ROGERS: THE TRUTH BEHIND MY FALL OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT
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’s 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 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 1999 World Cup.
“I tried to stay at London 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. and thought
Irish.
I“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 to 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 things.
“My age was against me as well because I was 30 when I won my first cap.
“But the main thing was Newport. It was a mistake.
“I should have joined a different club, a club which focused more on scrummaging.” lot of joining
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 Welsh-speaking prop from Trimsaran, who used to go to Sunday School with Jonathan Davies’s 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 every day.
“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 scrummaging sessions, from 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 live one