“Memories of a lifetime in rugby”
From adolescent nerve sin Newport to unbridled joy in Japan, long-time Rugby World columnist Stephen Jones shares his highlights from the past six decades
THE SIXTIES
Even as a teeny schoolboy I bled black and amber. Somehow my dad got us tickets for Newport’s 1963 match against New Zealand at Rodney Parade. I remember being scared by the crowd and the crush, and also excited when John Uzzell dropped a goal. The boys held on, gloriously, as the All Blacks kicked our Glyn Davidge black and blue. We beat the All Blacks. RugbyWorld was three.
Amazingly in that decade, we drew with Australia and beat the
Springboks. Not bad for a group of townies representing the town. Why, oh why, did they ever go down the Dragons regional route?
Here is the cost of a day at the rugby then, expressed in modern coinage: train to Newport 10p, match entry 5p, programme 3p.
There was no rugby in Welsh junior schools; we all played football. There was no mini rugby at clubs. So I first donned rugby kit in the first week of the first year at Bassaleg Grammar
School at a training session. John Harries, a legendary sports master, was in charge. None of us had played more than street touch rugby but we had followed the game avidly, we knew what to do. Mr Harries lined us up. “No 8!” he said. “You.” And I took my place.
What next? We went straight into a 15-a-side match. At the first scrum, I picked the ball up at the base and ran. Wow! We were off.
THE SEVENTIES
An Oxford idyll one fine summer was shattered as RugbyWorld
offered me a post as editorial assistant. There’s a presentation by Oxford Poly on my exit as ‘student attending fewest lectures in four years’ and then I hung up my punting pole.
I’d wanted to be a journalist since I was seven. The salary was too miniscule to be called pitiful, but I joined editor David Norrie and a rampage began.
The legendary Vivian Jenkins used to fulminate in his monthly column under a byline picture of him holding a Bakelite phone. His column in edition 193, one of my first, was on great Lions scrum-half Dickie Jeeps, who had become RFU president. “Jeeps made a forthright start to his season of office (1976-77). In his inaugural speech he made no apology for making reference to the playing side of the game,” wrote Viv.
“It is not usual on this occasion,” Jeeps had said, “but I am prepared to break with tradition and I want to say a few things about the playing side.” How very revolutionary of him to mention players!
But that is was what it was like then. Admin people were deemed more important. By themselves.
Women’s rugby was still embryonic but one item is well worthy of mention. A party of 35 players from the American Midwest came to play friendly fixtures in England, Wales and Scotland. Pam Tittes was team manager and tour organiser.
THE EIGHTIES
I had a year freelancing on Saturdays for TheSundayTimes. I never went to a game, I stayed in the office to write the RugbyRound-up column. I adored it. It made me feel like a newspaperman.
Ian Robertson left TheSundayTimes in 1983 to return to his first love, radio. Cheers Robbo. I applied for the job.
Something in me sensed I had a chance. I had a meeting with David Robson, the sports editor, in a London hotel. Later, in the ST offices, he said: “You are on.”
I won’t even try to express in words what I felt. For me, given a choice of a job on a national paper or 50 Welsh caps, I would take the job every time. I didn’t feel strongly that it was about rugby; I’d have been just as happy on the newsdesk or as beekeeping correspondent. So, farewell then, Rugby World, after a little under six years.
On 9 May 1983 I covered my first match as rugby correspondent of The SundayTimes. It was the Cup final between Bristol and Leicester, won by Bristol in a fantastic match. “Bristol’s improvement can be traced directly to
“I declared the 1984 Wallaby team the worst to ever leave Australian shores. They won a Grand Slam”
the arrival of Stuart Barnes at fly-half,” I wrote. I used to like him in those days.
The same year, I had the glorious honour of touring with the British & Irish Lions, my first of nine Lions tours to date. The Lions lost 4-0 to New Zealand, the ‘Irish mafia’ had got at the selection. But wandering through cities and tiny towns, small motor hotels and warm rugby clubs, was one of the great experiences.
