Front-row legends who finally put an end to 83 years of hurt for Cornwall
NEIL FISSLER meets the men who put a county’s rugby culture back on the map
Richard Nancekivell is happy to admit that Cornwall’s first County Championship in 83 years wouldn’t have happened without three farmers in the front row. The Duchy had last won the County Championship in 1908 when they beat Durham County 17-3 at Redruth but then suffered five defeats in the final.
Durham gained revenge a year later while Cornwall were beaten in 1928 (by Yorkshire), 1958 (Warwickshire), 1969 (Lancashire) and then, again, by Durham in 1989.
It appeared that they were going to suffer heartache again in 1991 when 16-3 down to Yorkshire in the final quarter before Nancekivell scored two tries to take the game into extra time.
Then in the second period of extra time fly-half Billy Peters stormed over the line to complete a turnaround that, according to Nancekivell, was down to John May, Graham Dawe and Richard Keast.
“The front row were the unsung heroes. They never get any glory for what they do and it’s so wrong because the guys in the engine room are the guys that make it happen.
“The three front row guys are legends in their own right. They don’t get any better than that. For their time they were well and truly ahead of it, Andy Keast in particular.
“He ate, breathed and slept the game. He wouldn’t let you down at any point but you wouldn’t want to upset him.
“He doesn’t travel more than 25 miles outside of Cornwall without a reason, but he could have played for the Lions, no question about it.
“Yorkshire were torn to pieces once we got going, that front row took them apart.You wouldn’t have got any better than any of them.They were the key to success.
“That solid platform gives you a springboard to run from. My second try was solely down to the front row boys, they held it as solid as a rock. Without them it wouldn’t have happened.”
The front row trio were three of eight survivors, along with Chris Alcock, Grant Champion, Glyn Williams, Andy Reed and Adrian Bick, from the side that had lost to Durham two years earlier.
Nancekivell remembers well that it was a roasting the players got from stand-in captain Champion – usual skipper Alcock had been injured – that turned the tide as much as the first of his two tries.
“We had a few failures before which kind of made us say, hang on how many more times are we going to fail.
“Like all things you get to a point where the buck has got to stop, the wheels have got to turn and you have to have a new outlook.
“Grant gave us a bit of a roasting when we were 16-3 down which really did rattle everyone’s cage. It was that more than anything that turned it round.
“It was a ‘we’re at the bottom of the mine now so what are we going to do about it’ type thing. It was the point of no return and time to do something.”
Bick adds:“We came out with a gameplan and it didn’t work. So we rallied around and once the tide turned, even in extra time we didn’t feel that we were going to lose.
“Everything was going in our favour, we had dominance in the forwards. Even though we played a very basic, narrow game, it worked for us.”
In 1497, the Cornish people twice rose up against central authority.
“Grant gave us a bit of a roasting when we were 16-3 down and it rattled our cage”
Some 15,000 walked all the way from the Duchy to the capital and their numbers were swelled along the way. In Blackheath they were faced by 25,000 troops of the King and were slaughtered.
Nancekivell says: “This time 40,000 waving the flag of St Piran, patron saint of the Cornish, made the six-hour journey to Twickenham.
“It was everywhere, you couldn’t move without it. I know Cornwall went this year but, while it has some momentum, it is nothing like it was then.
“You could not do anything without it being mentioned. It was like Brexit, they couldn’t talk about anything else.”
Bick continues: “There wasn’t a great deal to shout about in Cornwall at the time. It was a bit of a backwater. But there was a bit of a resurgence in the Cornish identity.
“And it was like the perfect storm for us.You go to Cornwall games now, and there isn’t the same passion or the crowds so I’m very thankful for having been involved at that time.
“Now the County Championship has lost its sparkle and they’ve brought in rules on who can, and cannot, play.
“The advent of professional rugby was the death knell for Championship rugby. But for guys like us who were playing club rugby in Cornwall it was our chance to get up there on the national stage.
“It was a chance to show what Cornish rugby was all about. There were few other ways of doing that, such was the set-up of South-west rugby. You’d only play sides in Devon and maybe go to Somerset, so it was a chance to get out of the county and get to Twickenham.”