It was a loose kick, tumbling aimlessly end over end into the All Blacks’ half. Their wing Billy Wallace gathered it and sprinted into midfield, through a gap and on into the Welsh half, only their full-back ahead of him now, and with his teammate Bob Deans in the corner of his eye, coming on the inside calling for the ball. Wallace gave the pass and Deans was away, making straight for the posts, tackled at the last moment by Rhys Gabe, and the two of them went sliding for the try‑line together.
The ball finished in the tips of Deans’s fingers, at the end of his outstretched arm. Inches away from the line? The referee John Dewar Dallas insisted that Deans never made it.
The match finished 3-0 to Wales: the All Blacks’ solitary defeat in 35 games on their 1905 autumn tour of Europe. Lloyd Jones wrote a great novel about that tour, Carl Nixon turned it into a successful play, Nigel Wray paid £180,000 for the jersey the All Blacks captain Dave Gallaher wore on the day. You can still buy a DVD of a “dramatic reconstruction” of the match, and a century later two Kiwi journalists published a book offering what they considered new, definitive proof about what happened.
Some 121 years later, if you ever want to start an argument, you can walk into the backroom of any Welsh rugby pub and tell the first old boy at the bar that of course Deans scored. Or walk into any Kiwi rugby club bar and say you’re sure he never did. There are no autumn tours this year.
Instead we have the conclusion of the new Nations Championship, starting in Dublin when Ireland play Argentina on Friday night. It’s a tournament designed to provide a context that was apparently lacking in that legendary match between Wales and New Zealand. Over the next three weekends France, Ireland and Italy all have matches against Argentina, Fiji and South Africa.
England, Scotland and Wales play Australia, Japan, and New Zealand, and at the end there are six games in three days across a long weekend at Twickenham, sixth place in the northern group against sixth in the southern, and so on, all the way until the top two teams play each other at tea-time on Sunday. The “Hemisphere Shield” will be awarded to whoever comes out top in what is being described as a “Ryder Cup style” competition. It took the sport the best part of a decade to cobble this competition together.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
