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From behind the Times firewall
‘At traffic lights, people surrounded my car, my house became a shrine, it was very alienating’
Legendary Wales and Lions fly half Barry John explains why he retired at 27 and why he’s a total throwback
Barry John stands with three friends at an outside table at the Queens Vaults pub in the centre of Cardiff. Bespectacled and now 76, the years sit lightly. Sipping a fruit drink, he listens more than he speaks. Once upon a time he was the world’s most famous rugby player, the one they called “The King”, but a year after his ascension he was gone. Retired at 27.
He suggested we meet here, a stone’s throw from the Principality Stadium and one of his old haunts. He looks well. “Not bad, not bad,” he says. “Six, seven, eight months ago, I had a gastro problem. The doctor said, ‘All right, first things first, drop all of this,’ because I was keeping the economy going with lager. Since then I haven’t bothered.” Abstinence is serving him well.
On this weekend 50 years ago he played his first game for the 1971 British & Irish Lions. That tour began with two games in Australia followed by 24 in New Zealand. In the world’s greatest rugby country, the Lions won 22, lost one and drew one. The 14-14 draw in the final Test gave the Lions a 2-1 series victory over the All Blacks, the first touring team to triumph in New Zealand.
If those Lions can be imagined as an orchestra, John was their conductor. If they were an invading army, he was their general. He could pin the opposition down or slice them open, often depending on his mood. He kicked the ball beautifully, passed it precisely and when he ran he seemed to ghost into open space.
The day after the final Test in New Zealand, reporters turned up in his home village of Cefneithin, in Carmarthenshire. They asked Vimy John about her son. “If Barry had run through a field of daffodils, no one would have noticed,” she said. Mum was right; he was that light on his feet.
Encouraged by his Cefneithin neighbour, the visionary coach Carwyn James, John took his teammates to places unimaginable before that tour and introduced the New Zealanders to a game they barely knew. John, Gareth Edwards, Mike Gibson, Gerald Davies, JPR Williams — that summer rugby changed.
One moment from an early game foretold the test. The Lions had won their first four games in New Zealand but the locals remained sceptical. “Wait until you meet Wellington,” the Lions were warned. Wellington, the Ranfurly Shield holders, were good. Coming up to half-time, the Lions led 13-3 and had a scrum inside their 22. Standing just in front of his own goalposts, John noticed Wellington’s backs standing ready to sprint off the defensive line.
“I said to Sid [the late John Dawes] and Mike Gibson, ‘If everything goes to plan, I will chip them or slip them, one or the other.’ Mike said, ‘No, no, put it into touch.’ Typically Irish, you know, look after what you’ve got. 13-3 up at half-time was acceptable.
“I chipped them and Mike sprinted, caught it lovely, veered left, drew the full back and put John Bevan in. Length-of-the-field try. From that moment on, you couldn’t stop Mike Gibson on that tour.
“What a player. I had Gareth [Edwards] on my inside and Mike Gibson, probably the best all-round rugby player I’ve ever seen, on my outside. Oh dear, dear, an amazing rugby player. There were moments he just reacted off my shoulder and bang, he was gone.” That afternoon at Athletic Park the Lions beat Wellington 47-9. Nine tries to nil. It may have been the single greatest performance by any Lions team.
And here in the Queens Vaults, John likes to remember. “I haven’t got a watch,” he says. “I haven’t got a mobile phone. Instagram, Twitter, f***ing hell — I don’t know what they’re on about. I am a total throwback.” Back then, a half-century ago, he was different. And at the same time different class.
I ask about James, the coach. John talks about the man. “There was a lot of wrong about what was happening to the miners,” he says. “Doctors would say so-and-so died of heart failure, but that wasn’t the cause of death. Carwyn promised to do something about it and he put his bungalow on the line, to get fair play for the miners.”
John’s father, William, worked in the mines. Around Cefneithin they used to say that the gold in the surrounding hills was black. His father would rise at 4.30 and with the other men take a bus to the Great Mountain colliery at Tumble. Day after day in winter, they saw no daylight. “Pay attention to your studies or you’ll end up in the colliery,” his father said.
