How ‘walk of hate’ helped England end 28-year Welsh jinx
Hamid threats of a player strike, Will Carling forced his team to march through streets to Cardiff Arms Park before brutal 1991 win
Owen Farrell marching his players defiantly through the streets of Cardiff to the Principality Stadium is unlikely to be one of the “arousal” ploys Eddie Jones uses to reinvigorate his Six Nations campaign, but the ploy has worked before. Thirty years ago, it not only set England on the road to a Grand Slam, but also banished a Welsh hoodoo that had stretched back to 1963.
Antagonism was everywhere in the build-up to England’s journey across the border in 1991. Ground down by a run of 13 winless matches in Cardiff – and already irked by a pay dispute with the Rugby Football Union – Will Carling’s side were determined to do things differently, including confronting the “hwyl” factor by staying in a city-centre hotel and walking en masse to the stadium.
They were fired up by two days of training at Kingsholm during which Geoff Cooke, the team manager, ordered that Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers) be played constantly on the PA system. So determined were the management to get players accustomed to Welsh hostility that the song was also blasted out on the team coach’s stereo system as they crossed the Severn.
“It flippin’ worked,” recalled Brian Moore, the England hooker. “We’d get the Vs flicked at us on the drive in from our usual sedate hotel retreat at St Pierre in Chepstow, with screaming and shouting from all sides. There was a lot of stuff going on – everyone hates the English anyway, but there were mass brawls in that fixture four years earlier, we had lost the Grand Slam to Scotland in our previous championship game in 1990. It was a heady brew. By the time we started our walk to the ground, we were all f---ing fuming.”
In truth, that historic 25-6 win will not be recalled for the majesty of the rugby. England relied on the brute force of their pack and the dead-eyed kicking of full-back Simon Hodgkinson with a worldrecord seven penalties to end their longest-ever losing streak in the championship. Even their solitary try was a short-range, no-frills effort off a scrum from Mike Teague. Given that it was an England pack who would rank as one of their greatest, containing warhorses such as Teague, Wade Dooley, Paul Ackford, Dean Richards, Peter Winterbottom and Moore’s front-row colleagues,
‘Cardiff was a unique place to play rugby. You would get pints of beer chucked on you as you came down the tunnel’
Jason Leonard and Jeff Probyn, the tactics should have come as no surprise.
“As a team, you have got to brace yourself, not stand for any messing around,” said Roger Uttley, the England coach, who had never won at the Arms Park as a player either. “That’s why we wanted to get them in the right frame of mind with the anthem and the hotel. It was an early use of sports psychology. Our boys were flinty-hearted and steely-eyed all right. You don’t get to win in Cardiff without that sort of bloodyminded attitude.”
For all the heightened pre-match build-up, the game was one-sided with England posting a record score against Wales. They kept it tight and did so throughout that championship, even though they had backs of the calibre of Jeremy Guscott and Rory Underwood. England – still scarred by a devastating loss to Scotland at Murrayfield 10 months earlier – paid no heed to critics who bemoaned their stifled approach.
If it all sounds familiar to followers of Jones’s England side, so does the abrasive nature of the response from those involved. “We had no intention of making any apologies for the way we played,” said fly-half Rob Andrew, one of the focal points of that criticism. “Our generation saw time slipping by. It was time to nail a Grand Slam, by any means.
“Cardiff was a unique place to play rugby. You’d get pints of beer chucked on you as you came down the tunnel. We were in a cussed mood that day.”
Andrew and Moore, along with captain Carling, were at the forefront of talks with the RFU over offfield payments that had been permitted under a relaxation of the amateurism regulations. A players’ company was formed, Parallel Media, to coordinate off-field opportunities, the squad even recording a rap version of Swing Low, at the Abbey Road Studios, to generate some money. It was small beer, with a return of only £1,000 per man for the entire season.
“We even did a deal ourselves with different sponsors for use of training kit, so we had to keep count of who wore what and when before making sure that the right photographs were taken,” Andrew said. “It was seat-of-the-pants stuff, and we were at odds with the RFU about what was permitted.”
Things came to a head in Cardiff. A fee of £500 had been agreed with the BBC for access, but the Rugby Football Union blocked the deal late in that week. Moore revealed that the squad had serious discussions about refusing to leave the changing room before kick-off.
“The forwards were all for it, but the backs bottled it. If I’d been captain, we’d have gone on strike,” he said. England did boycott all postmatch access with broadcast and written media.
The RFU was incensed and senior committee men upbraided Cooke and others at the Angel Hotel, where the official dinner was held.
“In many ways, that was a trigger point that led all the way to professionalism in 1995,” said Andrew. Hodgkinson said “being able to switch from a day job as well as from playing in front of no more than 1,500 people to going into an atmosphere like that” was a real achievement for a lot of players.
Sadly, it will be like old times in that regard at the Covid-restricted Principality Stadium on Saturday. The occasion itself, however, will be just as laden with significance.