became not uncommon for the nobility and high-ranking (or at least rich) ordinary people to come into contact, and created a very fluid class system. Whilst in France a middle class businessman was looked on with disdain by the lords, in Britain he would be far more likely to be offered a peerage; nowadays the practice is considered undemocratic, but this was the cutting edge of societal advancement several hundred years ago. It was this ‘lower’ class of gentry, comprising the likes of John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell, who would precipitate the English Civil War as King Charles I tried to rule without Parliament altogether (as opposed to his predecessors  who merely chose to not listen to them a lot of the time); when the monarchy was restored (after several years of bloodshed and puritan brutality at the hands of Cromwell’s New Model Army, and a seemingly paradoxical few decades spent with Cromwell governing with only a token parliament, when he used them at all), parliament was the political force in Britain. When James II once again tried his dad’s tactic of proclaiming himself god-sent ruler whom all should respect unquestioningly, Parliament’s response was to invite the Dutch King William of Orange over to replace James and become William III, which he duly did. Throughout the reign of the remaining Stuarts and the Hanoverian monarchs (George I to Queen Victoria), the power of the monarch became steadily more and more ceremonial as the two key political factions of the day, the Whigs (later to become the Liberal, and subsequently Liberal Democrat, Party) and the Tories (as today’s Conservative Party is still known) slugged it out for control of Parliament, the newly created role of ‘First Lord of the Treasury’ (or Prime Minister- the job wasn’t regularly selected from among the commons for another century or so) and, eventually, the country. This brought political stability, and it brought about the foundations of modern democracy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; what does this have to do with the Industrial Revolution? Well, we can partly blame the political and financial stability at the time, enabling corporations and big business to operate simply and effectively among ambitious individuals wishing to exploit potential; but I think that the key reason it occurred has to do with those ambitious people themselves. In Eastern Europe & Russia, in particular, there were two classes of people; nobility who were simply content to scheme and enjoy their power, and the masses of illiterate serfs. In most of Western Europe, there was a growing middle class, but the monarchy and nobility were united in keeping them under their thumb and preventing them from making any serious impact on the world. The French got a bloodthirsty revolution and political chaos as an added bonus, whilst the Russians waited for another century to finally get sufficiently pissed of at the Czar to precipitate a communist revolution. In Britain, however, there were no serfs, and corporations were built from the middle classes. These people’s primary concerns wasn’t rank or long-running feuds, disagreements over land or who was sleeping with the king; they wanted to make money, and would do so by every means at their disposal. This was an environment ripe for entrepreneurism, for an idea worth thousands to take the world by storm, and they did so with relish. The likes of Arkwright, Stephenson and Watt came from the middle classes and were backed by middle class industry, and the rest of Britain came along for the ride as Britain’s coincidentally vast coal resources were put to good use in powering the change. Per capita income, population and living standards all soared, and despite the horrors that an age of unregulated industry certainly wrought on its populace, it was this period of unprecedented change that was the vital step in the formation of the world as we know it today. And to think that all this can be traced, through centuries of political change, to the genes of uselessness that would later become King John crossing the channel after one unfortunate shipwreck…

And apologies, this post ended up being a lot longer than I intended it to be