Nobody Beats Us by David Tossell

Author:David Tossell [David Tossell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
Published: 2011-02-28T11:00:00+00:00

11

YOU CAN DO MAGIC

‘Do you need talent or dedication? The answer is that you need both. One doesn’t go without the other and we have all seen individuals who have had plenty of either but have not made it’ – Gareth Edwards

There is no need for a double-take, no trying to drag up recognition from the depth of memory when the familiar face of Gareth Edwards appears. Like sporting heroes such as Henry Cooper and Bobby Charlton, the man generally hailed as rugby’s greatest player has been away from television screens so infrequently that we have watched him pass through middle age before our eyes. Long before the ‘reality TV’ exploits of Phil Tufnell, Austin Healey, Mark Ramprakash and numerous other sportsmen, men such as Edwards, Charlton and Cooper were blazing a trail with A Question of Sport, Superstars and Pro-Celebrity Golf, a prime-time format where light-entertainment giants such as Bruce Forsyth and Ronnie Corbett collided with Tony Jacklin and Lee Trevino in an explosion of wisecracks and lurid knitwear.6

Thanks to Edwards’s ongoing public profile and the filmed preservation of so many of his greatest moments, his genius on the field has endured well into the new century. When the Welsh Rugby Union’s website asked users to vote for the country’s greatest player of all time, many of those who elevated him to first place would not have been born when he retired from rugby. The prompting of fathers and frequent re-runs of his most famous tries were all the evidence a new generation needed.

It was typical of Edwards that, even as 1973’s rugby public buzzed about the best game most of them had seen, it was his try that inspired much of the talk after that Barbarians–All Blacks contest. His contribution to the rest of the game had been modest compared with the eye-popping exploits of Phil Bennett, J.P.R. Williams and David Duckham. Yet, referring to the try, Tom David says with affection, ‘The ball went through all those hands and who scores in the corner? “Golden Bollocks” Gareth!’

Maybe all he’d had to do was run bloody fast and dive into the corner; and maybe the final pass from Derek Quinnell had been intended for John Bevan. But without Edwards’s intervention there would have been no try. Bevan was barely moving at that point and his lack of momentum would have made him a sitting target for tacklers. Edwards’s sheer speed, his determination to make up the ground and the breathtaking manner of his finish fashioned yet another addition to his expanding highlights collection. All commentator Cliff Morgan could manage in the aftermath was, ‘Oh, that fellow Edwards,’ with a sigh that sounded positively post-coital.

That fellow had been a boy in the Swansea valley mining village of Gwaun-cae-Gurwen, where one of the annual highlights of his childhood was the new rugby jersey he received each Christmas. At Pontadarwe Technical College, a school that afforded sport the same importance as Edwards gave it in his own life, he fell under

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