He won 70 caps for Wales and was a key figure in two Grand Slams. But it would all have been a very different story had Tom Shanklin heeded the advice of one of the legends of the game.
Having been born in Harrow, he was eligible for England as well as the land of his father, Jim, who won four Welsh caps in the early 1970s. So when a certain Clive Woodward came calling out of the blue in early 2000, the 20-year-old Saracens centre had a big decision to make.
His club coach, Francois Pieenaar, had no doubts over what he should do. “Go with England” was the message from the South African World Cup winner. But, thankfully for Welsh rugby, Shanklin didn’t take his advice and the rest, as they say, is history.
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So when we catch up for a chat about his sporting life, it’s a tale of wearing the three feathers rather than the red rose, a story of Hansen and Johnson, a midfield partnership with Gavin Henson, the high of the 2005 Grand Slam and the low of the injury that followed just weeks later, which was to plague the rest of his career.
There’s also the journey since he hung up his boots, both in business and as a pundit, including his double-act with podcast pal David Flatman. Plenty of ground to cover then, starting with how he came to spend much of the first 20 years of his life in England.
“My dad was born on a farm in East Williamson, in Pembrokeshire. But he left when he was about 18 and went over the bridge to work for Guinness. He was with them when he was playing rugby. Later on then, he had a sports shop on Tottenham Court Road,” he explains.
Tom entered the world in 1979 and spent his early years in the London area, before moving to Wales at the age of seven to live in Penally. It was there that he first took up rugby, at Tenby RFC.
“I played football to start off with. I was a midfielder for Tenby Juniors. Football was great, but I quite liked the physical aspect of sport when I was young, so I sort of got into rugby when I was around 10 and then decided to focus on that when I was about 13 or 14.”
It was at around that age he moved back to England, to live in Effingham in Surrey. At the same time, he was starting to get a clearer idea of his dad’s rugby career for London Welsh and Wales.
“When you get interested in rugby, you start to watch the videos. He is on the Crowning Years video scoring a try against Ireland in 1973. Gareth Edwards puts him away.
“It’s probably when I got to about 14-16, it really sort of sunk in that he was a decent player and played to a high level. Still today, people stop me to say they remember watching him play.”
Having initially linked up with Effingham RFC, Shanklin then switched to London Welsh on his dad’s prompting and focused on the centre, having also tried his hand at fly-half and full-back. He had a couple of seasons of senior rugby with the Exiles, playing under Clive Griffiths, while studying sports science at Brunel University in Isleworth.
Then, in 1999, came a key move as he was signed up by Saracens, which meant living next door to another new recruit, a certain David Flatman. “Flats was just the same back then pretty much. He was always good company!” he recalls.
In terms of the senior players at the club, it was a real rugby Who’s Who, with the likes of Thomas Castaignede, Richard Hill, Kyran Bracken, Danny Grewcock, Paul Wallace, Tony Diprose and Dan Luger on board, along with Wallaby World Cup winner Tim Horan.
“Playing alongside Horan in the centre, you couldn’t get a better education than that. To experience that at 20 was fantastic,” said Shanklin. “He was great on and off the field. He was constantly giving me bits of advice, either defensively or in attack. He was just always helping you through games.”
With such expert tutelage, Shanklin started to catch the eye and then came that sliding doors moment in the shape of the approach from Woodward.
“I was on my way back from training when I had the phone call. I honestly thought it was someone taking the p**s. I thought it was Kyran Bracken putting on a really posh voice. So I started swearing down the phone!” he reveals.
“Then I realised it wasn’t Kyran and that it actually was Woodward. It really took me by surprise because I’d had no communication from Wales up to then. It was after I played against Leicester at Welford Road. It was on TV and I played really well. It was one of my best games up to then. That’s when the call from Woodward came.
“He asked me if I wanted to be involved in the England squad for the Six Nations. He would have known I was eligible for Wales and, as a coach, you will sometimes take a bit of a risk and cap someone just to make sure they are not poached by another team.
“Anyway, I said ‘You will have to leave it with me’. I remember speaking then to Francois Pienaar, the coach at Saracens. I said ‘What should I do? Which way should I go?’ He said ‘Go with England, Go with England’. He was probably looking at it commercially and the bigger picture.
“But all my family are Welsh. I had played for the Welsh Exiles and Wales U19s, my father had played for Wales, I had taken up rugby down there. All my cousins and aunties lived in Pembrokeshire. So I decided I just couldn’t do it.
“The word got round then and about four or five days later, Trevor James, the Wales team manager called me and invited me into camp to train with the Welsh team. I remember turning up at Sophia Gardens and no-one knew me, I was just this skinny pale kid with a mop of hair!”
