WORLD'S BEST PROP PETER ROGERS AND WHY HE DISAPPEARED
His Wales career got off to a flyer... so why did Peter Rogers disappear off radar so quickly?
IT remains one of the great Welsh rugby mysteries of its time – what happened to Peter Rogers? In 1999, he was seen by many as the best loosehead prop in the world, having destroyed a succession of scrums during Wales’ 11-match winning run under Graham Henry.
But as rapidly as his star had risen following his arrival from South Africa, so it fell. Within a year, his Test career was over.
Rogers, who now works as a carer in Cardiff, has spent the past two decades trying to fathom out exactly what went wrong.
As he acknowledges when we catch up for a chat, it’s all the more baffling given his status at the end of the 1999 World Cup.
“I think I was in almost every national newspaper’s Team of the Tournament,” he recalls.
“I have still got all the cuttings now.
“I was in the Sunday Times Dream
Team, the Telegraph, all the rugby papers.
“They had the world rankings in this one magazine and I was the No 1 loosehead in the world, with Os du Randt No 2. I was above the Ox!
“I was like ‘Oh my God, it doesn’t get better than this’, because he was one of my heroes as a front rower.
“I was on fire that year. There was no-one I feared.”
But just 12 months later, his 18-cap Wales career came to a halt and he ended up switching to hooker at club level before calling it a day.
“I don’t know what happened,” he says.
“I have sat down and thought about it many times.
“I have searched for answers.” What that process keeps bringing him back to is his move from London Irish to Newport after the ‘99 World Cup.
“I tried to stay at London Irish. I was happy there,” he says.
“I also asked the question could I go back and play club rugby in South Africa and travel back and fore to play for Wales.
“But I got ridiculed for it. They said that’s not going to happen.
“I got told I had to come and play in Wales.
“I was going to go to Pontypridd, that was the plan. But I had a meeting with them and they didn’t understand the wages I was getting.
“Only a couple of clubs could give decent wages and I was told then to go to Newport.
“I would definitely say going there was the end of my career. It’s quite sad looking back.
“I should never have joined Newport. Nothing against the club, it was just the circumstances.
“Rod Snow was their favourite and I took his position which could have caused a bit of a rift in the squad.
“We didn’t have a decent pack of forwards that could scrummage competitively, either.
“We were picking blindside flankers in the second row.
“I had a couple of locks behind me who were semi professionals, not even full-time pros.
“Having a bit of a reputation as a scrummager, I would go up against people who would try and bring me down, with a whole pack behind them.
“I had a lot of people gunning for me.
“I was trying my best, but you can’t do it on your own. I couldn’t do it with the personnel around me. I was getting shown up a bit.
“I lived on being a scrummager and it was affecting my reputation.
“Maybe I was a bit tired mentally and I lost a lot of weight as well. I probably overtrained. I went down to about 17st from 19st plus.
“I wasn’t dominating like I was at international level and when the downhill spiral comes, it goes quick.
“It got to me, I guess. My confidence did go down.
“It was a combination of a lot of things.
“My age was against me as well because I was 30 when I won my first cap.
“But the main thing was joining Newport. It was a mistake.
“I should have joined a different club, a club which focused more on scrummaging.”
That was certainly what Rogers had become used to in South Africa, having gone out there in his early 20s.
He was born in Maidstone, but moved to Bryncethin, near Bridgend, when he was a toddler, with his father, Philip, being a Welshspeaking prop from Trimsaran, who used to go to Sunday School with Jonathan Davies’ mother.
It was at Llandovery College that Rogers took up rugby, playing at hooker, which is where he packed down for Maesteg, Bridgend and primarily Glamorgan Wanderers during his time studying accountancy and finance at the University of Glamorgan in Treforest.
It was towards the end of his time at college in the early 1990s that he made a life-changing connection.
“There were some South African exchange students that I became friends with and I just went over there for a holiday,” he explains. “I ended up staying for nine years. “I was only going to be there for the summer, but I joined the Pirates club in Johannesburg. They asked me to stay on and we were getting paid!”
It was at the Pirates he made his decisive positional switch.
“They had a well-established hooker in the first team, so they threw me in at prop and it went pretty well,” he says.
“I was about 16st when I went over and I ballooned up to about 19st within a year.
“When I went home to Wales, people who remembered me from when I played as a youngster would say ‘Oh, how did you get so big out in South Africa, let me think!’
“But categorically I can say there was nothing untoward.
“I naturally ballooned with overeating.
“Honest to God, I was eating steak for breakfast everyday.
“I had never seen steak in Wales really and there I was eating it every morning with eggs.
“I got into weight training as well. That was huge out there.
“I noticed the extra weight was helping me. I could scrummage. South Africa is the home of scrummaging and I learned so much out there.
“We would have 90 minute live scrummaging sessions, from one corner of the pitch to the other.
“I always remember I played one game for the Transvaal Development team.
“I swear I didn’t touch the ball the whole game and I got Man of the Match, because I had destroyed my opposite number in the scrum.”
Rogers made his provincial debut for Transvaal in 1995, playing under the captaincy of a certain Francois Pienaar and his standing steadily increased.
“I played the best rugby of my career when I was 25, 26 out in South Africa,” he says.
“I was at my peak. I was destroying every single tighthead I came up against and really ball-carrying well. I was younger, faster, carrying the weight well.
“I learned to speak Afrikaans too!” Then, in 1998, came another lifechanging moment.
“I had done quite well in the Vodacom Series and I was building up a reputation as a destructive scrummager,” he said.
