Phil Bennett: The Autobiography

Ours was a simple, basic, commonsense rugby. Dawesy approved because he shared that philosophy and knew that we had the players to get it right. For the most part the Wales coach at this time was exerting a greater influence over the Big Five when it came to selecting the team, but so many other aspects were still extremely amateurish. When I was dropped by Wales for the game against England in 1975, I learnt the news in a phone call from Peter Jackson of the Daily Mail. Jacko was on the ball, just as he still is these days, but I doubt that he’ll be the one telling Jonny Wilkinson that he’s dropped when the time comes. Things are done far more professionally these days, in that respect at least. I learnt the news from Peter because none of the selectors had the courage to call me. I never even knew why I’d been left out of the squad, but I suspect it had something to do with my decision to play a club game for Llanelli within days of pulling out of a Wales match against Australia because of injury. The fact that I had recovered sufficiently didn’t matter. Even so, I could have handled being dropped if the selectors had told me they were doing it. But to be told by a press man left a nasty taste in my mouth. Many things in rugby have changed for the worse in the past quarter of a century, but at least coaches have recognised their responsibilities when it comes to selection. When Woodward axes Wilkinson, or Steve Hansen tells Stephen Jones or Neil Jenkins they are being edged out, then at least those players can expect to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

It hurt being dropped, but as Pat and I had suffered the death of our first child only a year previously I was hardly going to lose perspective. As things turned out I was soon back in the side because John Bevan dislocated his shoulder playing against Scotland. My relationship with John Dawes had not suffered from my non-selection. I accepted the decision, if not the manner in which I learnt about it. In fact, within two seasons I had been made Wales captain after the magnificent career of Mervyn Davies was brought to a shockingly premature halt by a brain haemorrhage.

I thought Gareth Edwards would have become captain, but John and his selectors felt Gareth suffered as a player when he carried the responsibility of leadership. I can’t say I shared their view. Neither did Gareth and he still can’t see it to this day. Still, I became captain and will always be grateful to John Dawes. Our relationship survived me being dropped and we both thrived. We won the 1977 Triple Crown – the second of four in a row – and at the end of that season we went off with the Lions to New Zealand together. I was captain. John was coach. We lost the series but that should not detract in any way from John’s coaching achievements. He was a deep thinker about the game, a high achiever, but capable of celebrating Grand Slams with a handshake and pat on the back rather than anything more openly emotional. He will surely go down in history as one of the best coaches, and certainly the most successful, the country has ever known.

If Clive Rowlands had been a tough act to follow, then coming in to the job after Clive and John Dawes in succession made things extremely difficult. Add in the vital factor of a team that was starting to break up, and this is truly the point where the job did indeed start to become impossible. Wales won another Triple Crown in 1979, just for good measure, and then John stood down. He left behind a team that needed to be rebuilt with careful nurturing, but he also left behind public expectations that were enormous and that demanded instant satisfaction. What a mix. The man left holding the restless baby was John Lloyd.

The 1970s had brought three Grand Slams and five Triple Crowns. In the 11 seasons stretching from 1969 to 1979 Wales either won the Five Nations championship or finished runners-up. Looking back, it was an amazing period of consistent success. Now came 1980 – a new decade, a new Welsh team, but the same level of expectancy. John Lloyd had been a very solid prop with Bridgend, but even his shoulders were not broad enough to carry such hopes and responsibility. Whoever eventually takes over from Alex Ferguson at Manchester United will quickly know the feeling. It wasn’t that Wales suddenly became a bad side overnight; they didn’t. It was just that winning only 50 per cent of Tests and losing to teams Wales had previously brushed aside was an unpalatable change of diet for supporters used to heaven’s bread. The big names had gone and the difference they made could be seen clearly. Tight matches now started to go in the opposition’s favour rather than to Wales and the coach began to take hostile criticism in the media, which had also grown accustomed to reporting success. John Lloyd spent two seasons in charge as Wales coach, and although he had some bright ideas he was replaced in 1982 by John Bevan and his assistant Terry Cobner.

