WRU dish out ‘confetti’ caps to their reserve team

THERE was a time when the Welsh Rugby Union went to elaborate lengths to avoid awarding caps, almost as if it were a cost-cutting measure. When the All Blacks rumbled into Cardiff Arms Park in November 1974, Wales had ample reason for believing they would break the habit of a lifetime and rise to the occasion.

Their six-strong Lions’ Test contingent from the invincible tour of South Africa that summer were reunited en masse. JPR Williams joined them in a way which could never happen today, turning out for the London Welsh sixth XV after the Big Five selectors asked him to prove his fitness on his belated return from Durban.

The All Blacks came armed with all their big names – Bryan ‘Bee Gee’ Williams, Grant Batty, Sid Going, Tane Norton, Ian Kirkpatrick, Andy Leslie etc. No match could have been more worthy of Test status and yet the WRU downgraded it to a non-cap occasion as they did in those days against Romania, Italy, Argentina, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga.

The reason, that the All Blacks had been on tour in Ireland and therefore the WRU didn’t wish to upstage their Irish counterparts, sounded as though it had been plagiarised from the Bumper Book of Mumbo Jumbo. Contrast that to the antics of a recent WRU regime, devaluing caps by awarding them for matches against a club team, the Barbarians FC.

More were doled out yesterday when the selection of a Wales Reserve team, perfectly acceptable in a World Cup context, ridiculed their description of the fixture as a Test match. It ought to have been a Wales XV but then they would have had to charge less for tickets.

As JPR noted some years ago, caps are being ‘chucked around like confetti’.