Former Wales head coach John Ryan has sadly passed away at the age of 83.
He guided the national side from 1988 to 1990, a particularly turbulent time when Welsh rugby was hit by a series of departures to rugby league. Spotting a drinker reading a Welsh evening newspaper at the time, one arrival at a Valleys workingmen's club shouted across: "Who's gone today?" His words said a lot.
It was against this backdrop that Ryan operated.
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Before he took on the Wales position, he had enjoyed success at club level, coaching both Newport and Cardiff to Welsh Cup final triumphs. No-one had ever previously steered two different clubs to cup glory in Wales.
But his time as national coach was to prove exceptionally challenging.
It probably would have been for anyone at the time.
For the Wales national side were engulfed by a perfect storm during Ryan’s tenure. Injuries at various points to two genuinely world-class players, Robert Norster and Ieuan Evans, didn’t help, nor did the aforementioned haemorrhage of players to the 13-a-side code after Wales’ trouncing in New Zealand in the summer of 1988 which precipitated the departure of Tony Gray as team boss. Plenty felt the decision to ditch Gray and his assistant Derk Quinnell, who had led Wales to a Triple Crown just months earlier, to have been hopelessly misguided.
But Ryan was left to pick up the pieces.
At the time. he was the first Wales coach not to have played for the national team.
Wales defeated Western Samoa in his first game as coach but they lost to Romania in their next match. The following year’s Rugby Annual for Wales could not be accused of underreacting to the setback, calling it “a disaster”.
The book that was considered Welsh rugby’s bible noted the injuries to Norster and Evans, “plus a burst of over-zealous discipline by the selectors that penalised Mark Ring, who was not selected. Paul Thorburn, the match-winning full-back, was dropped. By this time, the try-scoring Adrian Hadley had gone north and pressure was mounting on Jonathan Davies as League scouts waved their bank notes. Not a promising situation for John Ryan!”
Indeed.
Davies duly exited for Widnes and the outstanding centre John Devereux played just twice under Ryan before following the fly-half to league. The back rower Paul Moriarty had already taken the same route, along with a number of others. It left the national coach with an unenviable job. Some might have called it an impossible job.
Wales duly went from Triple Crown winners in 1988 to finishing joint bottom of the Five Nations in 1989, with their solitary win seeing them prevail in the rain against England, inspired by a wonderful box-kicking display from Rober Jones and exceptional performances from Norster, Phil Davies and Thorburn.
The win was a one-off in a miserable championship season, though.
Nor did matters improve the following term, with a defeat by New Zealand in the autumn preceding losses to France (29-19) and England (34-6). The loss at Twickenham saw the largest margin of defeat for a Wales team ever against the men in white, with the writer JBG Thomas saying: “The Welsh display was so poor as to be beyond comprehension. The side were completely outplayed.”
At the press conference after the game, the Wales captain Robert Jones fielded most of the questions, and at the post-match function, the skipper apologised to the coach for the team performance. But Ryan subsequently resigned, having overseen just two wins from nine games.
It was a period when Wales went through four team bosses in little more than three years. “One of the reasons why we played so badly was instability in coaching, leading to constant changes in style,” wrote Jones in his book Raising The Dragon. “The team lost confidence and cohesion as it tried to adjust to the changes.”
Jones described Ryan, Ron Waldron and Alan Davies, three of those coaches, as “men of integrity, decent men who were desperate to achieve success for Wales and went about it in ways they were convinced were right”. Ryan, he said, was organised and analytical.
“If you could have brought together the best qualities of John, Ron and Alan you would have been somewhere close to an ideal.
“But, as I said, it was never easy for them.”
The Wales job may not have worked out for him but Ryan kept his dignity and was respected inside and outside the game.
He had previously played in the back row for Newport and London Welsh and would later manage the Wales Sevens team.
“John was a thoroughly nice guy, very laid back,” wrote Jones.
Few would disagree with that assessment.
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