On that tour in Dunedin – where it lashed down with icy rain for a week – a touring record was created. The Cherry Court Motor Inn was and remains the worst hotel we’d ever stayed in. Even now, veteran tourists can raise a wan smile by saying the words “Cherry Court”.
The following summer was a gorgeous treat. I covered the 1984 Open golf at St Andrews. Magnificent. I was standing alongside the 18th on the final day as Seve Ballesteros holed an amazing putt to win, while Tom Watson made a hash of the Road Hole behind him. I’ve covered almost every Open since.
It was a great time for my predictions. The 1984 Wallaby tourists arrived in Britain; I declared that this was the worst team ever to leave Australian shores. They won a reverberating
Grand Slam, playing beautifully. Wrong.
In 1988 I reported on the ScotlandEngland Schools match at Clarkston, in Glasgow. I was not impressed by one of the England locks. “The towering (Martin) Johnson did not appear to have a fiery temperament to go with his technique,” I wrote. Another great shout. He only dominated world rugby for the next 15 years. I can pick them.
During the Six Nations of 1986, I had uncovered a massive scoop that the game was about to start World Cups. I filed the story but whoever was in charge on TheSundayTimes that day did not share my sense of wonder.
So, our exclusive that the game would be changing beyond all recognition with a dramatic new move was run in two paragraphs as the fifth item in our RugbyRound-up.
THE NINETIES
The 1990s were Jeremy’s decade. I interviewed Guscott in the last week of the 1980s in his home up above
Bath and I’d already realised that the arrogant exterior was not the real man. He had already gone blistering past Romania in his first International in pre-revolutionary Bucharest.
In 1992 South Africa returned to Test rugby after many years in the apartheid wilderness, with the African National Congress allowed to run in elections. At Ellis Park, before a colossus of a match between South Africa and New Zealand, the loudmouth fool Louis Luyt insisted in marking the precarious new era by playing the old anthem, DieStem, which caused the nation to ferment.
Three years later, the World Cup in South Africa cemented my love for the Republic that has grown ever since.
The World Cup final when South Africa won and Nelson Mandela danced on the podium was a tear-jerker, so too England’s experience against the four-try beast, Jonah Lomu, in the semi.
And the bit that everyone present remembers? That pre-match moment when an SAA 747 flew over Ellis Park!
Later in 1995, the game went pro; cue endless sermons from the hacks. One of the RFU delegates to the fateful Paris meeting left before the decision. He was seen outside banging his head against the hotel wall. The late Vernon Pugh QC, marshalled the meeting and was the greatest official the game has ever had.
One year on, the All Blacks won their first Test series in South Africa – and again, it was stellar to be close. One year after that, Johnson’s Lions won a fantastic Test series, the hardest and best that I have seen. You see that glory-chasing Guscott lining up for
the winning drop-goal. You knew he’d put it over. “The ultimate Test-match animal,” said Sir Ian McGeechan.
Also in 1997, just to dip into club rugby, I saw one of the great games when Bedford – inspired by Scott Murray,
Rudi Straeuli and Paul Turner – beat a Newcastle team full of players who went on the 1997 Lions tour. Goldington Road remains one of my favourite grounds.
THE NOUGHTIES
Over the years I have consistently enjoyed club and European stuff more than Tests, with their continual posturing and posing. The 2000 European Cup final was no classic, won by Northampton over Munster. The interest for me was seeing one of my all-time heroes, Pat Lam, inspire Northampton to victory. He had badly injured a shoulder before the game, should never have played, but made a point of leading with the injured shoulder throughout.
There is not one club ground I’ve not enjoyed – Leicester, Exeter, Gloucester, Redruth, Heywood Road (Sale), Hawick, Glasgow Accies, Munster. As main match of the day, I’ve covered Liverpool
St Helens v Rosslyn Park, West Hartlepool, adored every trip to Orrell. I even covered Dunvant v Mountain
Ash as the main game. I loved that too.