Bevan and Cobner were a good mix. John, who sadly died in 1986 after an illness, had coached Aberavon, while Terry had been virtually a player-coach during his time with Pontypool. Both had played for Wales during the golden era of the seventies, both had toured with the Lions, and both knew what they were expected to live up to. They worked hard, were respected and shrewd in their handling of players and began to lay the foundations for what proved a brief period of recovery for Wales at the end of the 1980s. But Cobs and John, like John Lloyd before them, were operating in the toughest times for a Wales coach. They had so much to live up to and yet a quickly diminishing supply of talent from which to choose. Without anyone in the senior circles of the game in Wales able to identify a real shift in power, rather than just a blip, the cards were stacked against all three of them.

If someone had said to me in 1970 that Tony Gray would one day be a Wales coach then I would have thought they were either mad or had been drinking. Tony was a guy who I had toured Argentina with. He was a quiet, diffident North Walian who didn’t seem to have the size of personality to take on such a big job. But, helped by Derek Quinnell, a man everyone respected, Tony became Wales coach in 1985. In some ways they were an unusual pair. Derek had no first-class coaching experience, while Tony had cut his teeth outside of Wales with London Welsh. Neither, then, were at the top of the coaching tree but they went about their job with a quiet determination to get things back on track – and for a while they managed it.

I had a lot of time for Tony Gray. He recognised good players and got them to express themselves and play somewhere towards their potential. He had the vision and bravery to make bold selection decisions – such as picking two other fly-halves, Mark Ring and Bleddyn Bowen, alongside Jonathan Davies in 1988 when Wales won at Twickenham. With a strong pack and the finishing power of Ieuan Evans and Adrian Hadley outside the flair of the three fly-halves, the 1988 side was a strong one. It deserved the Triple Crown success and came close to a Grand Slam. They were a very good team and I think they would have given any of the sides from the seventies a real run for their money.

I can remember being in the BBC Wales TV studios a few days before Wales played France in the final game of the 1988 championship. A Grand Slam beckoned but I felt Wales had looked tired against Ireland while France were a strong-looking side who had caught my eye despite losing to Scotland. I felt very guilty tipping France to win before the match and my fellow studio guests, Ray Gravell and Allan Martin, were appalled at my lack of belief. Unfortunately, I was proved right. But that defeat was a narrow one, just 10–9, and there was real, hard evidence that Gray and Quinnell were making progress. Unfortunately, they then had to tour New Zealand in the summer of 1988 and they happened to run into one of the finest and most ruthless All Black sides ever produced. Wales lost the first Test 52–3 and the second 54–9. All of the European teams would have gone the same way. This was the period when the gap between northern and southern hemisphere rugby suddenly widened to a gulf.

Of course, instead of realising that, the WRU pushed the panic button. It was completely unfair and ridiculous but the decision was made to sack both Tony and Derek. Everyone in Wales was shocked by the scorelines, but not half as shocked as seeing the coaches dismissed in the same year as they had won the Triple Crown. Talk about overreaction! Wales had lost heavily, but to the best team in the world. Real progress had been made in the two years leading into that Triple Crown, but it counted for nothing in the minds of the incompetents on the WRU.

What was really needed was a thorough examination of why the New Zealand players were so much better than our own. What had they done to move so far ahead? But that might have pointed a few too many fingers at those running the game, so they pointed a loaded shotgun at the coaches, instead. Clive Rowlands had been given a similar bloody nose by the All Blacks in 1969, but Clive was given time to get things right and he did it. Gray and Quinnell were not given that time – despite their successes – they were just given the boot.

Jonathan Davies pleaded the case for sticking with Tony and Derek. He urged the Union to consult the players who were eager to become more professional, more organised and more skilled. Bleddyn Bowen said the same thing. But the WRU ignored Jonathan. They wouldn’t even let him address them on the subject at their own AGM. Disillusioned and demoralised by it all, Jonathan left for rugby league in the autumn of 1988. Others followed his path and Welsh rugby went from flying high with a Triple Crown into a destructive tailspin.

I felt very sorry for Tony and Derek. It was such a waste of their talent. It was also confirmation that the WRU were now reacting to defeat like the very worst kinds of soccer club chairmen. There were huge, fundamental problems with Welsh rugby in the 1980s, but the reaction to defeat now involved the forming of a lynch mob to go after the national coach, even though merely being paid to play and coach was still seven years away.

