Gareth Williams - The First XV (Rugby)

Harri Webb
Vive le Sport

W.J.Townsend Collins
The Master of Supreme Achievement

Terry McLean
The Greatest Match

Dylan Thomas
Enoch Davies and a Stranger

Gwyn Thomas
Padded up for action

Alan Watkins
Ups and downs of a climber

Richard Burton
The last time I played rugby

John Morgan
Excursion Train

Dai Smith and Gareth Williams
Cliff Morgan

John Reason and Carwyn James
Gerald Davies and Barry John in New Zealand 1971

Gerald Davies
Choking with Clive

Frank Keating
Phil Bach

Alun Richards
Carwyn

Eddie Butler
Prossers Pontypool

Rupert Moon
Moonstruck

Lewis Davies
Gone from under your nose

John Stuart Williams
River Walk

In 2007 I edited for the Library of Wales an anthology of Welsh sports writing called, unsurprisingly, Sport. The surprise to many lay in the quality of the writing it showcased; it has been twice reprinted. It offered a sporting smorgasbord from bando to boxing and snooker to swimming (there was also some soccer) varied enough to revitalise the most jaded palate, but maybe the meat came last, in the most substantial section which occupied almost a third of the entire book: Rugby. This imbalance reflected not only my own sporting and literary interests but underlined the centrality in the popular and wider culture of Wales of what the late J.B.G.Thomas always referred to as the Game. For over the years Welsh rugby has generated some classic writing, even if it has yet to attain the literary status enjoyed by cricket in England and boxing and baseball in the USA.

Parthians Richard Davies is an award-winning writer and a former player. Its in his DNA. I was a spectator at the old Arms Park in the late sixties when his father Randall, the mildest person you could ever meet, was sent off during a notably bruising (i.e. dirty) game between Cardiff and Neath. With the nation gearing up for more bruising World Cup encounters in New Zealand, I accepted Richards invitation to select a best fifteen from the forty odd pieces that appeared in the original Sport anthology. Here they are, with two new entrants that did not make the first cut, and two reserves. I wanted my First XV propped by the poets who bookended the original selection, so a brace of bards, the one feisty the other wistful, find themselves on the bench.

My selection has been shaped by the same principle as before: the best rugby writing is good writing that happens to be about rugby. Gerald Davies, who writes the Foreword, is as much an admirer of literary as of sporting elegance, and he has written on the game as stylishly as he played it. If I have needed an introduction, he needs none.

Gareth Williams

I enjoy very much the crossing over of cultural boundaries. Of, say, a musician with whom we are familiar and recognise as the figure on the podium all dressed in black with a white dress shirt and a bow tie conducting the evenings music only for us later to notice him dressed down with scarf and bobble cap among the madding crowd at Murrayfield. Or the elegant writer and broadcaster recording all of a nations yesterdays and bringing that history to bear on todays events, and then to find him on the golfing greens of Augusta. Or the eloquent politician surviving the bear-pit confrontations of the House of Commons who, regretting the lack of respectful silence there, brings this rumbustious experience to his Saturdays outing by shouting away on the sporting terraces.

I find it somehow pleasing to find heroes from one way of life enjoying the thrills and fun of a different life; admiring and respecting the talent of others and entering the mood of the sporting spirit. These are people with a hinterland, not exclusively one dimensional, cherishing something beyond their narrow, though expert, field of endeavour. I am thrilled when such people say they love rugby, my passion.

The same goes for the solitary business of writing. Quite simply I like it, having played rugby, to find that there are those who have the gift of translating the instant and instinctive action into words, creating a picture in the mind of what came and went in the blink of an eye and to understand why it happened and, perhaps, how it came to happen the way it did and thereby recording for all time the events of the day. Or the admiration the writer feels for a remarkable player who shapes an extraordinary event or a famous trip with a club gang and brings it all to memorable life.

In so doing they re-create the drama of what they saw and, more importantly, what they felt; of their encounter with the heroic, with mythical and lyrical embellishments of the pageant unfolding in front of them or, as Richard Burton writes, of the massive lies and stupendous exaggerations. So long as it makes for a good read.

We warm to the adventure of the game from slow staccato beginnings to the final mad crescendo; or the other way round, of a game reduced to a longing for the referees whistle to bring the whole dull, muddy rigmarole to an end and for an early beer to relieve the depression or to inspire a witty record of the slapstick event, Vive le Sport; the mediocre which cannot be ignored but which frequently, by the stroke of a clever pen, can be transformed into enriching, guffawing comedy. There are the jokes and the ribald songs. There is the romance the writer senses. There is the high seriousness as well as the cheerfully peculiar which he reviews.

We will all conclude that in the larger scheme of things, sport is ultimately but trivial goings-on which we gladly embrace to relieve us of much that is ordinary and mundane, taking us out of the days tedium to make us feel, or as close as it is possible to feel, that glad confident morning once more. Rugby, whether played at its glorious best or, for that matter, a simple unexpected and unadorned victory, uplifts us to make us feel better about ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Rugby can transport us into different realms. The game can either be painted in golden epic colours of international drama, in pastel shades of a casual rural scene, or sometimes, viewing the Pickwickian shape of the trundling tight-head prop, in bold and splashing tints of humour and even of farce.

Sport has the ability to do this and the writer is there to take us back to remind us of the exhilaration and the fun.

