Leader in the clubhouse for top rugby try by an Englishman in 2018: Oliver Gildart. Oliver who? Oliver Gildart, only 22, scored a corker of a try on his debut, sprinting from well within his own half, with several sidesteps and a blinding turn of speed, to secure an 18-16 win over New Zealand in a brutal first rugby league test at Hull. If you missed it please catch up: it doesn’t take long to watch, trust me. I remember once getting into a steaming row with a rugby pal who had dared to suggest that rugby league was better to watch than union. But who really does get the better entertainment? The Barbour–clad southerners at Twickenham or the flat-cap whippet brigade along the M62 who after the thriller at Hull last weekend must be savouring the prospect of the next two tests against the Kiwis, at Anfield on Sunday and Leeds the week after.
Is it a cultural thing? I’m a union devotee but I was brought up on union, and people who like league were usually brought up on league. What is appealing about that code though — besides the astounding fitness and courage of the players — is that it has done away with all the arcane stuff: set scrums (still being interminably reset), mauls/rucks and line-outs, which only the refs understand (most of them anyway).
The game is ferociously fast moving, but counter-intuitively this has reduced rugby league to something rather sterile and formulaic, a bit like basketball, with the ball passing through hands up and down the field in a featureless ebb and flow. But seeing Gildart’s try — which had it been scored by an All Black or a Barbarian would be hailed as one of the tries of all time — makes you realise that there should be a great readiness on both sides of the league/union debate to recognise the virtues of the other’s code.
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