John Ryan succeeded Tony Gray in the autumn of 1988 and the bottom line for John is that he didn’t have a hope in hell. This was now the time of the mass exodus to rugby league and Ryan had to try to make silk purses from cauliflower ears. His record of just two victories in his nine matches in charge shows he didn’t make many purses.

John had not entered the job on the back of a long playing career with Wales or a sparkling record as a club coach. He was a decent man, but out of his depth when it came to rescuing Wales from the tidal wave of destructive neglect that was now starting to gather a rapid momentum. Instead of treading on solid ground established by steady progress under Tony Gray, poor old John was up to his knees in a mess that he had no chance of sorting out. Somehow, Wales managed to narrowly beat England in 1989 but by the following year the pattern of the next decade was being firmly established. Wales were well-beaten 34–6 at Twickenham and England scored four tries to one. These days no one would bat an eyelid, but back then this was viewed as a national humiliation of epic proportions and there were few dissenters when Ryan decided to stand down. I rarely get to attend post-match press conferences, as they normally take place when I am still on air for Radio Wales, but that day’s was late starting and I shuffled into the back of a crowded room. I’ll never forget John Ryan’s face that afternoon. He looked wretched – a broken man. The responsibility was obviously too much for him and when the hacks started their grilling he seemed to melt away in his own misery. At one point I felt he was on the verge of tears. Had his captain, Robert Jones, not done well in deflecting some of the blame away from the coach then John could have suffered even more torment. It was a sad, sad sight. The nature of the Welsh job was changing because the identity of the man in charge was so much stronger than it had been before. John’s misfortune was to walk into this brighter spotlight at a time when the players in Wales were simply not up to it, and so all that focus was thrust upon failings rather than success. John wasn’t cut out for such intense scrutiny and I was hardly surprised when he threw in the towel.

The WRU needed a saviour, primarily to save their own disintegrating reputation, and they looked around for suitable candidates. The outstanding team in Wales at that time, and arguably in the whole of Britain, was Neath. So Ron Waldron, their respected coach, who had a slightly maverick reputation, was asked to step into the breach and he accepted. Ron did what anyone else in his position would have done; he relied on those he felt he could trust. In his case it was players he knew well at Neath. Suddenly, the team was half-full of Neath players, but still half-cocked when it came to shooting down anyone that mattered.

Wales lost at home to Scotland and then away to Ireland. Following the defeats to France and England, which had triggered Ryan’s resignation, it meant Wales suffered their first ever championship whitewash. I can remember bumping into Ron that evening in Lansdowne Road. He was forlorn. ‘It will always stick with me,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘The man who led Wales to a whitewash.’ It was a harsh self-judgement, considering he had only been in charge for half the tournament, but things weren’t about to get much better. In fact, they simply got a whole lot worse.

Wales lost three of their 1991 championship matches as well and drew the other, against Ireland. It meant that for the third season in a row we were left holding the wooden spoon – a staggering reversal of the fortunes of the past.

Wales went on to tour Australia that summer and suffered record defeats, conceding 63 points in the Test and 71 points in a provincial match. The defeat to the Aussies was the cue for a fight to break out among the Welsh players attending the official post-match dinner.

Wales left Australia with their reputation in tatters, their dignity stripped away and poor old Ron nursing a heart complaint that soon forced him to step down. Much of the personal bitterness that had been directed Ron’s way could hardly have improved his health. It’s true he gave away cheap caps to certain Neath players who were of dubious international quality, but that was not the real reason why Wales were declining. If Wales had been winning, no one would have noticed. Nobody complained that there were too many players from London Welsh during the 1970s. Ron was a good coach. He had proved that by shaping Neath into a very formidable team and bringing through players the rugby league clubs were eager to snap up. His emphasis on physical fitness may have been overdone but he was on the right lines, as other national coaches were to discover. It was the situation Ron found himself in that was all wrong. Chucked in at the deepest of ends it was little wonder that the waves engulfed him. The 1988 Triple Crown had been firm evidence of a revival in Welsh rugby, but the WRU pulled the rug away with their clumsy sackings, and confidence ebbed away from players, coaches and everyone else involved for the next three years.

