Bad blood sure to spill over in showdown
Sunday’s clash between Wales and Ireland at the Principality Stadium — after which Wales will be crowned Grand Slam winners if they win — is going to be a spicy, full-blooded affair.
Games between the two nations have always been full of controversy and drama. There was a brutal encounter in 1978 when Wales made history by becoming the first team to win Triple Crowns in three successive years but which also ushered in the end of an era, being the last game that Gareth Edwards, Phil Bennett and Gerald Davies played together. Then there was Tony Copsey’s haymaker on Neil Francis in 1992. Paul Wallace’s abiding memory is of a fire alarm going off at 2am in the Ireland team hotel the night before the teams met in the 1997 Five Nations, creating tension within the camp.
“It was our last game at the old Arms Park,” the former Ireland and Lions prop said yesterday. “I can still remember us all standing outside, bleary-eyed, in the middle of the night. We presumed it was set off on purpose by the Welsh.
“I think in the end it was traced to an IRFU [Irish Rugby Football Union] committee member who was smoking a cigar! But when Ieuan Evans scored a try after 31secs the next day we didn’t know that. We suspected subterfuge!”
Ireland ended up winning a thriller 26-25. “It certainly helped to fire us up on the day,” Wallace said.
Robin McBryde, the Wales forwards coach, admitted yesterday that clashes between the two nations tended to have “an extra edge”. McBryde, who won the last of his 37 test caps in the famous 2005 game in which Wales claimed their first Grand Slam in 27 years, explained that matches against their Celtic cousins were that bit more personal. “You always want to get one up on your next-door-neighbour don’t you?” he said. Every rivalry in the Six Nations has its own unique character and history, of course. But the one between Wales and Ireland does seem to hold a special place in the hearts of players and fans alike.
It is also perhaps unique in that it appears to have got more, rather than less niggly in the past 20 or so years.
A combination of bad blood arising out of Warren Gatland’s departure from the Ireland job in 2001, the increased competitiveness of the two nations in the 21st century, and arguably the relative success of the Irish provinces compared with the Welsh regions, has led to an ever more charged atmosphere; a battle not just for bragging rights but for supremacy.
“There’s certainly more [niggle] than there was in my day,” Wallace said. “In the late 1990s, more often than not we were playing for third place.
“Now Ireland and Wales are consistently up there.’’
As the stakes have risen, so too has the charged rhetoric. Ahead of the 2009 game, Gatland famously went so far as to say that the Wales players disliked their Irish rivals more than any other team in the Six Nations.
Shane Horgan, in an interview on the Irish channel RTE two years ago, fanned those flames by saying the feeling was mutual.
“There is more niggle to an IrishWelsh game than I think even than an Ireland-English game at the moment,” Horgan said. “Over the last 15 years we’ve done very well with our provinces. They haven’t done very well in their regions. Our win-loss ratio to them is good, but they’ve got three Grand Slams and we’ve got one and they think when we come together, we are a bit uppity.’’
The ingredients this year are as potent as ever; a Grand Slam on the line, a World Cup on the horizon, the backdrop of chaos in the Welsh regional game even as Leinster march on in Europe.