They say that Barry John, king among fly-halves, finally decided to quit rugby when a bank cashier in Rhyl offered him a curtsy. That’s how it goes in some tellings, anyway. In others it was a nurse in Swansea, or a young mother who told tell her son to reach out and touch his hand at the Eisteddfod, or the man who caused a tailback on Queen Street when he left his car idling in traffic so he could ask him for a handshake, or the kids who crowded round to stare at him when they got a tip-off that he had stopped in at the local garage to have his car fixed. “Living in a goldfish bowl,” John said when he explained why he retired, “isn’t living at all.”
John died last Sunday at the age of 79. There will be a minute’s applause for him, and his teammate JPR Williams, as well as the old England captain Mike Weston, at Twickenham on Saturday. John’s obituaries were a reminder the game in Wales is a little different to the one they play in England. There are 54,685 registered rugby players in Wales, spread across 276 clubs, among a population of just over 3 million people. It’s one corner of Britain where rugby isn’t a minority sport. John might have preferred it if it was.
“I’m not a god, or a prince, or a healer, but a regular man,” he wrote, and he missed being able to live like one. The irony was that his decision to walk away from the game when he did, at 27, only burnished his myth.
The past remains ever-present in Welsh rugby. There’s no escaping it. Especially when they play England. Warren Gatland has been talking about it this week, so has his captain, Dafydd Jenkins, and his outside-centre, George North, who is perhaps the one superstar left in his young team. It’s a rivalry that runs all the way back to 1881, but which was really forged in the years when JPR, Gerald, Gareth, Phil, Merv the Swerve and all the rest of them, no surnames needed, beat the English inside out, year after year. Welsh rugby’s had a sepia tinge to it ever since the 1980s, just like West Indian cricket.
It has been a rough couple of years for Welsh rugby. The national federation has weathered an independent report into its culture, which found that it could be a “toxic”, “unforgiving”, and “even vindictive” place to work. The regional teams are struggling, there have been vicious rows about, and resignations over, the reform of the professional game, and the results of the men’s national team, whose success over the past decade helped cover up all the underlying problems, which have taken a turn for the worse as one generation of players has given way to the next.
Gatland was supposed to use that press conference to announce his team for the match, but he had already revealed it 24 hours earlier. He went ahead of schedule, and without warning, because he was annoyed at the way the team had been leaked the previous week. The decision to bring the announcement forward had caught the press short, and the conference began with a long back-and-forth between him and a handful of Welsh journalists about the state of the relationship between the team and the media. “I feel,” Gatland said at one point, “like we’re stuck in a whirlpool of negativity around the game in Wales.”
There is another side to the story. There always is. Geraint John, the Welsh Rugby Unions’s community director, was one of those same kids who idolised Barry John. “I was nine in 1971, so my first real experience of rugby was the ’71 Lions tour,” he says. “My heroes were JPR, Gareth Edwards and Barry John. The first game I ever went to see was the 1973 Barbarians v New Zealand, I went with my father, so that’s what I was brought up on.”
While Gatland was giving his press conference, John was at a media event at the Principality Stadium, announcing the launch of a new WRU apprenticeship scheme, run in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University. Jenkins’s predecessor as captain, Dewi Lake, was one of the WRU’s apprentices, as was Kelsey Jones, who plays for the women’s team. Other graduates are working as hub officers or club development officers.
“Rugby in Wales isn’t just what happens at 2.30pm on a Saturday afternoon,” John says. “Because rugby matters in Wales. People still want it, families still have that passion for it, it’s still embedded in the culture.” He talks about clubs as being vital parts of the community, spaces where everyone is welcome, “even if it’s an 80-year-old who wants to stop in for a cup of tea”. The challenge, he explains, is that the communities themselves are changing. And fast. “I visit clubs where people will say to me, ‘We used to have this number of people playing,’” John says, “and I say back, ‘Yes, but we used to have 160-odd mines too.’
“You see new towns being built outside Cardiff, new schools, so the challenge for us is how do we provide rugby to that group of people?” The flip side is there are towns where the population is shrinking. “Take my mother, she’s 90, and there’s nothing in her town any more, there used to be two comprehensives, but there’s only one there now. It’s the same in one of the areas where my father-in-law lived. There’s no school at all there now. The local rugby club thrived because of that school, but how long is it going to be able to last without it?”
At the same time, the demographics of the playing population are changing too.
“If you look in the affluent areas, the clubs are full of minis, juniors, youths, there’s huge numbers there,” John says, “but I was speaking to a headmistress recently who told us, ‘I’m not worried about the 10% who play rugby, I’m worried about the 90% who can’t afford to.’” The WRU is running a Fit and Fed programme in deprived areas during the summer holidays, which provides breakfast and lunch to almost 15,000 children who usually rely on free school meals for nutrition. It also recently bought, and distributed, 5,000 pairs of boots for communal use.
The talent is still there, same as it was in Barry John’s day. Whether Wales win or lose, they will have plenty of it on the Twickenham pitch again on Saturday, young kids, some of them, who are wet behind the ears in the professional game but have all the makings of Test match players. And the enthusiasm is there too, and the excitement around this fixture, in particular. “Listen to Alex Mann talk about winning his first cap,” John says, “hear him say how it was the proudest day of his life, and you have to believe the game still burns in people’s hearts. And if we could just win on Saturday …”