I have no doubts that Ron’s health problems were related to the stress of the job. It had become impossible to deliver success and impossible to live with the consequences of failure. By the end, I was glad to see Ron get out. Once your health and family life are put at risk then no job is worth it.

With Ron gone, there was more panic among the general committee of the WRU. I can recall a lot of daft names were being muttered by people who should have known better, but someone with a bit of vision and common sense must have won the day because the Union wisely asked Alan Davies, the Welsh-born Nottingham coach, to take charge on a temporary basis for the 1991 World Cup. His temporary stint became permanent and he eventually coached Wales right through to 1995. You might have thought that would have included the World Cup of that year, but thanks to their own methods of madness the WRU sacked Alan just a few weeks before the tournament – creating exactly the same situation before that World Cup as when he had come in four years before. Most countries change their coach a month after a World Cup, but Wales like to be different.

Alan was different. He was a bit eccentric although I have to say I didn’t really take to his bow ties and braces. Neither did most of Wales. He had a plummy English accent and the red bow ties just made him look even more of an outsider. But he was a very sound coach and he should always be acknowledged for applying a brake to halt the speed at which Wales were careering downhill.

Alan took over at a terrible time following that shameful trip to Australia and although he brought some stability to the squad the 1991 World Cup was still a complete disaster. Wales lost to Western Samoa long before anyone took them seriously – the Samoans, of course, would later leave their mark on others – and although we scraped past Argentina we were thrashed by Australia, again, and found ourselves turfed out with the rest of the also-rans before the knockout stages. Once again, we were in desperate straits.

The results gradually began to improve, though, and even if Wales were still losing too often for most people’s liking, Alan at least lifted the spirit and confidence within the squad. It wasn’t a time of great achievements, but throughout 1992 and 1993 the team began to regain a bit of self-respect. We were no longer quite the laughing stock we had been in the summer of 1991. One of Alan’s best decisions was to take on Gareth Jenkins of Llanelli as his assistant and I still firmly believe the time will come when Gareth will gain another crack at Test rugby. He and Mike Ruddock have clearly been the best Welsh coaches at club level over the past decade.

Although Alan and Gareth stopped the rot, they found it hard to convince the public that they were entirely on the right lines. A blame game had set in, fostered by a sense of parochialism that had spun out of control. I was used to petty village jealousies, but even though the rest of the world had moved on Welsh supporters appeared trapped by their own narrow-mindedness. Just as Ron Waldron was continually castigated for picking too many Neath players, so Alan found himself sniped at by those who felt he was leaning too far towards Llanelli, Gareth’s club. When Wales played against France in Paris in 1993, there were eight Llanelli players in the side. The scoreline, 26–10, was certainly no disgrace but there was a lot of flak directed towards Alan by the anti-Llanelli brigade. It all became too personal and I found it ridiculous. Among the most unpleasant and unappealing attributes of some Welsh supporters is their willingness to heap blame on some small band of folk for the failings of a nation.

The level of bitterness shocked me the night Wales lost at home to Canada in 1993 a few months after the French defeat. It was certainly a humiliating loss, our first ever against the Canadians, but there was a hostility towards Alan that was unjustified. Certain people in the game, including former Welsh internationals, questioned Alan’s credentials simply because he hadn’t played for Wales. I’d never felt that was a necessity for the job. After all, Carwyn James only played twice for Wales and yet he was the greatest coach I ever came across. In my mind it didn’t matter. It was never a factor for me when Graham Henry became Wales coach and it didn’t matter with regard to Alan.

As it turned out, Alan had the best possible answer to his critics: Wales won the 1994 Five Nations championship, the last occasion Wales have won the tournament. They beat Scotland, Ireland and France and lost a respectable match to England at Twickenham when they were going for a Grand Slam and Triple Crown. The team was well organised, efficient, difficult to unsettle and occasionally unpredictable – much like the coach. But within a year Wales were whitewashed in the championship just a few weeks before the 1995 World Cup. Alan, Gareth and Bob Norster, the team manager, were all forced out and the Australian Alex Evans was asked to take Wales to the tournament with just a few weeks to prepare and pick a squad. Deep down he probably knew he was on a hiding to nothing, but coaching at international level must have an appeal that temporarily blinds people to the blindingly obvious.

