The rugby union player Richard Sharp was an England fly-half and captain best remembered for a scintillating try against Scotland at Twickenham that secured the Five Nations championship, and for home supporters was a warming ray of sunshine during the bleak, freezing winter of 1963. The flaxen-haired Sharp sold three audacious dummies to would-be Scottish defenders on his angled run to the line and John Willcox’s conversion secured a 10-8 victory.
The try was vindication for Sharp, who a year earlier on the British & Irish Lions tour to South Africa had found himself unwittingly at the centre of a cause celebre when he was the victim of an act of thuggery by North Transvaal’s Mannetjies Roux, who hit the Oxford University student with a head-high tackle that broke the young man’s cheekbone. Sharp was knocked unconscious, then missed the first two Tests, and his absence had a bearing on the series, which the Lions lost 3-0. Even in South Africa there was an outcry that Roux was selected for the first Test, and the tourists were incensed.