“All of a sudden, an agent phoned me out of the blue and said Graham Henry was going to be coaching Wales and he’d identified me as a player of interest.
“I think he had seen me play when he came across with Auckland for a game against Transvaal.
“It sounds like he had called every single agent and said he wanted whoever is Welsh playing anywhere in the world to come and bolster the Wales squad.
“Anyway, the agent said he’d help me find a club and I ended up at London Irish.”
However, that was to spark something of an international tug of war between Wales and England for his services.
“Graham had come to watch my first two games for Irish. He was in the crowd,” said Rogers.
“But then our coach, Dick Best, told me Clive Woodward was interested.
“All I kept thinking of was that Wales were a bit of a laughing stock at the time.
“They were going through turmoil. “I was at the game in Pretoria that summer when they lost 96-13 to South Africa and Nick Mallett said they were the worst team in world rugby.
“I remember I went into Transvaal training the next day. My nickname with the boys was Walliser, which is Welshman in Afrikaans, and they were all saying ‘Why do you want to play for Wales, Walliser?’
“England were a decent team and Wales were terrible.
“So I kind of had second thoughts when Dick said about Woodward being interested.
“There was a chance of it happening, because I was born in Kent and my mother was English.
“But then my dad said to me ‘You can’t play for England, you just can’t.’
“I was injured at the time and the message from Woodward was they would get back to me when I was fit.
“Wales said ‘We will sign you now’ and I went with them.
“Look, I have got no regrets whatsoever. I don’t think I could have put
that white jersey on, to be honest.
“It was bad enough going back to visit my mates in Bryncethin with the South African accent I had acquired!”
Rogers first wore the famous red jersey for Wales A against Scotland and Ireland on the opening two weekends of the 1999 Five Nations.
Packing down alongside Garin Jenkins and Ben Evans, things went well for him and the team, whereas the senior side lost their first two fixtures.
“I remember Wales A had a full-on scrummaging session against the Wales first team down in Sophia Gardens,” he said.
“And, oh my God, we pulverised them. It was embarrassing.
“We marched them back about ten yards at one stage.
“Then we all went up together for the France game, me, Garin and Ben.” It was to be a memorable Test debut for Rogers out in Paris, as Wales triumphed 34-33 to launch the 11-match winning run.
“Standing there for the anthem, I knew I had made the right choice,” he said.
“All my family were there, it was great. All apart from my dad.
“He was too nervous to go to the game, so he stayed at home.
“He watched the first half in the house, but then when he realised we were getting the upper hand in the scrum and I was doing ok, he ran down the Masons Arms in Bryncethin. He didn’t pay for a pint all day! He came to every other game after that then.”
And what memorable games they were, with famous victories over England and South Africa, along with a series win out in Argentina.
“I remember before the England match we trained down in St Helen’s on the Wednesday,” said Rogers.
“Graham got us to sit in the stand and you could tell he was right up for this game.
“He asked us ‘How many people here have beaten England’ and I think only three people put their hands up – Gibbsy, Jenks and Dai Young.
“But we were confident because we had just beaten France.
“It was incredible that day at Wembley. I will never forget the warm-up. Tom Jones was hanging round, Max Boyce. It was a beautiful warm day. That was maybe my best performance for Wales. I found it easy in the scrum. That’s how I got around the park so much. It was an easy day at the office.
“I was on the bench when Gibbsy scored, having come off. I was sitting next to Garin and I remember him saying ‘I am going to get a new kitchen with the bonus’.
“I remember Graham Henry having a tear in his eye afterwards and there was just so much emotion and so much celebration. It was just incredible. The crowd really sticks out in my mind as well. I remember walking round doing the lap of honour and thinking ‘I would love to be in that crowd’. It was mad.
“So, emotionally, that England game was the high point. They were a special team and we had just done them.
“But the other one that really stands out is beating South Africa in the Millennium Stadium.
“They were world champions at the time and that was a class team they put out against us.
“I knew a lot of their players as well. I remember Japie Mulder shouting ‘Walliser’ at me at one point.
“It was a fairytale for me, like living a dream. To beat England at Wembley and then South Africa in Cardiff.”
Wales were on a roll, nowhere more so than in the scrum.
“We destroyed everyone,” said Rogers.
“Garin and I used to talk about scrummaging a lot. We lived and breathed it and we used to smash people. I was so passionate about scrummaging. I still am today.
“I would do analysis and get as much footage of tightheads as I could.
“But it wasn’t just the front row. In Chris Wyatt and Craig Quinnell, we had two second rows that were hungry to scrum. It was all of us.”
On the back of the winning run, Wales went into the World Cup on home soil on the crest of a wave, with Argentina their opening group opponents.
It was a game that was to leave its mark on Rogers.
“I was up against Mauricio Reggiardo, who was a big, strong man,” he recalls.
“They had it in their minds that we had destroyed them out in Argentina twice.
“They were really worried about us. Anyway, I put Reggiardo up in the air in the first scrum. His feet were off the ground. Then I felt this really sharp pain in my earlobe.
“I got up and felt it and there was blood on it.
“I went ‘Ref, I have been bitten’. “But Reggiardo showed a bite mark on his arm to the ref and pointed at me.
“What he had done was bitten himself after biting me! It was obviously planned.”
Wales reached the quarter-finals before bowing out to eventual winners Australia at a rain-drenched Millennium Stadium.
“It was 10-9 for ages and they were miles offside at every breakdown and cheating at the scrum,” said Rogers.
“If the ref had given us the penalties we deserved we could have won that one.”