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them problems. It may not have been the best option, but it worked. Tom Shanklin jumped to catch it. 12–5. I had a go with a penalty from much further away than the one against England, but it fell just beneath the crossbar. I was happy with that attempt, though. I remember I struck it well but they use a different type of ball in Italy and it behaves slightly differently. In Wales we use the ball manufactured by Gilbert, but in Italy they are provided by Mitre. I don’t feel the Mitre ball travels quite as far as the Gilbert and although I hit it really well, and it stayed dead straight, it just dropped beneath the bar. It was a difficult kick, but it wasn’t a bad effort. No worries. Just before half-time I put Hal Luscombe through to cut inside their defence and a brilliant piece of quick-thinking from Martyn Williams gave us a third try when he touched the ball against the foot of the post. Stephen Jones converted and we went in with a 12-point lead.

      They pulled back three points with a penalty early in the second-half but they still couldn’t lay a finger on us when we really flowed. Shane tore them to pieces with another of his fantastic runs and the space opened for Brent Cockbain to go over. Two minutes later we scored an even better try. Alfie and Kevin Morgan wrecked their defence again and Shane ran it in. 33–8. It was all over even though there were 25 minutes left. We eased off after that although Rob Sidoli scored our sixth try in the last few minutes. It finished 38–8, a thrashing by Six Nations standards and proof that we could now live with our own reputation and the expectancy it had brought. We had shown confidence and plenty of ability. Mike Ruddock calls it ‘licence to thrill’ and we had certainly done that.

      Italy are probably the weakest team in the tournament but the pleasing thing was that there had never been a hint of complacency on our part. We had kept our feet on the ground, even though we were coming off a victory over the world champions. I think the fact that Wales had lost in Rome two years before helped us in some ways because it was mentioned as a kind of warning whenever we discussed the Italians. We paid them a lot of respect, but at the same time we knew that we had not really performed that well against England. We were capable of much better and we delivered it in Rome.

      I had enjoyed the whole day. The Stadio Flaminio may not be the biggest international rugby ground in the world but it’s got character and creates plenty of atmosphere. We had gone there and put on a show and it felt good to come off after a job well done. The team management were happy enough, so were the players, and I could tell the fans were very glad they had made the trip. Once again, the call from the management was for everyone to go back to the hotel after the official post-match dinner and once again it didn’t quite work out that way. After the dinner had ended, we were chatting to some of the Italian players who were great company. They invited us to jump on their team bus rather than go back to our hotel on our own and myself, Shane Williams and Jonathan Thomas didn’t need to be asked twice. There are some traditions in rugby that I still feel are very valuable and relaxing with the opposition when you occasionally get the chance is definitely one of them. I got on well with Aaron Persico, the Italian flanker, who is a really good guy. He’s from an Italian family, but he grew up in New Zealand. He and our own Kiwi, Sonny Parker, knew each other well from their younger days. Aaron and his mates showed us a little bit of Rome, a city which, unlike Cardiff, is comfortably big enough to lose yourself in if you want to escape the rugby crowds for a while. We stayed out until around two or three in the morning, but again the main purpose was to avoid a sleepless few hours laying in bed rather than go on a drinking session.

      We flew back to Cardiff on the Sunday morning and discovered the feel-good factor produced by the victory over England had now gone into overdrive. Everyone wanted to talk to us and the newspapers were full of reports stating the significance of our win in Rome. It was the first time Wales had begun the championship with back-to-back victories since 1994, they said, the last year when Wales had actually won the tournament even though they lost their final game against England. Some of the papers actually speculated on our chances of winning the championship, while one or two even mentioned the Grand Slam. There was an air of disbelief about the coverage, though, as if they couldn’t quite believe it. For me, there had been nothing at all odd about our two results so far. I felt we would beat England at home and I was equally confident we would do the Italians in Rome. The next game, though, a fortnight later, was against France in Paris and I have to admit I wasn’t so sure about that one.

      The two-week gap in between suited us down to the ground. It gave us an opportunity to really work on things in training but also to get plenty of rest before the trip to the Stade de France. We watched a few videos of the French and most of us came to the conclusion that they had actually been playing pretty poorly. Like us, they had won their opening two matches of the championship but they had been no better than average. They had won 16–9 at home to Scotland but only thanks to a late try and they had been saved from a shock defeat by a few dodgy decisions that went in their favour. After that game, the Scotland coach Matt Williams had gone nuts about the referee and it was hard not to feel sympathy.

      France had then gone to Twickenham to play England a week after we had beaten them. Once again, the French played virtually no rugby but they somehow managed to win by a point, 18–17. They were 17–6 down at one stage so you had to admire their resilience but there was nothing very stylish about them. They never looked like scoring a try in the whole game and had to rely on six penalties from their scrum-half Dimitri Yachvili. So long as we didn’t give away too many penalties it was obvious that we would be in with a chance.

      The Stade de France in Paris is one of my favourite stadiums and I was really looking forward to playing there. It’s an awesome place, like some gigantic spaceship from the outside and just as stunning when you are in the middle of the pitch. It’s intimidating. But some things were in our favour. It was very cold that day, which was fine by us. You don’t want to be playing France in Paris when they have the sun on their backs.

      We came out for the warm-up and the noise was unbelievable. The crowd sounds mix in with horns, a French brass band, a manic French voice on the stadium speakers, and firecrackers going off. The French national anthem also really fires things up. I have a confession about our own Welsh anthem, ‘Hen Wlad fy Nhadau’, or ‘Land of My Fathers’. Part of the reason I don’t sing along before the game is that I want to remain in control and a little bit detached from things. But partly, it is because I don’t actually know the words. It sounds terrible but I was never taught them in school for some reason and I’ve just never felt the need to learn them. The foreign players in our squad, Sonny Parker, who grew up in New Zealand, and Brent Cockbain, who’s an Australian, probably know all the words backwards, but I’ve never made a point of learning them. I’ve been tempted at times to join in for a couple of lines but I never do. I like to have set routines and as I wouldn’t sing the national anthem before a training session, why do it before a game? It certainly doesn’t mean I’m not patriotic because I am. I’m fiercely proud to be Welsh and I think it’s great that we have our own language. It’s part of our identity as a nation. But even if I sat down and learnt the words then I still wouldn’t join in, either at home or away. For me, the pride comes from looking out at the crowd and recognising the passion on the faces of the Welsh supporters. I like to take all that stuff in. I get a buzz from seeing what it means to them but I don’t want to be like that myself just before I play a rugby match. I want to be in control – calm and cool. It’s at that stage that I really focus on what I’m about to do and that was how it was in Paris.

      No matter how much any of us had focused, though, I don’t think we could have done much about that opening 15 minutes of the game. France were on fire. They were all over us. Things actually started off quite well. I put a kick in along the ground and the French had to defend. But our pressure lasted about 60 seconds. After that we just couldn’t get the ball and they came at us in wave after wave of attack.

      We were on the rack and they scored a try after just four minutes that had been building and building. It ended when Dimitri Yachvili crossed under our posts and he then converted it to make it 7–0.

      The French coach, Bernard Laporte, had recalled their powerful wing Aurelien Rougerie and it was obvious the idea was to run at Shane Williams and do some damage physically. Rougerie caused us lots of problems early on and it was he who scored their second try which made it 12–0 after just 12 minutes. That try, though, angered me because they shouldn’t

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