The boy listened, passed his 11-plus examination and got into Gwendraeth Grammar School. When the singer and storyteller Max Boyce sings of the “Welsh fly-half factory” it may have been this he had in mind. James, John, Gareth Davies and Jonathan Davies all wore the No 10 jersey for Wales and all went through Gwendraeth.
John remembers overhearing men in Cefneithin talking about him: “One day that boy will play for Wales.” His uncle had a motorbike and would take his father to Gwendraeth games on Saturday morning. They would leave just before the end and never mention that they had been there. The boy knew, and knew also that he was making his father proud.
Among his many gifts, there was the added blessing of supreme confidence. Edwards once persuaded him to do some extra practice before a Wales trial. It was a close and wet afternoon and the fly half grew weary of his training partner’s enthusiasm. “How would you like it?” Edwards asked. “You throw it, I’ll catch it,” John replied.
Part of the 1971 Lions squad, Chris Rea recalls sharing a room with John in New Zealand. Rea was a fine centre but with Gibson and Dawes in the squad, the Scot was part of the midweek team. Rea remembers one conversation between the two of them. “We were talking about confidence and Barry said, ‘Chris, I think the difference between you and me is that your confidence is low at the moment,’ ” Rea recalls.
“ ‘If I go on the pitch,’ Barry said, ‘and make a complete cock-up of the first thing I do, I know that the next thing I do will be good. I know that at some point I’m going to do something that will turn the game.’ He said that without one iota of arrogance, because he was not an arrogant man.”
James never spoke to his young fly half about tactics or strategy but allowed him to decide. They both believed that how you won mattered. Even now, 50 years on, John gently chides himself for being too conservative in the final Test, pinning the All Blacks inside their own half to make sure the Lions did not lose.
“We should have been more adventurous, gone for another try,” he says. “After we had drawn that final Test, I felt a sense of anti-climax. We hadn’t gone out in style.”
At Heathrow airport they came from Wales and other places to welcome the team home. Someone said it was the biggest turnout since the Beatles in 1964. The BBC’s Kate Adie ushered John into the women’s toilet, the only place they could do an interview.
He had gone to New Zealand as Barry John and returned as The King. For him, it was too much. Unable to say no, he became a prisoner of fame. He told the stories over and over until he began to bore himself.
He worked for Midland Bank and at a branch in Rhyl, north Wales, a young woman curtsied to him. Her friends thought it was so funny, but it unsettled him.
Four people travelled from Bristol to see his house in Radyr, outside Cardiff. It was a Sunday afternoon and his wife, Jan, invited them in for tea. They sat and chatted with the visitors but this was a life he never wanted.
“It was like our home had become a shrine,” he says. “At traffic lights in Cardiff people surrounded my car, stopping the traffic. I felt it was alienating. I was being separated from ordinary people.”
Six months after returning from New Zealand he began to believe the way to get his life back was to stop playing rugby. On April 26, 1972, eight months after his return from the tour, he played his last game, a charity match for the Welsh League of Youth that he and James had organised. Thirty-six thousand people showed up. He scored the winning try.
His closest friends in the Wales team, Edwards and Gerald Davies, tried to dissuade him. He could be stubborn too. The Sunday Mirror got word of what he was about to do and offered £7,000 for an exclusive story. He met them at the Ladbroke Club in London and did the interview.
Michael Christiansen, the editor, listened and then did the strangest thing. “Look, Barry,” he said, “the deal we’ve offered will be honoured when you retire but please don’t do it now. Put it off for two years.” Christiansen was a rugby fan, and like so many others he could not bear the thought of John’s premature departure from the game.
But as surely as The King ghosted past defenders, he got to the exit door without anyone laying a hand on him.
Of course there were regrets, but not enough to change the course of rugby history. He and Jan separated after almost 30 years of marriage, but they did not want a divorce. They remain on good terms.