Gareth Williams marvellous anthology gives us a wonderful taste of the kind of writing and the variety of styles that the game has inspired over the years. I wished for more. That he has included a piece of mine among the distinguished writers is an honour.

I hope the collection gives you as much pleasure as it did me.

Gerald Davies, CBE, DL

HARRI WEBB

Sing a song of rugby,
Buttocks, booze and blood,
Thirty dirty ruffians
Brawling in the mud.

When the match is over,
Theyre at the bar in throngs,
If you think the game is filthy,
Then you should hear the songs.

from The Green Desert (1969)

All my life through I have had a capacity for hero-worship. Whenever I have found greatness of character, intellect, skill, or kindliness it has been a joy to pay tribute to it. Yet, side by side with willingness to admire and praise (in connection with Rugby football and all else), has been an inability to ignore faults and shortcomings. In the early Nineties I thought Arthur Gould the greatest Rugby player I had ever seen. Today, after sixty years of football criticism, I think of him still as the greatest player of all time. There were days when he fell short of his own standards, and I criticised his play accordingly (much to the annoyance of some of his idolatrous admirers); yet, in spite of occasional defects, he seemed then, and to me remains, the master of supreme achievement. How wonderful were the days when Arthur Gould was the bright particular star of Invincible Newport and Invincible Wales! Under the heading of The Prince of Players, I wrote in 1893 or 1894 two articles which gave a full account of his career till that time. Its completeness was due to the fact that I had access to a newspaper cutting book in which Arthur Goulds admiring sister had kept records of most of the matches in which he had played. His career was remarkable in its variety. Though Newport was his home, and early and late he played for the Newport team, he spent long periods in other districts, part of the time associated with a brother who was a public works contractor. He played for the Southampton Trojans, the London Welsh, and Richmond; for Hampshire, South Wales, and Middlesex; from 1885 till 1897 he was assured of his place in the Welsh team, of which he was the accepted captain for years. Those who never saw him in his heyday can have little conception of his physical powers and the keen brain which directed and controlled them. He was a track sprinter only two yards outside evens; and a great hurdler who several times was second in the English championship. As a footballer he had all the gifts, and they had been developed by thought and constant practice. Some boys when they begin to play Rugby football find that they dodge, swerve, and side-step naturally it is not a question of thought, it is an animal instinct. Arthur Gould was one of them. He dodged or swerved away from a tackler instinctively; but before he had gone far he had learned to study the capacity of his fellow players and the defensive powers of his opponents, knew what he was doing, why he did it, and how it was done. Other players, on their inspired days, have gone through their opponents swerving, side-stepping, dodging with easy mastery which made the defence look silly; other centres have made perfect openings and unselfishly given their wings chances to score; other men have nipped their opponents attacks in the bud by the quickness with which they smothered man and ball, or by intercepting passes; others have tackled man after man or compelled them to pass to avoid being taken with the ball; but no three-quarter I have known has maintained the high level of attainment in attack and defence so long and so consistently as Arthur Gould no man has shown such uniform brilliance and resourcefulness over so long a period of years. He was in first-class football from 1882 till 1898; he first played for Wales against England in 1885, and his last game was against England at Newport in 1897 twenty-seven matches, at that time a record. And when comparison is made with the records of other players it must be remembered that in his day there were no matches with France, New Zealand, South Africa, or Australia to swell the record, and that he was in the West Indies in 1889. As a boy he played at three-quarter, but it was as a stop-gap full-back that he entered the Newport XV. His first game was prophetic. Kick, you young devil! shouted the Newport Captain, for he was playing a three-quarter game; but twice he ran through the Weston-super-Mare team and scored tries. As a full-back he played for Newport for three seasons; he got his cap for Wales first as a full-back; but when he had a chance to play at three-quarter he soon made his mark. In those early days he was famous as a kicker, and one season dropped twenty goals; but he was known also for his speed and elusiveness, and for the wonderful quickness of his punting. Thereby hangs a tale. Arthur Gould was left-handed and left-footed; he kicked instinctively with his left foot. But when his opponents found that he could kick only with one foot, they played on him from their right and smothered his kicks. When he found what was happening, he practised kicking with his right foot so assiduously that he became as good with one foot as the other, and the late W.H.Gwynn, of Swansea, Secretary to the Welsh Rugby Union, who told the tale, concluded, And you simply couldnt prevent him from getting in his kick. Never did a rugby player work harder to improve his natural gifts and perfect his technical equipment. As time went on, he became sparing of his efforts to drop goals, and concentrated upon running through the defence or making openings for his wings. In his closing years his defence was criticised, and it is true that often in those late days he would not go down to the ball, and obviously avoided clashes with big forwards who were bearing down on him; while too often he tried to intercept a pass instead of going for the man with the ball. This of course was a defect it counts against him. But he had taken a lot of battering, and had suffered many injuries in the earlier years, when his defence was the admiration of friend and foe. Indeed, after the Welsh victory over Scotland at Newport in 1887-8, Charles Reid, the greatest of Scottish forwards, said publicly that he had never known a man who did more for his team than Gould did that day. When Gould ran, he carried the ball in both hands; often as he side-stepped an opponent he raised the ball at arms length above his head; sometimes from that height he gave a downward untakeable pass. I mention faults developed late in his career, because if they are ignored I may be charged with praising this great player blindly or dishonestly. But, when all is said, Arthur Gould is to me the greatest rugby footballer who ever played.