Alan Davies won 18 out of 36 matches in charge. Not a bad return when you consider the situation in which he found himself when asked to take over the reins. He introduced a level of professional back-up for players that hadn’t been seen before and through careful attention to detail he transformed the team from an organisational shambles in 1991 to a team that lost only 15–8 to England at Twickenham when chasing that Grand Slam. If Nigel Walker had been given a few more passes earlier on in that match, then who knows what might have happened. But the problems of Welsh rugby, the real structural and especially the administrative weaknesses, couldn’t be disguised by simply tightening up the national side’s defence. The foundations of the game were still unstable and one grisly night in Johannesburg the roof fell in when a poor Irish team beat Wales to knock us out of the 1995 World Cup, once again before the knockout stages had even begun. Alex Evans was at the helm, a caretaker who found that not enough care had been taken on innumerable areas of the sport.

Typically, Alex was slated for packing the Wales team with too many Cardiff players, the club he had enjoyed great success with. It’s become a knee-jerk reaction in Wales, even though it makes about as much sense as a car driver blaming engine problems on where his passengers are from.

Alex sounded off with a few home truths about the state of Welsh rugby, and was rewarded not with a full-time job offer but with the suggestion it was time he went home to Australia. He left in the winter of 1995, the tenth man to try the impossible job and the owner of the briefest record in it – just four games, which included only one victory. What has been striking about all the appointments is the complete lack of consistency and continuity. No coach was ever brought through the system. There hasn’t been a system – just a succession of stabs in the dark, and it’s been pretty dark for much of the time since the end of the 1970s. Two World Cups – 1991 and 1995 – were completely wasted because of this policy of chop and change and a pitiful lack of foresight. But at the start of 1996, the WRU promised that things would be different. For the first time they appointed a coach who had come through some kind of process by coaching Wales at U19, U21 and A-team level. Kevin Bowring, it was said by the Welsh Rugby Union, would take Wales through to the 1999 World Cup. He was also the first paid, full-time Wales coach after the move to professionalism. However, given the deep-rooted problems in Welsh rugby, I didn’t think the money would save him. And I was right.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_f2b12a84-9f14-5898-95f5-850ec6606f66)

Guided by the Great Redeemer (#ulink_f2b12a84-9f14-5898-95f5-850ec6606f66)

The catastrophic 51–0 defeat to France at Wembley in 1998 didn’t turn Kevin Bowring grey. He was lucky on that front because he was completely grey when he came in. But the look on his face that Sunday night in London was the familiar expression of a man who knew his time was up. If the Welsh players hadn’t forced him to that conclusion with the abject nature of their pitiful performance then the supporters must have convinced him through the silence that lasted the entire second half. It only pointed in one direction for Kevin and if he hadn’t fallen on his sword a few days later then someone on the Welsh Rugby Union would have knifed him, if only to put him out of his misery.

It was all far removed from the optimism that had developed during the early stages of Kevin’s reign. He wasn’t pulling up trees in terms of results, but there was progress and more importantly his teams began to play with a style and verve that enabled every supporter to feel proud of the side again. Young players – like Leigh Davies, Arwel Thomas and Rob Howley – were given their opportunity and responded by playing with great flair and imagination. The future looked bright and even a defeat at Twickenham to England in 1996 was well received because Wales showed style and adventure before going down by just one score, 21–15. There was a three-year build-up period to the 1999 World Cup and after shamefully wasting the opportunities of the previous two tournaments there seemed a genuine determination to make this one count.

I liked Kevin Bowring. He was enthusiastic and energetic and had plenty of bright ideas on how rugby should be played and how rugby players should be developed. He had come from a background with London Welsh, so the usual accusation of bias towards one Welsh club or another wouldn’t fit. The critics would have to dig a little deeper to find their dirt. I had played against Kevin and remembered him as a good, solid back-row forward who might have won caps for Wales in other eras when the competition wasn’t so strong. I knew he could do well in the job and for a while that’s exactly what he did do.