“We’re closer now than ever,” John says. “In fact I rang her this morning and said, ‘If you’re in town today and see somebody looking like me, it is me.’ ”
‘At traffic lights, people surrounded my car, my house became a shrine, it was very alienating’
Legendary Wales and Lions fly half Barry John explains why he retired at 27 and why he’s a total throwback
Barry John stands with three friends at an outside table at the Queens Vaults pub in the centre of Cardiff. Bespectacled and now 76, the years sit lightly. Sipping a fruit drink, he listens more than he speaks. Once upon a time he was the world’s most famous rugby player, the one they called “The King”, but a year after his ascension he was gone. Retired at 27.
He suggested we meet here, a stone’s throw from the Principality Stadium and one of his old haunts. He looks well. “Not bad, not bad,” he says. “Six, seven, eight months ago, I had a gastro problem. The doctor said, ‘All right, first things first, drop all of this,’ because I was keeping the economy going with lager. Since then I haven’t bothered.” Abstinence is serving him well.
On this weekend 50 years ago he played his first game for the 1971 British & Irish Lions. That tour began with two games in Australia followed by 24 in New Zealand. In the world’s greatest rugby country, the Lions won 22, lost one and drew one. The 14-14 draw in the final Test gave the Lions a 2-1 series victory over the All Blacks, the first touring team to triumph in New Zealand.
If those Lions can be imagined as an orchestra, John was their conductor. If they were an invading army, he was their general. He could pin the opposition down or slice them open, often depending on his mood. He kicked the ball beautifully, passed it precisely and when he ran he seemed to ghost into open space.
The day after the final Test in New Zealand, reporters turned up in his home village of Cefneithin, in Carmarthenshire. They asked Vimy John about her son. “If Barry had run through a field of daffodils, no one would have noticed,” she said. Mum was right; he was that light on his feet.
Encouraged by his Cefneithin neighbour, the visionary coach Carwyn James, John took his teammates to places unimaginable before that tour and introduced the New Zealanders to a game they barely knew. John, Gareth Edwards, Mike Gibson, Gerald Davies, JPR Williams — that summer rugby changed.
One moment from an early game foretold the test. The Lions had won their first four games in New Zealand but the locals remained sceptical. “Wait until you meet Wellington,” the Lions were warned. Wellington, the Ranfurly Shield holders, were good. Coming up to half-time, the Lions led 13-3 and had a scrum inside their 22. Standing just in front of his own goalposts, John noticed Wellington’s backs standing ready to sprint off the defensive line.
“I said to Sid [the late John Dawes] and Mike Gibson, ‘If everything goes to plan, I will chip them or slip them, one or the other.’ Mike said, ‘No, no, put it into touch.’ Typically Irish, you know, look after what you’ve got. 13-3 up at half-time was acceptable.
“I chipped them and Mike sprinted, caught it lovely, veered left, drew the full back and put John Bevan in. Length-of-the-field try. From that moment on, you couldn’t stop Mike Gibson on that tour.
“What a player. I had Gareth [Edwards] on my inside and Mike Gibson, probably the best all-round rugby player I’ve ever seen, on my outside. Oh dear, dear, an amazing rugby player. There were moments he just reacted off my shoulder and bang, he was gone.” That afternoon at Athletic Park the Lions beat Wellington 47-9. Nine tries to nil. It may have been the single greatest performance by any Lions team.
And here in the Queens Vaults, John likes to remember. “I haven’t got a watch,” he says. “I haven’t got a mobile phone. Instagram, Twitter, f***ing hell — I don’t know what they’re on about. I am a total throwback.” Back then, a half-century ago, he was different. And at the same time different class.
I ask about James, the coach. John talks about the man. “There was a lot of wrong about what was happening to the miners,” he says. “Doctors would say so-and-so died of heart failure, but that wasn’t the cause of death. Carwyn promised to do something about it and he put his bungalow on the line, to get fair play for the miners.”
