How can Ireland be thriving on broadly the same levels of union income and exactly the same number of pro teams?To a casual observer – and in rugby there are plenty of those – the situation is bewildering. Wales have won more grand slams in the Six Nations era than anyone bar France, who drew level with them on four last season. They boast one of the biggest and most charismatic stadiums in the world and – more of an intangible, but very real all the same – rugby runs more deeply through the nation’s culture than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere.Yet Welsh rugby’s facade has imploded this past fortnight. Sitting bottom of the Six Nations table after two...
Hosts’ passion and intensity could not be questioned after a turbulent week off the pitch but it was still not enough Whatever else is wrong with Welsh rugby, they’ve never lacked heart. You could hear it in Katherine Jenkins’ singing, which must have shattered windows in Aberystwyth, and feel it in the heat of the fireworks that spiralled into the bright blue sky beyond the open roof. For all their failings, the Welsh Rugby Union still know how to organise a show at the Principality Stadium. And you could see what it all meant, too, in the faces of those two old friends and teammates, Alun Wyn Jones, 37, and Ken Owens, 36, as they roared the final words of...
As off-field tensions reach new levels, you have to wonder if the modern international governing body is fit for purposeGot to say, I’m intrigued to see how the Netflix Six Nations documentary covers the Welsh rugby crisis. Given that the Wales team are refusing to cooperate with the Netflix crew, denying them access to team meetings and even turfing them out of Alun Wyn Jones’s press conference last week, you have to wonder what sort of material is going to be cobbled together. Perhaps Wales will simply be pixelated out of the final product: a ghostly apparition at the edges of the screen, implied but never physically present, which, you might argue, is a pretty good way of describing their...
The coaching trio have no time to experiment as the race towards this year’s Rugby World Cup enters its final stagesIt used to be said that preparing for the 2023 Rugby World Cup was a gradual process. People liked to paint it as a painstaking four-year project, with an emphasis on steady incremental gains. Then everyone panicked. England, Wales and Australia have new head coaches with blank (ish) sheets of paper and there is an Old Testament feel to what happened just weeks ago.Because, suddenly, the marathon is a flat-out mass sprint. The three unions in question are banking on the ability of, respectively, Steve Borthwick, Warren Gatland and Eddie Jones to accelerate their teams from 0-60 mph quicker than...
The late writer and broadcaster, whose words decorated the Observer for so long, made his name in unlikely surroundingsOn the face of it, Eddie Butler and Pontypool did not make a natural fit. Educated privately at Monmouth school and with an accent that was more home counties than Torfaen valley, the Cambridge University student could have been expected to graduate to establishment clubs such as Newport and Cardiff rather than one that played on a public park and were regarded by many in the Welsh media as neanderthal in their approach to the game.But how it worked. Butler spent his 14-year playing career from 1976 with Pontypool, mucking in at a club he described as a commune. They were run...