Pain of 2011 exit still hurts, but Wales can make matters right
IT was a beautiful day in Auckland. We were going to get a dry ball and I remember thinking ‘this is brilliant.’
For a scrum-half, the conditions looked like they were going to be perfect for the 2011 Rugby World Cup semi-final against France at Eden Park.
My confidence was so high after playing well in the quarter-final against Ireland and getting man of the match. I was on top of the world.
I felt good in the warm-up and then all of a sudden there was just a massive downpour of rain. It just lashed down.
Looking back, that was the start of it and there were a series of events that took place from then on that went to show it just wasn’t meant to be our day.
It became a nightmare. It felt as though everything that could go wrong, went wrong.
We had a bit of a shaky start and they broke our defensive line a couple of times.
Before we got to the red card, something that often gets overlooked that day is the fact that we lost Adam Jones to a calf injury quite early on.
At that time, Adam was not only one of the best scrummagers in the world, he was one of the best rugby players in the world.
That was a huge loss.
Then we all know what happened in the 18th minute.
It was a harsh decision. I still say that today. Sam Warburton put in a great shot on Vincent Clerc, but sometimes that’s the way your body rotates when you’re in the air.
Sam was never a malicious player, it was just unfortunate.
Alain Rolland showed the red, I remember seeing the card going up. It was like being in a car crash. Everything happened in slow motion.
Looking back, it was just unbelievable. After that incident we didn’t get into any sort of rhythm and it felt like the world was against us.
We had to regroup at half-time and tinker with things slightly to manage the fact that we were one man down.
It was about tightening things up, but we stuck to our structure. We told each other in the dressing room ‘the bottom line is, each and every one of us has to work twice as hard and fight for each other.’
Those were the messages at the break.
I even changed my boots at halftime in the hope that it might change our fortunes because, let’s face it, things weren’t going well.
It actually worked to a certain degree because I went over for a try in the second half, but it wasn’t quite enough.
We still had plenty of chances to win the game even after Sam went off. We didn’t fall away or capitulate and I think that spoke volumes of the squad we had back then.
I scored and that was great. We stayed in the game. France were poor, to say the least. They stopped playing.
Generally, when you’re facing 14 men, you up the tempo, go through the phases and try to stretch the opposition, tire them out.
But they just kicked everything away, they didn’t attack us and we had our own opportunities to win it.
We missed a couple of kicks at goal. Leigh Halfpenny’s long-range penalty right at the end missed by inches – and that sort of summed it up.
Talk about emotional rollercoasters. In many ways, that one summed up Welsh rugby.
If we’d had a dry ball, as I thought was going to be the case, we’d have won the game pretty easily. But credit to France they did enough to get the job done on the day.
After the game, I went over to Sam straight away. It wasn’t his fault and I felt like I had to tell him that.
We had a few beers and we had the day off after the game to try and forget about it. match