LITMIR.BIZ

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that you’re not going to be the main attraction. Of course, I’d love to make the headlines every week but rugby isn’t like that. It’s a team game and when you’re part of a team as good as we were in that first 40 minutes then you’re just happy to go along with the ride. I did what I needed to do, but the other players around me were doing plenty of damage on their own.

      We came out for the second-half and scored a sixth try quite soon on. Dwayne, who was tearing Scotland to pieces, created space for Rhys Williams to stroll over. We didn’t manage any further tries, but I think the Scottish comeback had as much to do with our own wandering concentration as with any big improvement on their part. Scotland came back and scored three tries as we slacked off. I was replaced by Ceri Sweeney with about 15 minutes to go and watched the last moments from the sidelines. It was obvious we were tiring a little after our first-half efforts, but to be fair to the Scots they did play some good rugby in that last half hour. I think there’s a lesson in there for them which they need to take on board. They took a leaf out of our book and became willing to take risks in attack. They came at us from different areas of the field and they looked to try and keep the ball in hand, something we always strive to do. I think that has to be the future for Scotland and the basis for any recovery. They have the type of players who need that more adventurous approach and when the likes of the Lamont brothers, Rory and Sean, ran at us in that second-half they cause us problems. Not enough problems to ever threaten the result, though: it finished 46–22 to us.

      The Scottish newspapers had been full of pictures of Charlotte on their front pages on the morning of the game, a Sunday. She had flown up to Edinburgh to watch the match with a gang of mates and they all seemed to be wearing cowboy hats with the words ‘Girls On Tour’ printed on them. But it remained a girls-only weekend. Within a few hours of the match finishing we were at Edinburgh Airport boarding our flight back to Cardiff. Our final game of the tournament, against Ireland, was just six days away and as the Irish had played the previous day then the Welsh management wanted to try and lessen the advantage the Irish had of an extra day’s training.

      Ireland may have had an extra 24 hours of recovery time for their bodies, but on that Sunday it was probably their minds that needed more attention. Their own Grand Slam dreams had bitten the dust. Despite carrying victories over Italy, Scotland and England under their belts they couldn’t cope with France who had won 26–19 in Dublin on the Saturday afternoon. Not even a brilliant individual try from Brian O’Driscoll – who would go on to be my Lions captain – could save them. The Irish could still mathematically win the Six Nations title, but as far as the Grand Slam was concerned, it would either be ours or nobody’s.

      ‘Nobody in the squad is talking about a Grand Slam. We’re just treating the build-up as if we were playing any other game,’ claimed Mike Ruddock in the papers on the Monday morning. All I can say is that Mike must have flown home on a different plane. Everyone was talking about the Grand Slam. In fact, it’s all we were talking about. The management may not have uttered the phrase to the players for fear of breaking the spell, but everyone from 1 to 22 chipped in with their own thoughts of what it would mean if we pulled it off. We imagined what the reaction might be among the fans and the media, how the hype and the level of coverage would go through the roof. Someone also rightly pointed out that it might mean an end to people banging on about the old days of the Seventies.

      I don’t want to appear disloyal about this. What the great Welsh teams of the 1970s achieved for the country was unbelievable. To win three Grand Slams in eight years and five Triple Crowns was an incredible achievement. But I was born in 1982. I have no memories of any members of that side outside of the re-runs I’ve seen on television. Gareth Edwards, Barry John, Phil Bennett, JPR Williams, Gerald Davies – these were obviously brilliant players – but they are from my father’s generation so it’s hard for me to feel the same kind of connection as my old man does. The same goes for all the other players in the present day Welsh squad. Even Gareth Llewellyn was just a kid back then!

      All the current squad have massive respect for what those guys did. But what has annoyed us in the past is when those players from previous eras slag off the current ones. They have questioned our desire, our commitment, the way we have played the game, and lots of other things – often when they themselves have lost touch with the modern game and rarely even watch it. That is when you lose respect. I have to say I don’t want to name names and I don’t even know if those kinds of criticism have been directed at me. I tend not to read the coverage of Welsh rugby in the newspapers or watch much of it on TV. But I have much more time for the ex-international who actually comes up to you, face-to-face, and tells you what he thinks of your performance – good or bad. I put Jonathan Davies in that category. He’s always been honest and straight about my performances, but also constructive. I just about remember Jonathan as a kid before he went to rugby league but he is someone I have a lot of respect for. The same goes for Ieuan Evans, someone I loved watching on the wing for Wales. Mark Ring, who played for Wales and Cardiff in the late 1980s and early 1990s was another of my favourite players because of his attitude. He was an outrageous entertainer who was willing to try anything.

      The bottom line, though, is that former players – even those who were your heroes – are in the past. Players live in the present. They want to make their own history and that was all that mattered to us as we touched down in Cardiff on that Sunday night.

       CHAPTER FOUR Slamming It

      I was thankful it was a short week. Having played in Scotland on the Sunday, it basically left us with only five days to get things right before we met Ireland. That was enough. I don’t think any of us could have coped with more than that and a two-week gap between matches – as used to be the norm – would definitely have sent us all completely nuts. As it was, everywhere we went in those five days, everyone we bumped into at the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel, people around our training base, anyone who had an excuse to come up and talk … it was all, all about the game. The Western Mail, the national newspaper of Wales, was giving the match a level of attention I had never seen before. Day after day there were pages and pages of stuff about the players, the fans, the number of pints that were going to be sold, historical stuff about previous games between the sides and all the rest of it. I looked at the copies where they were left laying around the hotel. But I didn’t pick them up.

      Two facts became unavoidable, though, however much I tried to ignore the newspapers and not listen to the radio or watch TV. Wales had not won a Grand Slam for 27 years and we had not beaten Ireland at home for 22 years. If we won this game, then the impact would be massive and the party afterwards would be awesome. What more incentive did we need?

      For me, personally, there was an extra edge in this match as I would be up against Brian O’Driscoll. Like me, O’Driscoll is a centre and someone who seems to enjoy being the centre of attention on the field. Unlike me he had been a permanent fixture in his side for the past five years. He was their best player and although he was playing at outside centre and I would be inside, I knew that when our paths crossed I would have to be at my very best in order to contain him. He had scored an incredible try against France the week before and I knew from own experiences against him how difficult he was to play against. I’d been up against him twice before. The most recent time was earlier in that season for the Ospreys against his Irish province, Leinster, at St. Helen’s. I had suffered an absolute shocker with the boot, but felt I had handled O’Driscoll and his centre partner, Gordon D’Arcy, quite well. The time before, though, at The Gnoll, O’Driscoll had been the big difference between the sides. The Ospreys matched Leinster in most aspects that night but O’Driscoll was world class and he had won them the game. I wouldn’t say I was worried about O’Driscoll before that Ireland game; we were all trying hard to just concentrate on our own strengths. But I was aware of how good he could be and how we would all need to be fully alert.

      Before the Scotland match a lot had been discussed within the squad meetings of what the Scots might offer. There was a different approach in the countdown to Ireland. It was far more about us, rather than them. We felt they were under far less pressure than us because they had lost to the French and their Grand Slam

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