Passwater, 39, one afternoon from a second Iron Jug

Roman Passwater has been doing this for sixteen seasons and has exactly one Iron Jug to show for it, won in 1987, when he was young enough that everybody assumed there would be more. There were not. He is thirty-nine. The argument about where he belongs has been running for most of a decade and it ends, one way or the other, on Sunday. It did not, in the end, come down to him alone — it never does. But the Cannoneers won it 33-16, and a fortnight from now nobody will be able to describe this season without describing Sunday.