The sad thing for Kevin is that he knew that his own ability, and that of his players, was not going to be enough. He could see there needed to be change in both the running of the game and the attitude of the newly professional players – fewer easy matches, greater time spent on physical training and conditioning, a back-up of staff on the management – but the WRU turned a deaf ear. It must be very galling for Kevin to know that many of the things he asked for were given to his successor Graham Henry on a plate. Or perhaps it isn’t, because Kevin now works for English rugby and the RFU.

Judged purely on results, the Bowring era was nothing special. In three Five Nations championships he won four matches out of 12. But Wales beat France 16–15 in 1996 and lost narrowly 27–22 in an exciting match in Paris the following season when the French won the Grand Slam. It seemed we weren’t that far behind. He freshened up the team, and youngsters were given their opportunity. Wales were easy on the eye, even if the win-loss column still didn’t make such easy reading.

Things started to go wrong sometime during 1997. Wales finished the Five Nations by losing 34–13 at home to England in the last match at the old Arms Park before they tore the old stadium down. The scoreline wasn’t a demolition, but it was very one-sided and Wales seemed to lack confidence against a side much stronger physically and quicker, with the honourable exception of Rob Howley. In the autumn, Wales had to play New Zealand at Wembley. Bowring had become very taken with the southern hemisphere approach to the game and wanted Wales to try to play a similar ball-in-hand game to the Australians, having taken Wales on tour the year before and suffered two big defeats to the Wallabies. The trouble was that Wales didn’t really have the players to adopt those kinds of tactics. It wasn’t Bowring’s fault. The Welsh club game at this time was slow and ponderous. Players would trundle from one set piece to another and then the referee would blow at the first breakdown in open play. It was all too static compared to the Aussies and the All Blacks.

Rather naively, however, Bowring believed that Wales could take the All Blacks on at their own game at Wembley and run them off the park. It backfired. Instead of running in the tries, the only thing that flowed was Welsh mistakes whenever we tried to counter-attack. Ironically, New Zealand showed the way with a much more pragmatic approach. They ran it when it was on, but Andrew Mehrtens kicked for position on the rare occasions his side were under pressure. The result was a comprehensive New Zealand victory by 42–7.

Things started to slip after that defeat. It’s often the way and it’s up to a coach to try and switch track, to offer something different in approach. Bowring wasn’t able to, or maybe he simply didn’t have the resources. Wales were slaughtered at Twickenham, 60–26, and it was obvious that the players had lost faith in what they were meant to be doing. Wales were okay as an attacking force, but defensively we were flimsy. The breeze, itself, could have blown us away. The Wembley defeat to the French was the last straw and Bowring decided it was time to go. Another decent man had bitten the dust.

Kevin was a capable man, though, and should have been retained somewhere along the line within Welsh rugby. For instance, he could have gone back to looking after one of the age-group sides, where he had proved very successful. Instead, he was thrown on the scrap heap, leaving it to England to rehabilitate him as a coach. He’s firmly in the English system, helping to advise and guide other coaches, and he’s obviously highly regarded by Clive Woodward. That’s a credit to Woodward and England, and an embarrassing loss to our own game. It’s yet another example of waste by Welsh rugby, which can ill afford such flagrant inefficiency. Wales were to pay a heavy price – literally – because the next national coach would cost £250,000 a year, about five times what the WRU were paying Bowring.

Graham Henry was a brilliant coach, a master media manipulator, and an impressive illusionist. He did wonderful things for Welsh rugby, but there was a sense of the illusionist’s routine about Henry because when he went back home to New Zealand in 2002 Welsh rugby was in pretty much the same state as when he was appointed in 1998. For a couple of years he seemed to sprinkle magic wherever he intervened, but by the end people had had enough of the smoke and mirrors show because most of the tricks were no longer paying off.

