Sir Gareth Edwards saw the humour in it when we talked a few months ago about what was no longer there. As in so many of his conversations, the other side brought up the greatest try ever scored and his descriptions were beautifully vivid as he charted the miraculous journey of that ball 51 years ago in Cardiff.
He remembered everything as we stood about 135 yards away from where he and some Barbarians had practiced their magic.
But identifying the exact spot where he passed the All Blacks was trickier. It was virtually impossible, with the land obscured by decades of rebuilding, remodeling and renaming on the site of the old National Stadium, now filled by the Principality Stadium.
Progress yields to no one, not even Gareth Edwards in Wales, and he has an idea of what you might find on his corner now. He grinned as he shared his hunch: ‘A toilet.’
We had a good laugh about it, and he had to laugh again, because the moment has become such a common possession.
Man United are expected to make a decision on the future of Old Trafford this year
Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Co will have to decide whether to rebuild or renovate the current site
“The amount of people who come up to me to this day and tell me they were there, the crowd would have been a million people,” he said, and his words struck at the heart of sport. About the feelings it evokes and how they endure. The “I was there” moments. The moments when you could pretend you were there and the moments when you wish you weren’t. They are moments preserved in time and they are moments rooted in a place.
Whenever I go to the London Stadium, as I did to cover West Ham v Chelsea on Saturday, and on many days when the atmosphere is much more muted, I always think back to when Mo Farah won a World Cup there in 2017. I had never heard anything so loud in sport and nothing has done it since. It just stuck.
When I’m lucky enough to be sitting on Centre Court at Wimbledon, I automatically remember watching Andy Murray in the 2016 final and knowing that I’d seen better tennis, more beautiful tennis, but that I’d never see anything as great again. I haven’t.
At St Andrews the memory is of walking a few yards from Tiger Woods in 2015 and seeing him hit a two iron stinger downwind. It was perfect and a few holes later he was calling himself a ‘dick’. He missed the cut. At Ascot it’s a dirty joke by Frankie Dettori, and The O2 will always be about Kevin Mitchell getting his face bashed open by Jorge Linares and subsequently redefining what I understood as bravery in a ring. White Hart Lane belonged to Teddy Sheringham and his slow-motion excellence.
No matter the context in which we view sport, we all have long lists of personalized moments, and our places keep them young. Our places are an anchor, a solace, a trigger, a key part of the feedback loop. They are part of the beauty of sport; its soul, if you prefer.
And yet Manchester United should raze Old Trafford to the ground.
They should use a wrecking ball. Use dynamite, if you have to, and turn big rocks into small rocks and turn small rocks into gravel and load it onto a merry-go-round of moving trucks. Do it with the heaviest heart, light the fuse with the deepest regret, but do it anyway.
We’ve heard a lot of the deliberations on this and will hear a lot more in the coming months. About whether to redevelop the old or build anew. About surveys sent out to fans this week paying lip service to the myth that everyone in the boardroom will deviate from the instincts of Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
Soul is great, but the success of the pass can weigh heavily (pictured with United after their last title win in 2013)
He is known to prefer to start from scratch and build his Wembley of the North on the surrounding land. And unlike so many other decisions around the site in recent years, some of which he himself has made, this could be the right decision.
That will be painful for those who have much stronger ties to United’s physical stores than Ratcliffe, as it limits United’s future because of the abundance of tributes to the past.
And perhaps that instinct has been part of the problem for too long. That reflex to always look back, to turn every bad result into a lament for what was, has reached unhealthy places. That pressure has been as limiting to performance over the past decade as the railway line behind the South Stand was to designers looking for ways to modernise the existing stadium.
Because soul is a great thing, maybe the best. But it can also weigh a lot and the soul of Busby, his Babes, of Charlton, Law, Best, Robson, Ferguson, Cantona, Keane, Giggs, Scholes and Ronaldo weighs a ton.
The challenge for United is to determine the right amount that will be a decisive factor in a major decision, because they have a lot to gain from getting it right.
It brings to mind a conversation with a prominent Tottenham figure last month. We were discussing their gleaming spaceship of a house, perhaps the finest and best-equipped in the world of sport, and he offered a reminder of something – United’s matchday revenues last season were still double-digit millions bigger in their leaky relic than anyone else in the division.
Demolishing Old Trafford wouldn’t be a sell-out of all the great moments that came before it
The nightmare of every Premier League executive is that when United learn to get out of their own way, they will fly again. They are just that huge as a global commercial entity.
Now, while that theory has exhausted itself, the inertia will one day end. And it will end much sooner if their revenues, increasingly determinative in the dullness of this PSR landscape, are boosted by a bespoke arena with all the lucrative corporate bells and whistles. Settling for an uncomfortable renovation would feel like a fictitious compromise at a time when a complete reset is both possible and overdue.
This being United, the risk of inadvertently burying Sir Alex Ferguson’s old dugout spot under a toilet block can never be ruled out. But it wouldn’t be a sell-out of all the moments that came before, just a more effective way of not selling themselves short.
Rodri warning brings two predictable elements
There were two predictable elements to Rodri’s proposal for a strike this week in response to the increasing workload for top players.
One of them is that when he and Alisson raised their concerns, they both denied addressing their own clubs, Manchester and Liverpool, who, like all other clubs, are directly part of the problem and resist being the solution.
The other reason is the rather gloomy instinct of some bystanders to believe that athletes have no right to report a situation that demonstrably increases the risk of injury based on how much they earn.
Rodri (pictured) and Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson have expressed concerns over the schedule
Raducanu Concern
It was worrying to see Emma Raducanu injured again after a promising run at the Korea Open.
It was also tempting to think that the mentor she would need was the same guy who was walking around with an open shirt at the pro-am at Wentworth this week.
Andy Murray is enjoying his retirement, but it seems pretty clear to many who know him that he will eventually find a way back into tennis in a mentoring or coaching capacity. A partnership with Raducanu would be fascinating one day if it could survive the minor debacle of their last collaboration.
Emma Raducanu returns to Korea Open after promising run due to injury