Watching the Lions in Australia, I remember a lovely lunch with members of the England women’s team who’d just beaten New Zealand in New Zealand. Jason Robinson, Brian O’Driscoll and Rob Henderson were brilliant in the first Test. For the first half of the second Test it was more one-way traffic. Then Jonny Wilkinson threw a wide pass, Aussie intercepted and scored. Australia in that Test and the series were exhumed. They had gone but they came back. Disaster.
In season 2002-03, Welsh rugby made an horrific blunder. It was blindingly obvious at the time that it was a blunder and for every season since, it’s looked a blunder. They wrecked their own heritage and strength by forming horrible regional conglomerations – Blues, Dragons, Ospreys, Scarlets – forgetting that local town identification was the key, not silly names and amorphous lumps of the country. Welsh domestic rugby never remotely recovered.
Day of days? No question, the quarter-final Saturday of the 2007 World Cup, which was otherwise wonderful for its French backdrop and poor for rugby. Game One: England, tournament joke team, smashed hot-faves Australia with Andrew Sheridan and Phil Vickery savaging the Wallabies up front. Marseille was a sea of white. Game Two: New Zealand paid for their arrogance.
They were beaten by an unrated French side and whined like hell for years afterwards. After the match, you had to be in Marseille. The vast port area was a sea of white and blue – the French came out to celebrate too.
What can you say about the 2003 World Cup? England were by far the best team, they were magnificently coached by Sir Clive Woodward and his men in the differential assembly led not only by Johnson but about 12 other natural leaders. These were sensational weeks in Australia, even though I spent part of them staring at the back of my eyelids after a total of three major eye operations.
THE TENS
England began the decade with a shocking World Cup. The horror show at New Zealand 2011, after which almost all players complained about the coaches.
In itself, it was a stunning World Cup in 2015; it showed dear old England the nation in a great light. England the team were stunning too; having stunned the world by appointing tyro Stuart Lancaster as coach, they were stunningly bad in the tournament.
Saracens, with five Premiership titles and three European Cup titles in this era, surpassed the Bath of Jack Rowell and Wasps under Warren Gatland and are the greatest club team I have seen. For almost all of their thunderous run under Mark McCall, they were the best team in Europe and possibly the world. Class, commitment, commercially excellent, the best academy.
The Welsh Grand Slam in 2019 topped off the wonderful career of the best coach the game has seen, Warren Gatland, and topped off, too, his partnership with Shaun Edwards. To be so competitive at three World Cups, one of which they should have won, and to win so many Slams when the standard of professional club rugby in the country was shocking, is unbelievable.
The World Cup in Japan was in every way the event you dreamed it would be – thrilling, endearing, bewildering, fair, culture-shocking, well-run, profitable. Where else could you have Doyo no Ushi no Hi – a day when you eat only eel. And try telling the man who signs your expenses that the only place in Tokyo showing every RWC match was Hooters.
That amazing evening in Yokohama at the end of the pools! Typhoon Hagibis had visited the day before but all was well for that glorious match. Japan beat Scotland by playing such brilliant attacking rugby they immediately join the tiny list of possible all-time greats that I have ever seen. Joyous, joyous.
And not only that, what of England’s greatest display, the semi-final win over New Zealand? Maddeningly, they lost the final by playing 35 points worse and all of Eddie Jones’s selection errors were shown up. How savagely perverse. But that smashing of the unbeatable. Wow.
We came home from Japan happy for the sport. But then Saracens, having been judged to have infringed the salary cap, were pilloried by Premiership Rugby men, many of whom ignored their own regulations and all sat in judgement over a rival club. Scandalous.
Finally, as coronavirus bit hard, Mark Egan and his colleagues at World Rugby revealed through TheSundayTimes a blueprint for the sport, giving access eventually for every nation, giving proper back-up and opportunities for what were once called Tier Two teams.
It is the shining light for the future and if the hoary old unions torpedo it, the rest of the sport should split away and simply leave them to their posturing and money-grubbing.
“To win so many Slams when the standard of club rugby in Wales was shocking is unbelievable”