John’s father, William, worked in the mines. Around Cefneithin they used to say that the gold in the surrounding hills was black. His father would rise at 4.30 and with the other men take a bus to the Great Mountain colliery at Tumble. Day after day in winter, they saw no daylight. “Pay attention to your studies or you’ll end up in the colliery,” his father said.
The boy listened, passed his 11-plus examination and got into Gwendraeth Grammar School. When the singer and storyteller Max Boyce sings of the “Welsh fly-half factory” it may have been this he had in mind. James, John, Gareth Davies and Jonathan Davies all wore the No 10 jersey for Wales and all went through Gwendraeth.
John remembers overhearing men in Cefneithin talking about him: “One day that boy will play for Wales.” His uncle had a motorbike and would take his father to Gwendraeth games on Saturday morning. They would leave just before the end and never mention that they had been there. The boy knew, and knew also that he was making his father proud.
Among his many gifts, there was the added blessing of supreme confidence. Edwards once persuaded him to do some extra practice before a Wales trial. It was a close and wet afternoon and the fly half grew weary of his training partner’s enthusiasm. “How would you like it?” Edwards asked. “You throw it, I’ll catch it,” John replied.
Part of the 1971 Lions squad, Chris Rea recalls sharing a room with John in New Zealand. Rea was a fine centre but with Gibson and Dawes in the squad, the Scot was part of the midweek team. Rea remembers one conversation between the two of them. “We were talking about confidence and Barry said, ‘Chris, I think the difference between you and me is that your confidence is low at the moment,’ ” Rea recalls.
“ ‘If I go on the pitch,’ Barry said, ‘and make a complete cock-up of the first thing I do, I know that the next thing I do will be good. I know that at some point I’m going to do something that will turn the game.’ He said that without one iota of arrogance, because he was not an arrogant man.”
James never spoke to his young fly half about tactics or strategy but allowed him to decide. They both believed that how you won mattered. Even now, 50 years on, John gently chides himself for being too conservative in the final Test, pinning the All Blacks inside their own half to make sure the Lions did not lose.
“We should have been more adventurous, gone for another try,” he says. “After we had drawn that final Test, I felt a sense of anti-climax. We hadn’t gone out in style.”
At Heathrow airport they came from Wales and other places to welcome the team home. Someone said it was the biggest turnout since the Beatles in 1964. The BBC’s Kate Adie ushered John into the women’s toilet, the only place they could do an interview.
He had gone to New Zealand as Barry John and returned as The King. For him, it was too much. Unable to say no, he became a prisoner of fame. He told the stories over and over until he began to bore himself.
He worked for Midland Bank and at a branch in Rhyl, north Wales, a young woman curtsied to him. Her friends thought it was so funny, but it unsettled him.
Four people travelled from Bristol to see his house in Radyr, outside Cardiff. It was a Sunday afternoon and his wife, Jan, invited them in for tea. They sat and chatted with the visitors but this was a life he never wanted.
“It was like our home had become a shrine,” he says. “At traffic lights in Cardiff people surrounded my car, stopping the traffic. I felt it was alienating. I was being separated from ordinary people.”
Six months after returning from New Zealand he began to believe the way to get his life back was to stop playing rugby. On April 26, 1972, eight months after his return from the tour, he played his last game, a charity match for the Welsh League of Youth that he and James had organised. Thirty-six thousand people showed up. He scored the winning try.
His closest friends in the Wales team, Edwards and Gerald Davies, tried to dissuade him. He could be stubborn too. The Sunday Mirror got word of what he was about to do and offered £7,000 for an exclusive story. He met them at the Ladbroke Club in London and did the interview.
Michael Christiansen, the editor, listened and then did the strangest thing. “Look, Barry,” he said, “the deal we’ve offered will be honoured when you retire but please don’t do it now. Put it off for two years.” Christiansen was a rugby fan, and like so many others he could not bear the thought of John’s premature departure from the game.
But as surely as The King ghosted past defenders, he got to the exit door without anyone laying a hand on him.
