Adrian can’t believe the Wales’ Euro wait goes on
Three framed team photographs hang in Adrian Davies’ London home, each one illustrating a distinct stage in what used to be a double footballing life. There is Davies the schoolboy in the Wales U15 soccer team, a midfield player good enough to be offered a professional career by Leeds United and Sheffield Wednesday.
Then there is Davies the student flyhalf at Cambridge University in the early Nineties when he created such an impression that Tony Rodgers, the university’s veteran former coach, still rates him the best No.10 to wear the Light Blue jersey over the last 50 years.
And, most recently, there is Davies at the height of his club career halfway through the first season of the professional era, a central figure in what was virtually an all-international Cardiff team, the first from Wales to reach the final of Europe’s blue riband club competition.
A quarter of a century later, they are still the only one. Davies holds the distinction of being the only Welshman to score for a Welsh team in a Heineken Cup final since its rebranding as the Champions Cup, a misnomer if ever there was one given that some qualify despite losing as often as they win.
For that inaugural European final, on the second Sunday of January 1996, the organisers could hardly have done more to promote a Welsh victory. For a start, the English clubs opted out, not because they considered it beneath their dignity but because the RFU had been thrown into turmoil by the declaration of professionalism a few months earlier.
As if that wasn’t enough, Cardiff had the good fortune to be playing the final, against Toulouse, on home ground at the Arms Park. Davies’ fifth penalty took the match into extra-time at 15-all, his sixth prolonged the stalemate until the very last, fateful minute when they conceded a penalty in front of the posts.
For the casual observer aware that Wales have won more Six Nations Grand Slams than England and France, the recurring failure of Welsh regional teams to do something similar at club level is hard to reconcile. Resources, or, more accurately the lack of them, have been a handicap but that only goes so far.
It doesn’t explain, or excuse, why Llanelli/Scarlets reached four semifinals and lost them all, to Northampton (2000), Leicester (2002, 2007) and Leinster three years ago. When the truncated Champions Cup resumes this weekend, the Scarlets will be Wales’ last hope, a home tie against Sale offering the prospect of a quarter-final at Gloucester or La Rochelle.
The other three Welsh teams are in the distinctly second-tier Challenge Cup: Cardiff at London Irish on Good Friday, Ospreys and Dragons home to Newcastle and Northampton respectively 24 hours later. How strange that many of those who went so close to winning the Slam in unforgettable fashion last Saturday night should find themselves so far down the bill next weekend as to be barely noticed.
Adrian Davies, at 52 director of a building consultancy, could never have imagined on that Sunday night long ago that no Welsh team would reach the Heineken final over the next 25 years, let alone win the trophy. “I would not have believed it,’’ he says. “I would have thought some Welsh team would have won it by now. Cardiff, Neath, Swansea, Llanelli were all extremely competitive at that time but they all lacked one thing: exposure to the other side of the M4 corridor. Every game was played between Newport in the east and Llanelli in the west. Some of the guys had never been to places like Gloucester and Harlequins.
“We have missed those historical derbies at places like Kingsholm, Bath and Bristol. We definitely missed a trick in not being part of an Anglo-Welsh League.
“Europe is a big competition and it gets bigger every year. Until that first season we’d never stayed at a hotel before a match or experienced different food and different referees. On the
Monday morning after that final I was back at work. We were absolutely devastated to have gone so close.’’
Maybe not a degree or two less devastated than another Cardiff team 13 years later at losing rugby’s first, and hitherto only, penalty shoot-out: 7-6 to Leicester after the teams had finished 26-all after extra time.
Davies’ teammates in that first final, under Hemi Taylor’s captaincy, included a whole host of veritable folk heroes like Mike Rayer, Mark Ring and Emyr Lewis who remembered a finish as cruel as the one in Paris last weekend.
“The penalty was very dubious,’’ Davies says. “It was almost as if, after all that time, the ref wanted someone to win it. I’m gobsmacked that after all these years no Welsh team has won it.’’