Berry’s briefest of brief encounters…
PETER JACKSON
THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW
TEN summer Olympiads have come and all but gone since Marty Berry went off on a sprint which made Noah Lyles' in Paris the other night feel a bit sluggish.
The turbo-charged American hadn't been born when Berry achieved the unprecedented feat of compressing an entire Test rugby career into a few seconds fewer than the time it took Lyles to win gold even if that meant waiting for the technology to determine his victory by one five-thousandth of a second.
While Lyles' hanging about for the verdict would have seemed like an eternity, it was nothing compared to Berry's. He spent the remaining seven years of his rugby life yearning for another chance to come under starter's orders for the All Blacks in a Test match.
It never came, saddling him with the memory of an encounter almost too brief for belief. No matter how successful Lyles continues to be in reducing the 100 metres to a still more gob-smacking exercise in brevity, Berry's track record will take some beating.
He emerged as a late replacement for Frano Botica against Australia at Eden Park in 1986, so late that the three-Test series had been lost. Berry would have spent most of the 60 seconds at his disposal waiting for the Wallabies' failed conversion of David Campese's corner try.
By the time the All Blacks restarted Berry spent what was left of the last minute dashing off from halfway in forlorn hope of touching the ball. Instead it rolled into touch whereupon the referee blew for no-side.
In the absence of a stop-watch nobody knew for certain precisely how long Berry's single act of chasing the kick-off had taken except that it was probably all over well inside Lyles' 9.73 seconds.
That the phantom substitute's time never came again wasn't for any lack of trying on Berry's part. He toured England and Scotland with Sean Fitzpatrick's All Blacks in 1993, starting with a try against London & South-east counties at Twickenham and finishing against Combined Services at Devonport.
Like most of a generation at their peak before substitutes began to run riot in all directions, Berry suffered from the restriction of ‘replacements' to a maximum of three when he finished running his race in the mid-90s. A larger bench would have suited him down to the ground as a wing-centre able to provide cover beyond the Frank Bunce-Va'aiga Tuigamala midfield axis.
The whirligig of substitutes running amok since the advent of the 23-man game has saved many a fine player from ending up like Berry, a
Test cap but not enough time to get the ball in his hands. A few made a decent living off the bench, most notably Ollie le Roux.
Over the course of eight years from 1994, ‘The Baby Elephant' played 54 Tests for the Springboks, 43 of them off the bench including the one in Paris when Jannie de Beer's five drop goals did for England at the 1999 World Cup, provoking questions which Sir Clive Woodward answered four years later over his fitness for the job.
No amount of substitutions, though, can guarantee immunity for those concerned from emulating Berry. A whole host of unwitting attempts have been made over the last 20 years from those whom fate decreed would get one shot on the big stage.
Some of those to be found in the one-cap wonders category managed to go the full 80 minutes, from start to finish like Ben Skirving (England v South Africa, Pretoria 2007), Christian Wade (England v Argentina, 2013), Eli Walker (Wales v Ireland, Cardiff, 2015), Hugh Blake (Scotland v Ireland, Murrayfield, 2015), and the Irish duo Billy Holland (v Canada, Dublin, 2016) and Roger Wilson (v Japan, 2005).
A few other substitutes lasted long enough for a whole hour, a category including a pair of Scots from Edinburgh; Jack Cuthbert at full-back against Ireland at Murrayfield in 2011 followed two years later by hooker Steve Lawrie against Samoa.
