DAVID BECKHAM’S career-defining last-gasp free-kick against Greece.
Paul Ince’s belligerence with a bandaged head in Rome.
Michael Atherton’s longest and greatest innings of 185 not out in almost 11 hours at Johannesburg.
Monty Panesar’s unlikely Ashes heroics as a No 11 batsman at Cardiff.
The late Cheick Tiote’s stunning strike to complete Newcastle’s recovery from 4-0 down against Arsenal in one of the Premier League’s most memorable matches.
What do these great sporting moments have in common? They were all magnificent efforts made to earn draws.
So would you have wanted to change the outcome of any of those contests? With extra-time or a penalty shoot-out or a game of paper-scissors-stone?
Probably only if you’re an American.
most read in sport
But at Auckland on Saturday night, when the All Blacks and the British & Irish Lions ended up 15-15 to tie their compelling three-match Test series, it seemed like the very concept of a sporting draw was under threat.
There was much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth about the fact that an epic series had ended all square and an insistence that, one way or another, we ought to have contrived a winner.
It’s not immediately apparent where this widespread feeling came from – around a quarter of all football matches end in draws, along with many domestic rugby contests, while a fair number of Test cricket matches last five days without either team ever looking like winning.
So draws have always been deemed perfectly acceptable, outside of knock-out competitions.
And the Irishmen on the Lions tour will tell you that Gaelic football and hurling do not just accept draws, they actively *encourage *them.
Famously, if an All Ireland Final, in front of a 73,500 full house at Croke Park, is anything like close, a referee will often carry on playing until the scores are even, just so they can fill the place all over again for a replay – making the GAA governing body another £3million in gate receipts.
Yet when it came to the Lions, a draw was widely deemed to have been anticlimactic and wholly unsatisfactory.
From the Kiwis, there were frequent repetitions of an old saying emanating in American Football that obtaining a draw was ‘like kissing your sister’ – although the idea that incest is somehow a double-edged sword was lost on those of us from less remote areas.
But the two captains, Sam Warburton and Kieran Read, had to lift the trophy one handle apiece, with both stating they’d have preferred extra-time – Lions skipper Warburton, even saying he’d been preparing for it, unaware that a draw would simply be a draw.
Read said it felt unsatisfactory that after weeks of effort, we’d ended up back where we’d started.
Except that we hadn’t really. We’d experienced three weeks of riveting drama, the All Blacks provided with genuine and much-needed competition by a Lions side which had come close to achieving what had seemed impossible.
Almost everyone outside of the Lions squad expected New Zealand’s back-to-back world champions to win the series, and probably 3-0 – as they had the last time these two most famous of rugby teams had met a dozen years ago.
Instead, the Lions proved themselves the equals of the finest team on the planet – not the superiors, because they’d led for only three minutes in four hours of rugby, but the equals nevertheless.
Like the finest hours of Atherton and Ince, they had proven themselves dogged and indomitable in earning the glory of an unlikely draw.
And while the All Blacks hadn’t been as good as we’d expected, they still dominated for long spells and didn’t deserve to lose any more than the Lions did.
Some said it was a shame that everyone had to shuffle around awkwardly before the presentation ceremony and that they couldn’t detonate orange explosions and thousands of tinfoil streamers on the winners.
But many of us quite enjoyed the fact that all that usual post-match guff had to be curtailed.
Because elite sport hasn’t yet become just another TV talent show, employing Dermot O’Leary as a professional hugger – congratulating arbitrary winners, consoling tearful losers - while Ant and Dec giggle away like ninnies stage-right.
It’s more dignified, more meaningful, more noble, than all of that.
And sometimes a damned good draw is the perfect example.
Fake Roomance
IF Wayne Rooney’s move back to Everton is held up as a rare example of romance in football, then the game’s fallen lower than we imagined.
From Everton’s point of view, any ‘romance’ surrounding Rooney’s Goodison return is commercially-driven.
He remains a marketable commodity but is no longer a top-class footballer, as Ronald Koeman would surely concede privately.
The announcement that the boyhood Toffees fan has been sleeping in Everton pyjamas was a nice PR line.
And a job lot of Rooney PJs will be en route to the club shop imminently…
Stump up or shut up
ONE of the greatest myths in cricket is the idea that ‘sledging’ is so inherently witty, that Oscar Wilde would have loved to bowl left-arm over at Peter Ustinov, just for the quality of the badinage.
In reality, though, it’s mostly bowlers and batsmen telling each other to ‘f*** off’.
So when South Africa’s exciting fast bowler Kagiso Rabada was suspended from the Second Test against England for saying just that, after he’d dismissing Ben Stokes at Lord’s, how exactly did the game benefit?
If industrial language showed up on the stump mike, then get rid of the stump mike. Either that or everybody could just grow up.
Hansen nab could give England a lift
ENGLAND’S rugby union team have thrived under Eddie Jones – an engaging, straight-talking, massively quotable Aussie who also happens to be a very fine coach.
If the RFU are looking for something similar after Jones moves on following the 2019 World Cup, they could do far worse than recruit current All Blacks chief Steve Hansen - a gruff, spade’s-a-spade Kiwi country boy whose typical soundbite goes something like: "It’s a big boys’ game played by big boys, my old mate".
Hansen may have seen his world champions held to a shock series draw by the British & Irish Lions but, like Jones, he’s proved that he’s great box office.
Keeper kit is taking the pizz
WYCOMBE’S Barry Richardson has been explaining the club’s new goalkeepers’ kit — seemingly based on the sort of pavement pizza you’d throw up after dining on radioactive waste.
Richardson, a coach and second-choice goalie at Adams Park, says: “I had a kaleidoscope as a kid. I remember looking at it and it drew my eyes into the middle.
“With all the sparkly colours, you could see them all on the peripheral, but your eyes are always drawn to the centre.”
Which must be the first time in history that an employee of a fourth division football club has flawlessly quoted Dylan the Rabbit from The Magic Roundabout.
Ry's wise to resist Prem giants
SO England thrashed Germany 4-1 at the Euro Under-19 Championships and the doom-mongers are at it again — ‘Yeah but how many of them will ever play regularly in the Premier League?’
Well two-goal hero Ryan Sessegnon might, for starters.
The left-back, 17, has turned down every top-six club to prove himself by playing regularly in the Championship at Fulham, rather than ending up in a big club’s reserves or going out on a bewildering succession of loans.
It’s up to young players and their advisors to make the right long-term decisions. Nobody forces them at gunpoint to earn millions for not playing first-team football.
Leave a comment