TheWelsh Lions who but didn’t get chance
THEY may have performed outstandingly for Wales or simply for their clubs, but what they also have in common is that they never got to tour with the British and Irish Lions.
Some missed out as a result of selection folly.
Others went to rugby league, while a number couldn’t afford the trip and health and injuries issues ruled out still more.
These are the final Lions selections Warren Gatland will make in the next two weeks
At least one falls into the category of being too hot for the Lions to handle.
We look at why some of Welsh rugby’s finest players over the decades never got to test themselves with the best of British and Irish rugby. Jonathan Davies Among the handful of greatest players from any of the home countries not to have toured with the best of British and Irish rugby.
Jacques Fouroux, the former France skipper, once described Davies as the “Maradona of rugby”. In ability it was a fair comparison, but the genius from Trimsaran was unlucky as far as the Lions went: he came through after the 1983 tour to New Zealand and had left for rugby league before the 1989 trip to Australia.
Blessed with Rolls Royce acceleration, sublime skill and tactical awareness, he would have walked a Test spot on that tour Down Under. But it wasn’t to be. Dai Morris A Welsh rugby hero in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was part of an outstanding back Wales back row with John Taylor and Mervyn Davies.
Yet the man whose support play earned him the nickname The Shadow was one of the few members of Wales’s 1971 Grand Slam team who failed to make that year’s Lions tour to New Zealand.
Some said it was because there were doubts about how the self-professed homebird would cope with months away from his beloved Rhigos.
Others thought it might have been tactical, with the bulkier Derek Quinnell winning the vote instead. Whatever, a fine player missed out. Geoff Wheel The Ripper was a key figure in Wales’s forward effort during the 1970s, his great mauling ability proving priceless to successive Welsh teams.
His big opportunity to tour with the Lions came in 1977.
But he was said to have been ruled out of the tour on medical grounds — he was reported to have had a heart murmur. Claude Davey An authentic crash-tackling great who ranks as one of the finest Welsh centres of all time. His misfortune was that his career peaked at a time when there was no Lions tour.
He was too young in 1930 and in 1938 his Test days were coming to an end. It meant that a man who played in two winning sides against the All Blacks, in the space of three months in 1935, was never a Lion.
It was their loss. Mark Ring Talent was never Ring’s problem – he was as gifted as they come, a man who had more tricks in his locker than a circus entertainer. He also had a sharp rugby brain. Injuries sadly conspired against this maverick at key points in his career, but in 1988 he dazzled as one of four fly-halves in the back division that Wales paraded at Twickenham. Throughout that campaign his class shone through.
Able to play in the centre as well, he might have made the 1989 trip to Australia but a serious knee problem killed his hopes. What a joy it was to watch him play, though. Dicky Owen Respected authorities rate this lightly-built son of Swansea as one of the top three players ever to play for Wales. He is said to have pretty much invented the scrum-half role as we know it.