Of course there were regrets, but not enough to change the course of rugby history. He and Jan separated after almost 30 years of marriage, but they did not want a divorce. They remain on good terms.
“We’re closer now than ever,” John says. “In fact I rang her this morning and said, ‘If you’re in town today and see somebody looking like me, it is me.’ ”
Thanks for sharing that Taff, what a guy, lovely stories, its why I love Rugby, the players 
Floating * - Goal
** Barry John did
Signing off Taff, see you tomorrow. All the best
Floating * - Goal
** Barry John did
Signing off Taff, see you tomorrow. All the best
From behind the Times firewall
REMEMBERING THE 1971 LIONS
Carwyn James’ ethos of freedom was template for coaching – but it was forgotten
It is 50 years ago, almost to the day, since the British & Irish Lions touched down in New Zealand. On arrival, the tour manager told the local media that he expected the Lions to win the series 2-1; according to Chris Rea, the Scotland centre, you could hear the laughter all the way from Invercargill.
Yet there began one of the greatest odysseys in sport. The Lions had never won in New Zealand; no one had ever expected them to. Their upsetting of the odds in 1971, and the style in which they did so, ensured they would be treasures of the game for ever. In one version of rugby history, they changed the way the game was played; in another, the message of the man behind it all was all but snuffed out, the man and his ideas to be heard no more.
This is Carwyn James, brilliant and enigmatic, adored and yet ignored, 38 years dead now, at the age of 53, yet a forward-thinker whose coaching philosophy, half a century on, is still a lesson crying out to be heard by practitioners around the world.
In 1973, when James invited a 26-year-old Ian McGeechan, a Lions coach in the making, to play in an invitation game at Llanelli, one of the reasons he accepted was because he wanted to talk to the great man and discover what it was about him.
In the late Seventies, when James was coach of Rovigo, a young Brian Ashton, a free-thinking England coach in the making, was also in Italy and desperate to learn whenever their paths would cross. “I remember being in his flat in Rovigo, literally sitting at his feet, because it was so sparsely furnished, just listening,” Ashton recalls. “It had a massive impact on the way I viewed coaching — and life.”
It was his capacity, above all, to be a free-thinker that set James apart. He was not an orthodox rugby figure and he challenged orthodox rugby thinking.
In the magnificent book When Lions Roared, Willie John McBride, one of those 1971 heroes, recalls that “he was a great man for vision”. Mick Hipwell, another tourist, said simply: “He was the best person I ever met in my life.”
All of that touring squad would joke that James was sponsored by Gordon’s gin and Player’s cigarettes, though those twin luxuries would haunt him later in his life. They seemed to appreciate that, on that Lions tour, they were getting a very different rugby education.
How so? James did an early version of what, today, we call analysis. Before departure he gathered as many journals from New Zealand as he could find and read almanacks from previous years. When they were in New Zealand, at games, he would detail each non-player to watch specifically the Kiwi players in their position and report back their findings.
He was a brilliant, original motivator of rugby players. He had a soft voice and never raised it; somehow he never needed to. This approach went hand-in-hand with his all-embracing philosophy which was never to issue orders but to encourage his players to work it out for themselves. This is what, today, we call giving “ownership” to the players. As James said himself: “I don’t think it is my duty as a coach to tell backs like the Lions what moves they should use. Let them create for themselves.”
This is how Mervyn Davies, his No 8, saw it: “He invited us to take personal responsibility for our role but without ever telling us what to do. He had a persuasive knack that led us to believe that his suggestions were ours, not his.”
“We were free to express our ability, free to attack from any situation,” Mike Gibson, the Ireland centre, said. He recalls sessions with James running behind the backs, “harassing us, shouting: ‘Think! Think! Think!’ ”
Ashton calls him the “consigliere” and refers to the Richard Hytner book Consiglieri: Leading from the Shadows about the ability to wield influence without being notably the man out front.
