Living on past glories

By CHRIS RATTUE

You can tell the All Blacks are about to play a test against Wales because there's not much talk about it.

There's even a horrible rumour that Hamilton is putting on an extra taxi to cope with the rush to the ground.

Most public discussion about tomorrow night's test sounds more like a mass meeting of the All Blacks' selection panel. Wales are just making up the numbers.

Maybe they'll prove us all wrong tomorrow night, but following Welsh rugby for the past 20 years has been like watching Richard Burton turn up in a splatter movie.

Wales used to represent the future of rugby.

Now all you can think of when you watch them is the past.

There are still lots of Gareths and Jonathans and Davies and Williams and half the squad is called Jones. But they're not Gareth Edwards, Jonathan Davies, Gerald Davies, JPR Williams or Ken Jones.

Wales remind me of my maths career. I mastered third form maths and was quite chuffed about it, the only problem being that this milestone occurred about three weeks before leaving school in the seventh form.

The Welsh team are always building for the future and when they arrive, it's too late.

They know that X equals Y but they don't know how to do all the work to get there.

When Wales get forwards who don't get knocked over by a breeze, rugby will be full of blokes the size of tanks who can bench press a small car.

How did this happen? You could have a bit of a laugh and blame coal pit closures yet New Zealand rugby is in decent shape even though the only farming the players do these days is with their financial assets.

The great Welsh teams of the past were full of schoolteachers anyway. Graham Price, the magnificent tighthead prop who looked like a grizzly bear, was a lab technician.

Surely Wales didn't run out of schools and laboratories, and now that the game is professional the players don't have occupations any more.

Wales is bang in Europe, which isn't the poorest region on earth.

And for goodness sake, it was one of their blokes - the late Vernon Pugh - who announced to the world that the game was going professional.

What on earth were they doing up there when Vernon declared in 1995 that players were officially allowed to earn more than 23 cents a day and everyone could think and practise rugby 24 hours a day if they liked instead of just singing about it.

"Oh boy, there goes Vernon again, getting all high and mighty. If he thinks he's going to upset our village with all his fancy professional talk he's got another think coming," you could almost hear them saying before belting out another chorus of Land of My Fathers.

Wales have even got their own language, which should give them a major leg up when it comes to national pride and coded lineout calls.

And that is a stirring national anthem. But all the 'Hen Gymru fynyddig paradwys y bardds' in the world aren't much good when your team keep getting beaten at the breakdown.

I've never been to Wales, not really.

We attempted to go once but after spending a few hours in a Welsh pub wondering where all the photos of Barry John were, found out we were still in England.

It left very little time for a quick pony trek around the Black Mountains, and none for any rugby talk with the locals.

But word has leaked to these parts about Welsh rugby woes. So here are a few theories on their demise.

* They're a stick-in-the-mud bunch who hate change - probably because any sort of progress reminds them of all the flash Harrys in England.

* Their main aims in life are to stay in the same village and dislike the village next door. They'd rather eat alfalfa sandwiches than get their heads together with someone who lives more than a mile away. There's something to be said for a traditional way of life, but it makes revamping the national sport tricky.

* Their clubs are run by big wheels with big wallets who want to call all the shots.

And everyone is so desperate to have their say that Welsh rugby was for many years organised - to use the term loosely - by an unwieldy committee the size of two football teams who would have had trouble staging a chook raffle without the feathers flying.

It's down to a one football team committee now, which might cut the arguments in half.

But when the Welsh players see the committee men piling into first class for the away games, as still happened even recently, they get resentful, which leads to mad behaviour like going on strike while driving up a motorway before an overseas tour.

When the rugby world learns the Welsh team can't catch a plane on time, it just laughs. The head of Welsh rugby, David Moffett, with a CV as long as a Welsh losing streak, has his work cut out before moving on to whatever takes his fancy next.

You wouldn't give their New Zealand coach, Steve Hansen, much chance of surviving long enough to institute any master plan, given he's a foreigner and the only corners Wales have turned are the ones that go in circles.

Wales haven't beaten a really decent team since winning in Paris 27 months ago. It's a great shame. Their heyday in the 1970s produced among the finest rugby and players.

Welsh rugby has become like those old horses that wandered around the Black Mountains while we shouted 'giddyup' and tried to rein them down the right path.

They had names like Fire and Braveheart but meandered with hair dangling over their eyes, nibbling on bushes and bumping into each other. Probably contentedly remembering the days when they could jump fences and do more than a canter.