But he made enough of an impression to be selected for Wales A, playing under Dennis John and Mike Ruddock, and then the 2001 summer tour of Japan where he won his first cap.
“I made my own debut really! I played in the centre against the Pacific Barbarians in the game after the first Test. I was going to get smashed in the tackle, so I passed it to Mark Jones quickly instead and he got injured. So there was a vacancy on the wing, where I had played a bit for Saracens, and I was one of the only people left. So I created my own space.”
Shanklin’s second cap was to come against France in the 2002 Six Nations, which was Steve Hansen’s first game in charge following Graham Henry’s resignation.
“He called me in from outside the squad so that was a great early vote of confidence from him,” he says. “Hansen was brilliant for me. The whole combination of him, Scott Johnson and Andrew Hore was streets ahead in terms of professionalism and attention to detail, both tactical and technical. You could see how good they were.
“Johnson was great because he was sort of the go-between between the players and Hansen, who was the strict one. It was a little bit of good cop, bad cop.
“Scott just made you think a little bit more about basic stuff like which side to place the ball when you are going into contact, trying to turn the right way for your scrum-half. He gave us a better understanding of rugby, of where to be, executing three v twos, two v ones, catching and passing, things you might take for granted, but you’ve got to be good at that. That’s not just the backs, it was 1-15.
“Hore came in and looked at us and thought the team was miles behind where we needed to be and all of a sudden training was a lot more intense. We did so much more physical conditioning. It was structured as well.
“Man management was where Hansen really stood apart. I remember in the 2004 Six Nations, he told me I was going to be on bench for the Italy game having started the previous match. But he made a point of saying how they massively valued what I brought to the team and that I would come on. He then looked at me and said ‘But most of all, you have got a massive ticker, just keep going.’
“After something like that, you come away with a positive mindset. You are thinking ‘I’m not playing, but he rates me and I will get some game-time’. As it was, I came on and I scored a try with pretty much my first touch.
“That’s where he was good. He took time to have individual meetings with everyone. He would tell you to your face if he was leaving you out. It’s not nice dropping players. But what he did well was put a positive spin on it. He knew what to say to certain players, who needed a rollicking and who needed an arm round them. I will never forget that.”
With Hansen returning to New Zealand at the end of the 2004 Six Nations, it was Mike Ruddock who took the helm.
“I got on really well with Mike. I worked with him in the A team and I really enjoyed his company. I thought he was a great bloke. He realised what worked within the group and built on that. He had to pick the team at the end of the day and he picked a Grand Slam winning team.”
Indeed he did and Shanklin, now with Cardiff Blues, was to be a key part of it, starting all five games in the memorable 2005 Six Nations clean-sweep.
“That was my best season. I was 25 years old, I was injury-free, I was agile, I was powerful, I had pace. That’s probably when I was at my most dangerous in attack.”
His midfield partner was the mercurial Gavin Henson: “Myself and Gav worked really well together. I would run quite hard angles, I would be more of a strike runner while Gav would be a distributor. We got to know each other’s game well. You knew how soft his hands were.
“The best thing about playing with Gav is that, at 12, his first option wasn’t to run, his first option was to pass, which is great because it automatically creates more space. He was a great decision maker. He would take the ball really early, he had a great vision and was very good running across the field. You knew what he was going to do and you would just react. To play outside him was brilliant.” You can read about Henson's new life here.
So what is Shanklin’s personal highlight from that triumphant Championship campaign? After pausing for thought, he replies: “It was probably the bus journey into the stadium for the Ireland game. It’s always a special time on the bus, there’s no music, there’s no-one joking around.
“But that day the crowds were just massive. You had people walking in from Leckwith, you don’t often see that. You know it’s a big game then and the weather was just lovely.”
That Slam-sealing game against Ireland saw Shanklin produce arguably the most re-played moment of his career as he hit a great line off Stephen Jones and stepped inside Peter Stringer before giving the scoring pass to Kevin Morgan for a try that took Wales well clear.
“Things like that happen in a split second. You don’t have time to process what you are going to do. It’s just reaction. You see someone coming out of the corner of your eye and you step naturally, you don’t have time to think about it,” he explained.
“The hole just opened up. I don’t think Kevin Morgan takes enough credit for the horrible pass I gave him! It’s not a nice one. It’s not straight to the bread basket. It floats in the air, it’s in front of him a little bit too much.
“Kevin would run great support lines in the hope there would be a break. I looked up and he was there. My father always said if you make the break, pass, link. That’s what I did.”
That try gave Wales an unassailable lead, with the closing stages of the game resembling a mass celebration party inside the Millennium Stadium.
“There was about three minutes to go and we were two scores ahead and I could hear the crowd singing ‘Grand Slam’s coming home’ to the tune of the Three Lions England football song. You don’t often hear any of that.
