It must have been about my ninth birthday when an Irish uncle sent me a slim, elementary instruction book, Rugby: Do It This Way, by the veteran Emerald Isle half-back Mark Sugden. He inscribed it: "To Francis – Enjoy a lifetime of fast hard running, crisp low tackling, and a large sackful of tries."
The middle of those genial entreaties – the crisp, low tackle – is now as dead as the Python parrot. Rugby does not refer to tackles any more, certainly not low ones. Tackles are collisions, intentionally hurtful collisions. A playing field with the capital H at each end is now a major crash site – bell-clanging ambulances, rushing paramedics and all. For those fields now reverberate only with "hits" and the bigger the hit the better. Licensed Neanderthal muggings. Dumper-truck v JCB. Zap! Pow! Ugh!
After 313 games for Wasps, 78 for England and a Test for the Lions, Joe Worsley retired last week at 34. Was he the last of the olde-tyme tacklers – crisp and low and conclusive? On his own, one might say, Worsley won the Heineken Cup final of 2004 with a remorselessly unforgiving 33 solo tackles against Toulouse – and three years later he ensured England's place in the 2007 World Cup final in the dying minutes of the semi-final when he lassoed at the ankles the exultantly headlong French sprinter Vincent Clerc – crisp, low and terminally conclusive.
The first fabled low-tackle tale to lodge in my boyhood ken was a Welsh neighbour's telling of how he had been in an enraptured Cardiff throng two years before I was born when the full-back Viv Jenkins secured with epic defiance Wales's (still) most lustrous victory, against the 1935 All Blacks, as he homed in at the ankles of the full-pelt, seemingly home-and-dry Kiwi winger George Hart. As the WRU's official history hurrahs: "… only yards short of the corner flag, Jenkins launched himself in a hurtling horizontal which engulfed Hart like a flying landslide".
Any winter reverie around this time triggers recall back to the mists and my first University match when we muddy schoolboys were allowed to listen in the common room to the crackly wireless commentary from Twickenham in the teatime gloaming of December 1949, a close encounter of the desperate kind decided at the very last by the cornerflagging secateurs' job on Gloucestershire's light-blue hare J V Smith when Oxford's Cornishman, John McGregor Kendall‑Carpenter, cut him down in the final stride of a palpitating length‑of-the-field chase.
It would be a shame to let this year pass without an intake of breath to mark the half-century since the Swansea sailor Haydn Mainwaring's dauntless flying tackle which shuddered the seismograph when, for the Barbarians at Cardiff in 1961, he sandbagged the rampaging Springbok captain, another matelot Avril Malan. Mainwaring's imperishable spreadeagling of Malan was a venomously timed no-hands shoulder-charge which, strictly speaking, would be penalised even today, as was – same field, different cornerflag, 15 years later – JPR Williams's unforgettably resounding one-man convulsion which so spooked France's quailing Jean-François Gourdon and secured a grand slam in 1976.
As a nod to Worsley's going here is my offhand 40-year clutch of remembered match-turning, old-testament thunderclaps. A Top 20 – some off the telly, I admit – to stir an oldie's memory: 1971 John Taylor (Lions) on Bruce Hunter (New Zealand); 1978 Seamus Dennison (Munster) on Stu Wilson (New Zealand); 1983 Ollie Campbell (Lions) on Murray Mexted (New Zealand); 1987 John Kirwan (New Zealand) on Ieaun Evans (Wales); 1990 Scott Hastings (Scotland) on Rory Underwood (England); 1991 Mick Skinner (England) on Marc Cécillon (France), John Eales (Australia) on Rob Andrew (England); 1994 George Gregan (Australia) on Jeff Wilson (New Zealand); 1995 Joost van der Westhuizen (South Africa) on Jonah Lomu (New Zealand), Japie Mulder (South Africa) on Jonah Lomu (New Zealand); 1997 Jonathan Davies (Wales) on Jeremy Guscott (England), Scott Gibbs (Lions) on Oz du Randt (South Africa); 2003 Peter Stringer (Ireland) on Dan Luger (England), Brian O'Driscoll (Ireland) on Olivier Magne (France); 2006 Josh Lewsey (England) on Jean de Villiers (South Africa); 2007 Josh Lewsey (Wasps) on Frank Murphy (Leicester), Mathew Tait (England) on Stirling Mortlock (Australia); 2008 Mike Phillips (Wales) on Shane Horgan (Ireland); 2009 Ugo Monye (England) on Thom Evans (Scotland), Gethin Jenkins (Wales) on Hugo Southwell (Scotland).
The last classic schoolboy-low tackle I whooped at – crisp, clean, clinical, conclusive – was the old-hand Scot Chris Paterson's on England's cocksure full-flight Ben Foden in this year's Calcutta Cup game. But, oh dear, such a shame that Chris went far too high a few months later while trying to stop Argentina's last-minute (13‑12) match winner Lucas Amorosino. For sure, and alas, that hit remains a resounding miss.