How and why was he both so enlightened and original? In part because coaching, in rugby, was so new; there was hardly an established template so, to an extent, he had to think it out for himself.
As a player, he had been a smart, diminutive fly half whose caps for Wales numbered only two because his career happened to collide with the great Cliff Morgan. That probably set his mind going, but he had strong interests beyond the game: he had a passion for the arts, particularly Welsh poets; in 1970, he stood in the general election as a Plaid Cymru candidate.
And who knows what impact his rumoured closeted homosexuality had upon him. Players would describe him as “enigmatic”; in his latter years, he was increasingly a solitary figure.
An insight comes from a TV interview with his older brother, Dewi, three years after his death, where he says: “He should have got married and brought up a family.” More sympathetic is his sister, Gwen, interviewed ten years after his death. “Lots of things in Wales are kept quiet. It would be far better if things are not bottled up.”
His biographer, Alun Gibbard, suggests “a correlation between the role that rugby played in his life and the state of Carwyn’s mind”. In which case, he was probably never happier than when he was in New Zealand in 1971.
He clearly took pleasure in outsmarting the Kiwis. In an extended interview in the book How We Beat the All Blacks, he said: “The New Zealander is somewhat different from the kind of animal we breed here.” And: “We had this impression of unsmiling giants, a machine, geared to play a certain way.”
He liked, also, to know that while Kiwis were coached to run hard and fast, often without the ball, he coached technique and skill, always with a ball in hand. “They love the perspiration,” he said, “and I had a feeling that they were not all that impressed by the inspiration.”
By the time the Lions had finished in New Zealand — 2-1 victors, as predicted — James had forced the home nation into a major redress of their entire approach to the game. He had not finished with them there, though.
The following year, the All Blacks would return, on tour, to Europe where James would get the better of them twice more: once, famously, as coach of his club side, Llanelli, and then, even more famously, as the coach of the Barbarians. Yes, that try came under his watch too.
None of this, though, would lead to the job for which he seemed destined: the Wales national coach. Here his thinking was simply too advanced. In his application for the job in 1974, he stated his terms: that a board of selectors was an anachronism and that the coach should be the sole selector. His application got no farther.
He turned instead to working in the media. His stint in Italy would follow. He died, alone, of a heart attack, in an Amsterdam hotel room.
Even 50 years after that Lions tour, the prime question he asked of the game and its players is as relevant as ever: can you think for yourself on the pitch? Rather than follow his philosophy, half a century of “progress” has resulted in the game becoming ever more led by its coaches, most of whom are reluctant to play the consigliere.
Back in 1971, Kevin Bowring was in the sixth form at Neath Grammar, fascinated by that Lions team and how it achieved its success. He would go on to coach Wales, then became a coach of coaches. “If he could see where coaching has gone,” he says, “Carwyn would turn in his grave.”
He cites the cult of the big-personality coach, their level of influence and hands-on coaching. James would never have prescribed a move; he always wanted players to work it out for themselves.
“He just liberated his players to go out and play,” Ashton says. “Surely that is what a coach is for?”
Bowring says that his philosophy is not all lost. He identifies what he calls “the second coming of coaching” where players are being given more responsibility and fewer instructions. “Carwyn,” he says, “would approve of that.”
Indeed, his great achievement in 1971 remains a message for the game as much as one of its greatest memories.
REMEMBERING THE 1971 LIONS
Carwyn James’ ethos of freedom was template for coaching – but it was forgotten
It is 50 years ago, almost to the day, since the British & Irish Lions touched down in New Zealand. On arrival, the tour manager told the local media that he expected the Lions to win the series 2-1; according to Chris Rea, the Scotland centre, you could hear the laughter all the way from Invercargill.
Yet there began one of the greatest odysseys in sport. The Lions had never won in New Zealand; no one had ever expected them to. Their upsetting of the odds in 1971, and the style in which they did so, ensured they would be treasures of the game for ever. In one version of rugby history, they changed the way the game was played; in another, the message of the man behind it all was all but snuffed out, the man and his ideas to be heard no more.
