There are videos of David Duckham out there, but not as many as you’d hope. His twisting run past three All Blacks in that match against the Barbarians in ’73 is online, so is his whirlwind sprint down the wing against Scotland in that year’s Five Nations, in what they called the greatest try never scored at Twickenham (and there’s a conversation), and his side-step around Roger Blyth to score the opener when England played Wales in ’74. There’s a sharp finish, “one of his specials”, for Coventry against London Scottish in the Cup final later that same year, and bits and pieces of his Lions tour to New Zealand in ’71, when he scored 11 tries in 16 games.
Nothing that I can find, though, of the one Duckham, who died last week aged 76, scored on debut against Ireland at Lansdowne Road in ’69. “Duckham at once fed Rod Webb, his friend on the wing, and then looped round him for the return pass and a glorious, glorious try in the corner,” Frank Keating wrote in this paper a few years later. “The nation exalted, and the official history still calls it the most daring try of recent years.” England’s history, maybe, but the one that counts is written by the winners. Ireland edged it 17-15 and Duckham’s try didn’t make the edit in their documentary about the game. “I suppose I should have dived to make it perfect,” he said afterwards, “but the ground was hard and frosty.”
It’s not much, but enough just to give you an idea of what it was like to watch him in his pomp, “fair-hair streaming like a pre-Raphaelite angel,” Keating wrote, “winged boots always no more than an inch from the touchline till he ducked inside with no more than a shrug of his hip.” Wales’s Mervyn Davies said you felt like you ought to be able to tackle him. “From 10 yards away his side-step looked obvious and predictable, but then when you were there in close-up it still left you stranded and leaden-footed.”
Of course Keating loved him: “What swiftness of foot and thought, what panache, sheer enchantment.” All the romantics did. Rugby does those split-second moments, when a player breaks the game open, and everything starts to unspool in fast forward, better than any other sport. Even when you’re watching them back in crackly black-and-white. Duckham’s feet seemed to move even before his thoughts had ordered them to.
Duckham’s trouble was there weren’t too many cavaliers involved in the running of English rugby back then (or before or since). He only scored 10 tries in his 39 Tests. Read through the match reports, and often as not all the talk is about why England never managed to get more out of him. Keating went along to Coventry to watch his very last game, against Bristol, “it goes without saying that he hardly got a pass worth the name”. The roundheads said it was Duckham’s fault that he wasn’t more involved, that he ought to go looking for the ball more instead of brooding on the wing like some faraway guard watching over the distant border.
Duckham knew it too. “In the early days with England there was a totally different attitude,” he said. “We took far more risks. It was fun. We were allowed scope to dare and scope to enjoy ourselves, try things. Then attitudes changed. International rugby became too intense. You had to win. Everything was stamped with a no-risk policy.” Switched from the centre to wing, from wing to centre, then back to the wing again, Duckham said he ended up becoming his own worst enemy. “With so few chances I was wondering all the time if I could still do it in internationals, still run with the ball, still beat a man with speed.”
It was no surprise that he played his best Test rugby for the Lions and Barbarians, when he was under the great coach Carwyn James. “The boring unthinking coach continually preaches about mistakes,” James once wrote in his Guardian column, “adventure and error go together.” There haven’t been many England coaches, or captains for that matter, who were willing to make that wager. Much to Duckham’s frustration. He was one of the loudest critics of the England team during the 1991 World Cup, when, in the days before the final, he said he would be “embarrassed and very sad” if they won it by playing the boring sort of game that got them there to begin with.
History doesn’t record how he felt about the fact that they listened to him (and everyone else who was giving them stick) and then went on to lose 12-6 to Australia while trying to play in an entirely new style. As Ben Stokes showed in the last year of cricket, the secret to playing the game like losing doesn’t matter is in knowing when you really can’t afford to. The most dogged innings Stokes played for England last year was the 52 he made off 49 balls when the T20 World Cup final was on the line. Like his skipper Jos Buttler said afterwards: “If he batted like that in a Test match he’d drop himself.”
There’s talk the England rugby team may start playing the same sort of carefree way themselves. Believe it when you see it. Till then, “We’ll take the three, please, referee.”