“That’s the only time in a game you can relax when you know it’s out of reach. There was no way Ireland would be able to score twice. It’s only those moments in a game you can actually enjoy. The rest of the time you enjoy to an extent, but you are switched on. You are not thinking too much, it’s auto-pilot.”
Shanklin added: “The thing people often forget about that game is Mark Taylor played on the wing and was brilliant. Rhys Williams had got injured and there was this question of what the coaches were going to do.
“I remember saying to Scott Johnson in the week of the game ‘If you want me to play on the wing, I will’. But he said ‘No, we want to keep the combinations’.
“So they went with Mark. We knew Rhys was out on the Monday or Tuesday, but they still named him in the team and he took part in the warm-up to make it look like he was playing. Otherwise Ireland could have changed their plan and gone aerial a lot more and targeted a bit wider.
“Mark had never played on the wing before and here he was playing there in the biggest game Wales had had in 27 years. But he didn’t put a foot wrong. He was phenomenal that day. Just rock solid.”
Shanklin’s own outstanding performance during the Grand Slam saw him selected for that summer’s Lions tour of New Zealand, with Clive Woodward finally able to pick him. He was on top of the world. But just days later came the knee injury that was to have a huge impact on his rugby life.
“I was playing for Cardiff against Ulster. I remember stepping off my right and feeling the tear. I had an operation to remove the cartilage as they couldn’t repair it,” he recalls.
“I got myself just about fit enough for the Lions tour. I played three games out there, but my knee just started swelling, that was it. I was out for a year and for the rest of my playing career, it was damage limitation.
“I wasn’t able to train much. I couldn’t do leg weights because my knee was so bad. I would just get through games. I wasn’t able to change direction. The problem was I was losing cartilage everywhere, so it was bone on bone. The knee felt weak and I had to monitor it constantly and have injections.”
Remarkably, Shanklin was able to manage the injury to an extent that he kept on playing for Wales through to 2010, sharing in a second Grand Slam in 2008 - again alongside Henson - while Cardiff’s EDF cup final victory over Gloucester at Twickenham was a real highlight on the domestic front.
But, in January 2011, at the age of 31, the state of his battered knee meant it was time to retire.
“It was a pure relief when the doctor said you can’t play anymore. It was a weight off my shoulders. I was actually happy. I didn’t have to put myself through it anymore. I didn’t have to take anti-flams, I didn’t have to get my knee drained every month. I didn’t have to ice it after every single session.
“It’s soul destroying when you are playing with an injury and you’re not able to do what you used to do. It’s really hard to keep going, to motivate yourself. I just couldn’t move like I used to. I’d played with it for such a long time, I was glad to be finishing, I was really glad. When you train constantly with an injury, it’s not nice."
What next then? “Dai Young said to me he thought I would be a good coach. But when I finished, I’d had enough of rugby. I needed a break from it. Plus, coaching is tough. It’s a cut-throat business. You are the first to go if things aren’t going well.”
So Shanklin worked in account management with DS Smith Recycling for a couple of years before moving into his current job as director of Genero, a Barry-based audio-visual production company which he runs with his business partner Peter Leckie.
“We do the sound, the sets, the lighting for any events. We also run our own hospitality for Wales international matches,” he said.
In addition, Shanklin also works as a pundit and commentator on TV, notably for Premier Sports with their coverage of the United Rugby Championship.
“It can be quite tough because I’ve got two jobs really. I’ve got to keep on top of the rugby and do my prep.”
There’s also his Flats and Shanks podcast with former England prop and one-time team-mate David Flatman.
“We are into our sixth season now. It’s a bit of fun. He will pick me up on any word or name I have said wrong! I just like listening to him. He is just so sharp, so funny, so witty and a great story teller.”
As for his family life, he is married with three children, aged 13,10 and three, and lives in Penarth.
In terms of what rugby has meant to him, he says: “It’s given me a life really. It’s given me a path. It’s given me purpose. The hardest thing is working out what you are going to do after. It’s only a short part of your working life. You have done your dream job. Whatever you do after, you are going to compare it to that.
"It’s never going to be as much fun, but I do feel lucky I have fallen into life after rugby, that I have got out of the game with another purpose, another job and something I enjoy. It’s a nice balance. I still get to keep involved with rugby, I still get to go to games, I still feel part of the buzz.”
So finally, any regrets about turning down Woodward and England all those years ago?
“I look at Mike Tindall now and I see his lifestyle and what he has become with his celebrity mates and his free cars and maybe....No, not at all,” he replies with a grin.
“I have never ever regretted my decision. You wouldn’t change countries even for a World Cup winners medal. The people you meet along the way, the players, coaches, staff, the fun you have, the bonds you have made. You can’t take that away. So absolutely no regrets.”
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