This is Carwyn James, brilliant and enigmatic, adored and yet ignored, 38 years dead now, at the age of 53, yet a forward-thinker whose coaching philosophy, half a century on, is still a lesson crying out to be heard by practitioners around the world.
In 1973, when James invited a 26-year-old Ian McGeechan, a Lions coach in the making, to play in an invitation game at Llanelli, one of the reasons he accepted was because he wanted to talk to the great man and discover what it was about him.
In the late Seventies, when James was coach of Rovigo, a young Brian Ashton, a free-thinking England coach in the making, was also in Italy and desperate to learn whenever their paths would cross. “I remember being in his flat in Rovigo, literally sitting at his feet, because it was so sparsely furnished, just listening,” Ashton recalls. “It had a massive impact on the way I viewed coaching — and life.”
It was his capacity, above all, to be a free-thinker that set James apart. He was not an orthodox rugby figure and he challenged orthodox rugby thinking.
In the magnificent book When Lions Roared, Willie John McBride, one of those 1971 heroes, recalls that “he was a great man for vision”. Mick Hipwell, another tourist, said simply: “He was the best person I ever met in my life.”
All of that touring squad would joke that James was sponsored by Gordon’s gin and Player’s cigarettes, though those twin luxuries would haunt him later in his life. They seemed to appreciate that, on that Lions tour, they were getting a very different rugby education.
How so? James did an early version of what, today, we call analysis. Before departure he gathered as many journals from New Zealand as he could find and read almanacks from previous years. When they were in New Zealand, at games, he would detail each non-player to watch specifically the Kiwi players in their position and report back their findings.
He was a brilliant, original motivator of rugby players. He had a soft voice and never raised it; somehow he never needed to. This approach went hand-in-hand with his all-embracing philosophy which was never to issue orders but to encourage his players to work it out for themselves. This is what, today, we call giving “ownership” to the players. As James said himself: “I don’t think it is my duty as a coach to tell backs like the Lions what moves they should use. Let them create for themselves.”
This is how Mervyn Davies, his No 8, saw it: “He invited us to take personal responsibility for our role but without ever telling us what to do. He had a persuasive knack that led us to believe that his suggestions were ours, not his.”
“We were free to express our ability, free to attack from any situation,” Mike Gibson, the Ireland centre, said. He recalls sessions with James running behind the backs, “harassing us, shouting: ‘Think! Think! Think!’ ”
Ashton calls him the “consigliere” and refers to the Richard Hytner book Consiglieri: Leading from the Shadows about the ability to wield influence without being notably the man out front.
How and why was he both so enlightened and original? In part because coaching, in rugby, was so new; there was hardly an established template so, to an extent, he had to think it out for himself.
As a player, he had been a smart, diminutive fly half whose caps for Wales numbered only two because his career happened to collide with the great Cliff Morgan. That probably set his mind going, but he had strong interests beyond the game: he had a passion for the arts, particularly Welsh poets; in 1970, he stood in the general election as a Plaid Cymru candidate.
And who knows what impact his rumoured closeted homosexuality had upon him. Players would describe him as “enigmatic”; in his latter years, he was increasingly a solitary figure.
An insight comes from a TV interview with his older brother, Dewi, three years after his death, where he says: “He should have got married and brought up a family.” More sympathetic is his sister, Gwen, interviewed ten years after his death. “Lots of things in Wales are kept quiet. It would be far better if things are not bottled up.”
His biographer, Alun Gibbard, suggests “a correlation between the role that rugby played in his life and the state of Carwyn’s mind”. In which case, he was probably never happier than when he was in New Zealand in 1971.
He clearly took pleasure in outsmarting the Kiwis. In an extended interview in the book How We Beat the All Blacks, he said: “The New Zealander is somewhat different from the kind of animal we breed here.” And: “We had this impression of unsmiling giants, a machine, geared to play a certain way.”
