SPECTATOR SPORT
Welsh rugby gloom
Frank Keating
THE BARBARIANS rugby club, chival- rous and shimmying in intent, continues its merry celebrations in Wales. Merry? Not across Offa's Dyke these days, boys. The party could turn nasty. Welsh rugby con- tinues to drool glumly in the unsung corners of those dire and dingy, brown- linoed pubs of theirs: occasionally dolorous teardrops splash into the thin, insipid, Felinfoel bitter they drink so desperately. The bespangled, preening, cocky Celtic swagger which entranced rugby football with its opulence a decade or so ago is dissipated. They cannot even beat England any more. Dammit, man, they don't expect to beat anyone — sorry, except Namibia, for heaven's sake, where the clumsy, hob- bledehoy Welsh XV toured in the summer. Rugby in Wales is seething with intrigues and surly venom both on the pitch and in the committee rooms. Just like Yorkshire cricket, that other example of the pre- sumptuous, introverted tribe which turns on itself once the winning stops. York- shire's miserable excuse is that they only play the Yorkshire-born — Yorkie-born Whites only, more like. Wales's mitigation Is more valid: that their game has been denuded in recent years by professional rugby league. Since the brittle-boned but belligerent totem, Terry Holmes, took the money and limped up to Bradford North- ern in 1985, 17 leading Welsh players have followed, led by another all-time hall-of- famer, the insouciant sprite, Jonathan Davies. That's an awful lot of glitter to leave South Wales's rugby Klondyke. They cannot whistle down the pitshaft for a new fly-half like they used to: very few pitshafts left.
Hence the gloom in the taproom bars, and back-stabbing hatreds in committee. 'We are the corpse in the gutter of world rugby,' wrote a former captain, Clem Thomas, in the Observer on Sunday. The English, so often at the painful end of a Welsh toecap down the years, have been enjoying it immensely. Just before he died earlier this year, one of Twickenham's bluff mandarins and hooraying hyphens, John Kendall-Carpenter, grinned with wicked relish when I asked him — because something's got to give, and pronto — if the Welsh union would be first to turn pro. 'Heaven knows' he said. 'The machina- tions of Welsh rugby politics are mercifully beyond me. It cannot be much fun being lost without trace in the entrails of Welsh mysticism, can it? Or drowning in that great, seething, unsavoury goulash of a dark and dirty Celtic colour.' And he, as Twickenham always does, was trying to offer a balanced view.
Tne English will never comprehend. Like the very day that triggered off this present, five-year-long, Welsh wail. We all piled up from London on the luncheon special to watch Terry Holmes's first league match at Bradford. Afterwards we clattered over to the locker-room showers to interview him. Terry is one of those soft-spoken Welsh mutterers, not your bellowing Geraint Evans sort of toff taff. His new money, I knew, had allowed Holmes to buy a house down the Halifax Road at Brighouse. 'Where are you living, boy?', snapped the endearingly officer- crisp, no-nonsense man from the London Daily Mail, Terry O'Connor. Holmes told , him, softly. 'Big house, eh?', queried O'Connor, sceptically. 'How many bed- rooms and bathrooms, then?'
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