There’s nothing quite like an England-Wales clash to stir up the emotions
I’LL never forget being at the Wales v England match in 1999. As a teenager, I was there at Wembley when Scott Gibbs went over and Neil Jenkins nailed the conversion that denied England the Grand Slam.
There was a Welsh bloke not too far from me in the stands who stood up and poured a pint of beer over his head on the final whistle. thinking to myself: ‘I do not want to be part of that kind of Welsh team’.
English teams get hyped up a lot and I think that plays on the mind of Welsh players sometimes and they don’t quite believe in themselves.
Being Welsh, we typically started the game in our shells, but when we began to believe in ourselves we completely blew them away. It was a great win that day.
The celebrations afterwards were lively. We were on such a high, having some beers on the bus on the way back down the M4.
By the time we got the Severn Bridge, we were on top of the world.
Some of the boys took offence to not being allowed out in Cardiff to celebrate, and one of them said: “I’d love to see them drop us after that win!”
But we stayed in the hotel that night and enjoyed each other’s company in a relaxed environment, celebrating a job well done.
I started two games for Wales at Twickenham and I’m really proud of the fact we won both.
There is something that winds you up about it. There always seems to be a certain degree of arrogance about the crowd there.
They have the money behind them, we’re a smaller nation, they look down their noses at us and you just use that as motivation.
Even when I was playing at Sale, some of the boys up north have a problem with the way the Twickenham crowd carry themselves. That says it all.
The thing that really annoyed me