He liked, also, to know that while Kiwis were coached to run hard and fast, often without the ball, he coached technique and skill, always with a ball in hand. “They love the perspiration,” he said, “and I had a feeling that they were not all that impressed by the inspiration.”
By the time the Lions had finished in New Zealand — 2-1 victors, as predicted — James had forced the home nation into a major redress of their entire approach to the game. He had not finished with them there, though.
The following year, the All Blacks would return, on tour, to Europe where James would get the better of them twice more: once, famously, as coach of his club side, Llanelli, and then, even more famously, as the coach of the Barbarians. Yes, that try came under his watch too.
None of this, though, would lead to the job for which he seemed destined: the Wales national coach. Here his thinking was simply too advanced. In his application for the job in 1974, he stated his terms: that a board of selectors was an anachronism and that the coach should be the sole selector. His application got no farther.
He turned instead to working in the media. His stint in Italy would follow. He died, alone, of a heart attack, in an Amsterdam hotel room.
Even 50 years after that Lions tour, the prime question he asked of the game and its players is as relevant as ever: can you think for yourself on the pitch? Rather than follow his philosophy, half a century of “progress” has resulted in the game becoming ever more led by its coaches, most of whom are reluctant to play the consigliere.
Back in 1971, Kevin Bowring was in the sixth form at Neath Grammar, fascinated by that Lions team and how it achieved its success. He would go on to coach Wales, then became a coach of coaches. “If he could see where coaching has gone,” he says, “Carwyn would turn in his grave.”
He cites the cult of the big-personality coach, their level of influence and hands-on coaching. James would never have prescribed a move; he always wanted players to work it out for themselves.
“He just liberated his players to go out and play,” Ashton says. “Surely that is what a coach is for?”
Bowring says that his philosophy is not all lost. He identifies what he calls “the second coming of coaching” where players are being given more responsibility and fewer instructions. “Carwyn,” he says, “would approve of that.”
Indeed, his great achievement in 1971 remains a message for the game as much as one of its greatest memories.
Morning Nick and PHFloating
Cheers Nick
Goal - Gaol
All well here and trust likewise with you both.
Today’s theme is words that include the random letters NEW
Gaol - Newgate
What a wonderful way to start the day, thank you. 
Going to order "When Lions Roared" and a CD of the '71 tour, later this morning.
All fine here, good to know same for you and hopefully PH
A captivating link today
Newgate - Swansea **
** Prison, where 9 inmates were hanged...so I'm reliably informed
Good luck in the play-offs
Going to order "When Lions Roared" and a CD of the '71 tour, later this morning.
All fine here, good to know same for you and hopefully PH
A captivating link today
Newgate - Swansea **
** Prison, where 9 inmates were hanged...so I'm reliably informed
Good luck in the play-offs
- wonder how you knew that ...Swansea - Newport*
* - also in the Play-Offs
Thanks Nick - think we need some good luck, as you know from what I’ve been writing, we’ve not played well for quite some time. Hopefully, we can turn it around and ‘do the business’
Morning Nick, Taff & whoever,
I hope all is well with you and yours, all fine here,
Wenceslas Werner **
** other Herzogs are also available
I hope all is well with you and yours, all fine here,
Wenceslas Werner **
** other Herzogs are also available
Morning PH
Werner - Winner **
** Another film director and (imo) a seriously unpleasant character, directing unpleasant films
Werner - Winner **
** Another film director and (imo) a seriously unpleasant character, directing unpleasant films
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Hope no side effects
Wines
- Newt ****P****d as a... result of to much vino
Newbury - Went **
** To my favourite local pub with Kaye. 2 x Cod n Chips and all the bits, 2 pints of Tribute, Lime and Soda for the Driver = £34 - handsome.
Home with a GnT.
Life ain't too shabby eh?
**** To my favourite local pub with Kaye. 2 x Cod n Chips and all the bits, 2 pints of Tribute, Lime and Soda for the Driver
= £34 - handsome.Home with a GnT.
Life ain't too shabby eh?