The academy which is envy of the world
Cardiff Met have rightly been in the spotlight recently with their growing reputation in the brilliant BUCS Super League and penchant for producing fully rounded mature adults and players ready to step straight into professional rugby.
Like all the BUCS teams, they provide a different route to the ubiquitous club academies and most recently England have been the main beneficiaries with Alex Dombrandt, below, Luke Northmore and Tom Pearson all learning their stuff on the other side of the Bridge. Aaron Wainwright has also starred for Wales and judging from a few of their midweek matches I’ve watched online this season there are more big name players on the way. If ever you need a midweek rugby hit check out the BUCS live streams, you will be richly entertained.
But actually Cardiff Met are not just a modern day phenomenon. In their many incarnations they have been producing brilliant rugby players for 70 years and they took time out earlier this month to celebrate that fact with a gala dinner with the guest list headed up by old boy Gareth Edwards who broke into the Wales team during his time at the College.
That changing identity is perhaps why, on occasions, they haven’t always been properly appreciated.
They started as Cardiff
Training
College in
1950, were then renamed
Cardiff College of Education before morphing into South
Glamorgan Institute which is perhaps the entity most familiar to rugby fans. Education is always reinventing itself in Britain however so it then became UWIC and most recently it has settled on Cardiff Metropolitan University. Whatever the nomme de jour the Cyncoed establishment has always been known locally as the “College on the hill”.
It can boast 60 internationals – mostly Welsh but not exclusively so, England, Ireland and Portugal have all profited – and 19 Lions, so its playing legacy is huge. During my time reporting in Wales in the 1980s they were unofficially the 19th senior club in Wales, playing – and beating – many of the 18 teams that traditionally gloried in that status.
But their prowess on the field has only ever been the tip of the iceberg. It has also spawned legions of impassioned Welsh PE teachers and rugby tragics who travelled afar doing essential “missionary work” at our schools, not least in England. And it’s not just the schools that benefitted. Many junior clubs in south east England at various times fielded virtually all Welsh back divisions.
More recently there is scarcely a senior club in the country that hasn’t, at some time, employed a match analyst or fitness coach who didn’t learn their
stuff at Cyncoed. Oh yes there was plenty to celebrate last week.
As with their closest English counterparts – Loughborough and
St Luke’s College before the latter was merged with Exeter University – you could normally identify a Cardiff Met team simply from the cut of their gib.
I recall one murky afternoon at Newbridge – a power in the land at the time – reporting on what was billed as the ritual slaughter of a particularly coltish looking South Glamorgan Institute. Except, playing an athletic 80 minute eyeballs out form of the game possibly 30 years ahead of its time, the students ran Newbridge off their feet and made off with a famous win.
A fresh faced John Devereux, a man child who looked about 15, caused havoc that day and within months had been capped by Wales and indeed selected for the Lions for their “home” fixture against a World XV which was in lieu of their cancelled tour of South Africa.
David Rees was a classy utility back, Michael Holding a lightning rod on the wing and Huw Bean a livewire at hooker. Tony “Muscles” Rees – who went on to win a Heineken Cup with Brive – was their one really big unit up front while Stuart Davies was already a canny operator at No.8.
The main man though was Cornwall’s Colin Laity, Devereux’s midfield partner in crime. Laity was the real deal. Strength of a weightlifter, dynamic burst over 30 yards or so, great array of passes, subtle kicking game and a clench fisted winning attitude. Laity would rank very high on my list of the best uncapped players in recent history.
England seemed sniffy about picking somebody who played all his rugby in Wales and were well served at centre in the late
80s and 90s while initially it was also a time of plenty in midfield for Wales with the likes of Mark Ring and Devereux. After the latter went north, Laity should have taken centre stage and it remains unfathomable to me that he didn’t. I heard it once mentioned by somebody in authority that he was reckoned to have concrete hands and this counted against him. If he did I never witnessed such a weakness.
There are players out there with 50 Test caps with not half Laity’s talent or rugby nous. Still the big five moved in mysterious ways back then, they even managed to give a once in a lifetime player like David Bishop just one cap.
A quick scoot through just some of the alumni of Cardiff Met gets the rugby juices flowing. As well as Edwards there was speedster JJ Williams – a star of their athletics squad naturally as was demon shot putter Allan Martin who became a Wales lock of note – while 1971 Lions try scoring phenomenon John Bevan was a star pupil and top schools coach of the future. Roy Bergiers was a centre in the Devereux mould in the early 70s, David Richards oozed class at 10 and 12, John Lloyd went on to captain Wales while prop Colin Smart played and drank aftershave for England; Brian Price was a colossus even as a student and Tony Gray was the archetypal roaming openside who did great things at London Welsh and also coached Wales.
Their first-ever captain was Bill Samuel who not only wrote the best rugby autobiography ever – Rugby Body and Soul – but can fairly claim to be the man who first spotted and then nurtured the staggering talent of Gareth Edwards.
Clive Rowlands was another early skipper who went on to not only captain Wales but then as coach, lead them into the glory days in the 70s. Dewi Bebb, Jonathan Humphreys, Ryan Jones, Alex Cuthbert, the list is almost endless, but you get the picture. This was and is a rugby academy that bears comparison with almost any in the world.We raise a glass in their direction.