When the WRU appointed Henry in the summer of 1998, I felt it was a good decision. I’ll clarify that, because I knew they had already offered the position to Mike Ruddock and I had felt for a while that Mike had all the attributes for the job. The Union had asked their director of rugby, my old Wales team mate Terry Cobner, to trawl the world for the right man to replace Kevin Bowring. Cobner got as far as Dublin where Mike was coaching Leinster. He was in no rush to return to Wales, but when your country calls and offers you the top job then it’s hard to resist. Mike said yes and Terry told the WRU general committee he’d found the right man. It was a good appointment as Mike was a very talented young coach who had enjoyed massive success with Swansea. I also felt his decision to coach in Dublin had widened his perspective and would protect him from the accusations that he was too closely identified with one Welsh club. The memory of how people had undermined Ron Waldron because of his Neath associations was still fresh in my mind.

But Mike was never to get his backside in the national coach’s seat. The WRU general committee did an amazing U-turn. Having told Cobner they would back his judgement they then told him to keep looking for candidates because they had heard through a few murky sources that a New Zealander, currently coaching Auckland, might be interested in coming to Wales. His name was Graham Henry.

It was a despicable way to treat Mike and it’s to his enormous credit that he shrugged his shoulders and went back to coaching Leinster. He later became the Wales A-team coach, and although he’s finding it tough going at Ebbw Vale at present, where there are major financial problems, I’ve no doubt he would still make a very good Wales coach if given a crack after the 2003 World Cup.

If Ruddock would have got around his Swansea connection because of his experience in Ireland, Henry was a complete outsider. He was coming from the other side of the world and in that sense the slate had been wiped clean. But he has always been a man who could negotiate a good deal and since Wales were desperate, and he had just led the Auckland Blues to two Super 12 titles, he didn’t come cheap. England had wanted him the year before but he had turned them down because he wanted to coach the All Blacks. But in the summer of 1998 the politics of New Zealand rugby seemed to be making that a less likely proposition. Henry was in his mid-fifties and knew the clock was ticking. If he was going to complete the transition from school headmaster to top coach then Wales was his big chance. So he took it. In countries where rugby matters, there is always a political agenda, and Wales were fortunate in that the politics of New Zealand rugby suddenly helped them sidestep the political problems at home of appointing another Welsh club coach. I was amazed when the press revealed Henry would earn £250,000 a year, making him by far the highest-paid rugby coach in the world. After all, Henry was hardly a name that conjured many memories within our rugby culture. It wasn’t as if Colin Meads was coming over. But if that was the price of success, then, like most Welshmen, I was prepared to pay it.

There was a huge sense of expectancy before Henry’s arrival and the character of the man was the perfect foundation on which to build a myth. He was very charismatic, clever, and hugely entertaining. He delivered great one-liners, normally deadpan but always followed with a twinkle in his eye and a knowing half-smile. Because he was an outsider he said things that no Welsh coach could have got away with. He challenged the way our rugby was organised, made observations that were brutally honest, and, most importantly of all, the results were spectacular.

In June 1998 Wales lost 96–13 to South Africa in Pretoria. It was the time before Henry’s arrival and following the U-turn over Ruddock. Dennis John was the caretaker coach put in charge for the tour and a busload of players had dropped out before they had even left Cardiff. A few more injuries while they were out there left Wales threadbare and the Springboks simply tore us to shreds. It was so one-sided and utterly contemptuous that the crowd booed when the Boks spilled the ball near the Welsh line in the final seconds because it denied them 100 points. After the game the South African coach Nick Mallett described Wales as the worst international team he had ever seen. We had reached the bottom of the barrel and the only sound I could hear was the scraping and splintering of wood.

Into this mess strode Henry, a hired gun from out of town. It was a fresh start; a new era was about to begin. Those players who had cried off the summer tour now all claimed their various aches and pains had healed. So it was a full-strength team that took on the Springboks again at Wembley in November. Henry had told them they could beat South Africa and they very nearly did. Only a lack of concentration in the final few minutes saw Wales throw away the lead and eventually go down 28–20. After the game, people were euphoric, including the media and even some of the Welsh players. The only man who kept perspective and seemed mildly irritated was Graham Henry. ‘We lost when we should have won,’ he said. I realised then that his standards were much higher than ours. He wanted to be a winner and he wanted Wales to be winners again. I liked his style.