Teen star Prydie is looking for a new club
Tom Prydie landed in the Wales squad at the age of 17 and weeks later became their youngest capped player of all time at 18. None the worse for a relatively gentle introduction against Italy, he kept his place for the next match against South Africa and duly responded to the tougher assignment with his first Test try. So far, so good.
Warren Gatland had picked the novice Ospreylian despite misgivings from the teenager’s regional management about their protege being flown too high, too soon. It wasn’t that they feared he would end up like Icarus frazzled by the sun but that he was being flown a little too high a little too quickly.
Far from sharing their reservations on that score, Gatland promptly deemed Prydie ready for the ultimate challenge later that month, a two-Test series against the All Blacks in New Zealand. He went the distance in the first at the House of Pain in Dunedin and all but the last ten minutes of the second at Hamilton.
Prydie would have come home looking forward to the next stage of his career at the highest level as due reward. Instead he disappeared.
Shane Williams having made one wing his own, several likely lads superseded Prydie on the opposite touchline – Will Harries, Aled Brew, Tom James and Morgan Stoddart, none of whom stayed long.
Prydie’s exit coincided with the entrance of another teenaged wing destined to go the distance, George North. Then Alex Cuthbert came galloping over the horizon to claim automatic selection on the opposite wing.
The emergence of a one-time scaffolder from Waunarlwydd in the Swansea valley, Liam Williams, sent competition for places through the roof. Prydie moved from Swansea to Newport via Wasps, wondering whether he would ever find a way back. Other hopefuls, like Harry Robinson, Eli Walker and Cory Allen, flitted on and off the big stage.
Over a period of eight years, Prydie found himself permitted just the one fleeting appearance, for a second-cumthird choice against Japan in June 2013 in Tokyo where he scored the solitary Welsh try in a lost cause. Having waited three years for that opportunity, he waited almost twice as long for the next one.
Cuthbert had gone by then but an even better wing had surfaced in the Premiership at Worcester, Josh Adams. With many of their front-line players given a summer’s rest, Wales recalled Prydie for a mishmash of a so-called Test against an under-par Springbok team at the RFK Stadium in Washington, DC.
Wales won and Prydie went the distance again, only to be replaced by
“At 6ft 4in, weighing more than 15 stone, nobody has doubted his physicality”
Adams after the cavalcade relocated to Argentina the following week. For the return match against the Pumas in Santa Fe seven days later, Prydie appeared nine minutes from the end as a full-back substitute for Hallam Amos.
The boy wonder of yesteryear has not been seen in the Test arena since and now, for the first time in his eventful career, he is looking for a club. A short news release issued by the Scarlets last Monday morning barely stayed afloat in the whirlpool of reacexactly tion to the carnage caused by the All Blacks.
As per usual with a communiqué announcing the departure of a player, his ex-employers thanked Prydie for his services over four seasons and ‘wished him well with what comes next’. He is fit and ready to go, the Scarlets having delayed his exit to give him time to recover from a damaged foot.
While barely two months into the season is hardly an ideal time to be looking for a new job, Prydie does have a lot going for him. At 29 he is not in the over-the-hill category, nor does he have an excessive amount of mileage on the body clock.
At 6ft 4in tall and weighing in at more than 15 stone, nobody has ever doubted his physicality. With so many clubs hit by casualty lists of crippling length, Prydie ought not to be short of offers for a new start.
In a frenzied business where next to nothing can be ruled out, it would be safe to assume that whatever comes next for Prydie, one more shot with Wales is not even on the horizon.
How strange that more than eleven years after arriving in the national team at an earlier age than any Welshman dead or alive, Italy at home in March 20, 2010 should remain his solitary appearance in the Six Nations.
Unless there is a startling up-turn in Prydie’s fortune, it will also be his last. How strange, too, that he has not had the luxury of a home Test since South Africa a few weeks after his capping, so long ago that the Springboks then still held the World Cup won against England in Paris in 2007.