Welsh rugby at the cliff face... and we’re on it too
Go look for a random rugby clip and, before you know it, you have lost half an hour to Chuck Norris’ top 10 moments (cool!) or Anne Doyle rapping on TV3’s Late Lunch Live (cringe!). That’s how we came across Max Boyce this week.
Boyce’s name had rang a bell before but it was only a subsequent google search that fleshed out the details of a career built on musical comedy, his origins in the mining communities of South Wales and a slavish devotion to the game of rugby union and its immortal gods.
Boyce’s pomp coincided with that of the greatest of all Welsh teams back in the 1970s and he paid tribute to their genius in his song and poetry through which the names of Barry John and Gareth Edwards would bob and weave.
When I played for Wales, one of his acts, hasn’t dated well — the punchlines are as obvious as a hospital pass — but Boyce’s routine about beating England 406-12 on his street as a nine-year-old and shipping a late tackle three yards short of his anorak sing to a universal audience while cornering the unique dream that is the Welsh and rugger.
That England were always the opposition told a tale too. The Old Enemy might not have known it, or cared, but they have been beaten day after day for decades on the streets of Cardiff, Edinburgh, Dublin and many more cities and towns outside of the Celtic capitals and the man from Glynneath had a few ditties for that as well.
“When it comes to the one great scorer/ To mark against your name/ He’ll not ask how you played the game/ But … whether you beat England.” Another obvious ending, certainly, but even that is dated now if coverage of tomorrow’s visit of Warren Gatland’s side to Dublin is anything of a barometer.
It has been a build-up dominated by talk of a hostile Aviva Stadium “welcome” for the Welsh and Lions coach, Brian O’Driscoll’s attempts to put all talk of his demotion by the Kiwi last summer to bed and a handful of judicious enquiries from members of the fourth estate which have served to give legs to a story that should have collapsed under its own weight months ago.
The surprising thing though is that it isn’t the media here propping it up like a washed-up crooner for one last pay day. It was an enquiry from a Welsh journalist last week that prompted Gatland to point fingers about “lazy journalism” and it was a BT Sport tweet fanning the ashes of the Australian saga which got O’Driscoll this week.
To the uninitiated it must seem like these two Celts will be facing off from opposite sides of a familial civil war and the net result has been to inflate a needless air of spite into a meeting that had more than enough going for it before perspective was lost.
Wales were always going to be a threat.
What few of the 50,000-plus people in the crowd tomorrow will realise or care is that the threat is far more magnified in the boardroom than on the field of play because if the Welsh regions proceed with their intention to abandon the PRO12 and sign up to an Anglo-Welsh league then the ground underneath the provinces and Joe Schmidt’s national team will give way in an instant.
It’s a doomsday scenario that few people in the media, the rugby establishment or among the public have remarked upon but the implications for the game here would be disastrous and would run a fault line through an underrated competition which has served as the foundation for the success enjoyed by the IRFU and its branches.
Considerable debates and legal niceties would still have to be negotiated for that to happen but the success of the Welsh national team won’t always paper over the chasms that have appeared at club level where the switch from the great old clubs like Llanelli and Pontypridd to franchises has been such an unmitigated disaster.
One Welsh rugby journalist often jokes about playing a game of ‘spot the fan behind the goal’ so scarce are the numbers watching and it is a situation all the more alarming given the rise in fortunes of football with two Welsh clubs — Cardiff City and Swansea City — facing off in the Premier League again to a packed house this weekend. Synonymous with the same coal face that claimed the life of Boyce’s father and almost eight years of his own as a young man, Welsh rugby now finds itself tottering at the cliff face.
And Irish rugby stands with it.
Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @Rackob
