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Bring your dead-eyed metronomes in red tunics. Run on your slope-shouldered beasts from the sodden North.
Assemble your stifling tank battalion, festooned by Celtic tattoo and strapped with the colours of the home of rugby. Spin the ball through the crafty craftsman son o’ Murray to the bowlegged carpenter, whose slender feet connect as if dovetailed by the old guild, sailing through the posts as if equal magnetic forces repelled and compelled and impelled its safe passage.
Push the scoreboard up, by drips and drops and drams; no need to sprint. It’s a pub crawl, a fight in a red phonebooth, a brawl in the back of a lorry, a bite-and-break street contest in a dark Bristol alley, losing teeth in the docks of Liverpool, jackling and grafting and elbowing through maul and ferry, while uttering grim oaths impugning colonial motherhood and virtue, covered over by the pretty red jersey and polite socks of Erin.
Set your target for rucks one through three, be they never salient. The ball is precious in the muck of Galway or Glasgow – don’t toss it high or wide. March your wide-chinned Munstermen, even the one with the flat accent of the Cape, up the foreign fields, seeking joy in Eden.
If you launch your howitzer; set it fine and close, and send the cavalry screaming into the blackness.
If ye run past the line, keep low, as a badger or a fox on the lope. If possible, run on all fours, and nary an offload attempt, unless a clear path looms.
Let your wings and flanks appear identical, and lock your pack with yeomen; the screaming hybrid madman – the only one allowed to roam.
Dampen the contest, deaden the air with carpets of bombs on Savea, dig out the earth around Dagg, strike Little Ben, rattle the BB gun, and be the Big Daddy Teo of Sonny Bill’s weary adventure.
But you can do all of that, and more. You can sent the O’ brothers, you can bring both sides of the Boer War, you can send the ball sailing high, you can spend your halfpennies and your pounds, and you can bind loose on tight and get away with it, too.
But know it cannot work. You are not in Chicago, soldiers of fortune.
The ball will skip away from you those few ineffable times, fly a wee bit far, nestle in the hands of the wrong assassin in black, who will frolic around your henchman fierce, with a merry mana band of rugby derelicts, who passed the pill like addicts in an Auckland street when you were practicing place kicks in Shropshire.
Those South Island demon farmers descended from Laidlaw’s bigger ancestors will clean you from every breakdown like sleds loaded with bricks, and the line breaks will finish with sliding smiling slackers nodding to the dark crowd as if all of it was inevitable.
In the booth, your pinch-nosed Kiwi will shake his head, but the affable Kiwi cop will just red his jowls in beefy hands, as you trade three for five or seven, and at the end, some rangy All Black lock will streak across the line as if he was playing with his brothers in the back yard.
All is lost.
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.