By Dr. Flamingo
Many praises have been sung about the never-say-die attitude of the green jerseys from Havelock town. Everyone’s been jumping on the bandwagon to add their their take on how the steely nerves of Havelock town boys took the game to the last second and destroyed the hopes of the boys from Kandy. In the end, it was another trophy added to a cupboard that is already bursting at the seams.
The schools season started with a bit of a shake up this time around. The knockouts at the start of the season was a downer. It was like having the baby even before the honeymoon began. A lot of rugby fans were like WTF! But the authorities would have had the last laugh.
Some schools are notoriously known for withdrawing from the KOs after a season of hard labour. Most of the time it has hardlyy anything to do with player injuries. The whispers in the nooks and corners have always been that it is do with ego. Some schools don’t want to enter the knockouts if they win the league. They must be thinking “WTH, we won the league, can’t get our faces and bums dragged along the mud if we lose the KOs.”
The authorities dummied them all. In the end, the knockouts at the start reached a super duper climax when the boys from Havelock town and Kandy clashed. But of course, the season kicked in with some drama. One power house took early leave due to some “boys’ issue in the dressing room”. So the predictable bunch played it out with their eyes on the berth in the final on slippery ground.
This time the boys from Kandy showed promise from the early stages and made their mark when they took on the school by the sea. Those Mount boys always take time to warm up. Usually a quarter of a season is the time they take to get into the game. Probably the perils of chilling out on the beach for too long. In the Trinity game they fired too late, and they missed the train.
Even before the knockouts reached the halfway mark, the final was on the cards. One final berth was predictable – Pathana. So, as the Kandyans made their way to the vacant berth, it was going to be a tussle between the Highlanders and the Green Machine.
That evening, when I sat down with a chilled one and opened my laptop and logged into “Papare” to watch a thriller, I didn’t expect it to become such a hard-fought battle. Having run out of the two cans by the halfway mark, I was kicking myself for not getting more.
I was hoping for a win for the Kandy boys. Not that I don’t like the Green Jerseys. It is just that they have won too many. In the dying moments of the game, when the ball was in the Green half, them on the defensive, I remember the commentary beig dished out going something like “Isipathana would want to run the ball at this stage, but they have got no legs left to run”. This was true. They had exhausted themselves so much in the face of some resolute defense by Trinity throughout the game. Their were worn out.
There was hardly anything left in the Pathana tank. You don’t expect them to run out of fuel, but on this day, they had run out. Their bodies were tired and their fierce determination had almost disappeared. I breathed a sigh of relief. Not because I am a fan of the boys from Kandy, but because I didn’t want Pathana to take away another trophy.
It was the last couple of minutes and I felt relaxed, despite the tension, knowing that the game was Trinity’s and the Green Machine had run out of steam. But then, I saw a close up of a few green faces, they looked tired, and in their faces, it looked like the winning line was a mile away, but the determination in the eyes was still on. Unmistakably so.
At that moment, something inside of me said “these guys can still be dangerous, hope they don’t get possession”, and I felt uneasy. And then it happened. They got possession and they took play close to the line that was a mile away just a minute ago.
In that dying second, the tables turned, and the ‘never-say-die’ boys from Havelock Town taught us all a lesson – It’s never over until it’s over.
After years and years and years of trying to deny that I admire the kind of rugby dished out by the green jersey lads, I finally became an admirer. I will of course, always support my alma mater. But I will be a big supporter and admirer of their determination.
You just can’t deny them. They have a way of coming back. Their kind of determination isn’t just a lesson about sports. It’s about life itself.
In Sir Winston Churchill’s words – “Never, Never, Never give up!”