ne warm evening in the summer of 1971 I got home from work with a copy of the London evening paper in my hand. Look, I told my girlfriend, it says here that the Lions are arriving at Heathrow tonight. Let’s go. So we climbed into the car and drove out on the M4 to the airport. We were not alone. The arrivals hall was already packed – but with people who had arrived from the opposite direction, which meant from Wales. The singing had already begun. Cwm Rhondda, of course, and much else, while we waited. By the time the heroes had passed through the baggage hall and passport checks and started to emerge, people were standing
Scooter Gennett Jersey on chairs and tables, creating an impromptu arena. Looks of astonishment crossed the players’ faces as they saw the welcome that awaited them. One after another, each newly minted legend received his massive cheer. John Dawes, the captain. Gareth Edwards, the genius. Barry John, the king. Willie John McBride, the giant. Ian McLauchlan, the mighty mouse. Gerald Davies, the uncatchable. John Taylor, the tackler. JPR Williams, author of a crucial drop goal – the only one of his career – in the final match of the Test series. And so on. All of them cheered to the rafters – with the exception of David Duckham, the dashing blond England wing, who received a few good-natured Welsh boos for having displaced John Bevan, the 20-year-old Cardiff prodigy, in the last three Tests. The Lions had beaten the All Blacks in a series for the first and, so far, the only time. They had been away for three months. Their coach returned with them, too. It was he who had persuaded McBride to change his mind about undertaking a fourth Lions tour and he who had coaxed a reluctant John – a native of the same mining village – into joining the party with the promise that he would not be subjected to an unduly rigorous training regime. It was he who bent the Lions’ rules to allow Davies to fly out and join the party three weeks late, after taking his Cambridge tripos exams. That was Carwyn James, whose achievement in New Zealand remains unequalled by any of his successors. At 31, and taking a chunk of unpaid time off from his day job as teacher of Welsh and head of rugby and cricket at Llandovery College, James was already a man of many facets, some of them seemingly contradictory: a lover of literature and the theatre, a deacon at his village chapel, a 40-a-day cigarette smoker fond of wine and gin, a compelling columnist (for this newspaper) and broadcaster, a solitary man yet a lover of company and stories and singing. But, most of all, a rugby visionary beyond compare. Advertisement Although a confirmed
http://www.authenticmilwaukeebrewers.com/Travis-Shaw-Jersey Welsh nationalist who stood in the 1970 general election as a representative of Plaid Cymru, he viewed the task of coaching the Lions as one of reconciling the characteristics of the four nations. And he did it his way, a way that persuaded the members of his squad to lay down their deep-rooted national rivalries. Lasting friendships were formed that would have seemed impossible before the party assembled to listen to an introductory speech given by a coach known to the Welsh players for his prowess as a fly-half and later coach with Llanelli, but who was a complete unknown to others. Years later he put it this way: “The very first thing I said to them was: ‘Look here, be your own man. I don’t want Irishmen to pretend to be English, or Englishmen to be Celts, or Scotsmen to be anything less than Scots. You each have an ultimate quality to give to the team and you must know that you are able to express yourself in your own special unique way, both on the field and off it.’” “I shall always remember his gentleness,” McLauchlan once said. “In New Zealand he was dealing with a fairly rough bunch of blokes, but he never had to utter a harsh word and never had to raise his voice. Our success was entirely due to him.” I thought of him this week when Eddie Jones, the England coach, spoke of making his players into “participants” rather than mere “recipients”, as if this were something new. As John Spencer, the England centre who was a member of the 1971 party, said in a TV programme on James several years ago: “One of his strengths was that he left a lot of the ideas to the members of the team.” But Spencer also called him “a great organiser”, and he was meticulous in his preparation. An amateur in an amateur game, he brought a professional’s
http://www.authenticmilwaukeebrewers.com/Wily-Peralta-Jersey commitment to the task as he assembled dossiers on their opponents, visited Matt Busby to talk about Manchester United’s training methods and called on Eric Ashton at Wigan to see how rugby league’s champions went about their work. It was amusing to hear Sean Fitzpatrick, speaking in the aftermath of the 2017 tourists’ defeat by the Auckland Blues, suggesting that their task against the Crusaders on Saturday will be easier because “there’ll be a lot more structure to the game” – implying that spontaneity is alien to the Lions’ culture. In 1971, James gave his players a structure within which their individual creativity could find its fullest expression. Advertisement When it was all over, the defeated captain paid him a high compliment: “He kept a unity that transferred itself to the pitch,” the great Colin Meads said. “He did have stars, but no one could have coached the stars he had like Carwyn did. He was judicious and scientific in his approach, in a way we hadn’t seen in New Zealand before.” Honoured and fulfilled in many ways, rejected and isolated in others, he died of a heart attack in 1983, aged 53. Now the many elements of his complicated life are explored in great depth and with exemplary sensitivity by Alun Gibbard in a new biography titled Into the Wind, whose English-language edition is published on Friday. Speaking of James’s love of the work of Federico García Lorca, Gibbard refers to the way in which the presence of the Spanish concept of duende within the poet’s work – “a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity” – found a resonance in the rugby coach’s
Brenton Bersin Jersey sensibility. Duende might not be an ingredient of Warren Gatland’s formula for this year’s Lions but, as much as anything else, it was what earned the 1971 team their heroes’ welcome home
