Try-fest with big issues below the surface

THE Paris Games, more formally known as the XXXIII Olympiad, are almost upon us and the Rugby Sevens schedule is full to overflowing. Yet there is still time to include a new competition for the union world’s least productive employees, with podium contenders including Steve Borthwick’s joke writer, Owen Farrell’s anger management counsellor, the Television Match Officials’ in-house optician and, in the aftermath of last weekend’s Champions Cup quarter-finals, the entire roster of specialist defence coaches.

Forty-one tries in four matches? That’s an awful lot in anyone’s language and a seriously stupid amount in the stark, unforgiving tongue of knock-out rugby. If you crammed all those five-pointers into a single jam jar, Billy Bunter would throw away his spoon and take up fasting.

You do not have to be a professor of pure mathematics to work out the average number of successful raids on the broken goal-lines of Bordeaux, Dublin, Northampton and Toulouse, or a doctor of philosophy to wonder if there is any role more futile in the whole of top-level sport than that of “defence strategist”. When big-time union manages to make basketball look like a scoreless desert, it is reasonable to ask some very hard questions of those coaches charged with raising the barricades, and one question in particular. Namely: “What are you actually for?”

Agreed, there were some mitigating circumstances. The Bulls, shame on them, travelled from the highveld of South Africa to the low-lying flatlands of the English Midlands with nothing more threatening than a bunch of second-stringers and a white flag on a stick. Exeter? They ran into a Toulouse side in must-win mood and leaked second-half tries like a sieve, which can happen to anyone down there in Dupont land.

And even though the free-scoring extravaganza involving Bordeaux and Harlequins was sensational in its way, the precise details of the dozen tries shared by two teams quickly disappeared into the fog. Artificial intelligence might have the bandwidth to process all that information, but the bog-standard human brain? No chance.

Maybe this is an age thing, an addled trip down Nostalgia Lane, but when the Heineken Cup of blessed memory was revelling in its golden age, tries seemed immeasurably harder to come by – more akin to a goal in any game of football not involving Manchester City, or a “time gentlemen please” knock-out blow in a heavyweight title fight – and lived longer in the mind’s eye.

Take the European campaign in 2005-06 – the first of Munster’s glorious triumphs – as an example. The Irish province took on Perpignan in the last eight, a fixture played in Dublin in front of 50,000 spectators give or take, and squeezed home 19-10. The touchdown count? Just the two. Across the water in England, there was a tryless tie between Leicester and Bath, which the West Countrymen edged by the odd penalty in nine. Down in the Basque lands, Biarritz made it through against Sale in a one-try contest.

The strike rate in the remaining quarter-final tie was positively blitzlike by comparison, with Leinster producing one of their defining performances in hunting down Toulouse on their own estate. Brian O’Driscoll and company were given a standing ovation by the local crowd, who knew a peerless attacking performance when they saw one, having witnessed plenty from their own team down the years, and the public prints unanimously lauded it as a major imaginative leap for rugby in these islands.

And how many tries did Leinster score that day? Four. Not seven, or a dozen, or 48. Four. And your columnist can still shut his eyes and see at least three of them, from first pass to touchdown. At least, he thinks he can. A qualified doctor might tell him otherwise.

For all its skin-deep glitz and glamour, there were significant issues below the surface of last week’s tryfest. Ten and a quarter tries a game suggested an imbalance between attack and defence – an imbalance that is not, and never has been, apparent in football, the world’s most popular sport, where the main event, the scoring of a goal, is cherished as a climactic moment rather than shrugged off as a triviality.

Rugby holds true to the football model when it comes to World Cup finals. The All Blacks, miles better than anyone else in the 1987 tournament, outclassed France in the final, but found themselves restricted to a 3-1 try advantage even so. Thereafter, touchdowns were rarer than snow leopards: one in 1991, none in ’95, two in ’99 and again in ’03, nada in ’07, no more than a couple in 2011.

Then came the nearest thing to a classic final, when a great New Zealand side put three tries past an excellent Wallaby vintage, who registered two of their own. It was a brilliant occasion, raised to new heights by the rarity of its free-flowing spirit. If the cycle continues, we won’t see another like it until 2039.

And that will be okay, if we accept that too much of a good thing is not good for any of us.

“More than ten tries a game suggests an imbalance between attack and defence”