Explosion of tries is turning into a circus

SOME of us remember “Mr Creosote”, the Monty Python character who, after a light dinner of pate, shellfish, frogs’ legs, caviar, jugged hare with a cream and Grand Marnier sauce, a superabundance of egg dishes, another helping of pate, half a dozen bottles of claret, a Methuselah of bubbly, enough brown ale to fill an ocean-going liner, and a single wafer-thin mint…finally reaches breaking point… and explodes, all over the restaurant. That was in 1983.

- 

Today’s equivalent? The Premiership

Last weekend, we saw 39 tries in five matches. You do not need a Fields Medal in mathematics to work out the scoring rate: eight a game, as near as makes no difference with the Bristol-Exeter game throwing up an a Mr Creosote-ish kind of (say) 10 tries in the first half alone. Or, to put it another way, one every four minutes.

Things were almost as glutinous along the A4 at the Recreation Ground, where Bath and Gloucester, teams who once considered the concession of a single point to be the end of the world, shared six of them before the break. Which was one every 44 seconds.

Across the Celtic-Italian-South African divide in the United Rugby Championship, there were, by weird coincidence, 54 tries in eight matches, including a grand total of 13 in 15. Even the devout believers in the “more is more” philosophy of life, it was plenty for one sitting. As for the rest of us, that URC tally of 54 is summoned images of the England bar-racks facing Roberts, Holding, Garner and Croft on a quick one in Jamaica rather than anything associated with the union code.