I thought Gareth Edwards would have become captain, but John and his selectors felt Gareth suffered as a player when he carried the responsibility of leadership. I can’t say I shared their view. Neither did Gareth and he still can’t see it to this day. Still, I became captain and will always be grateful to John Dawes. Our relationship survived me being dropped and we both thrived. We won the 1977 Triple Crown – the second of four in a row – and at the end of that season we went off with the Lions to New Zealand together. I was captain. John was coach. We lost the series but that should not detract in any way from John’s coaching achievements. He was a deep thinker about the game, a high achiever, but capable of celebrating Grand Slams with a handshake and pat on the back rather than anything more openly emotional. He will surely go down in history as one of the best coaches, and certainly the most successful, the country has ever known.
If Clive Rowlands had been a tough act to follow, then coming in to the job after Clive and John Dawes in succession made things extremely difficult. Add in the vital factor of a team that was starting to break up, and this is truly the point where the job did indeed start to become impossible. Wales won another Triple Crown in 1979, just for good measure, and then John stood down. He left behind a team that needed to be rebuilt with careful nurturing, but he also left behind public expectations that were enormous and that demanded instant satisfaction. What a mix. The man left holding the restless baby was John Lloyd.
The 1970s had brought three Grand Slams and five Triple Crowns. In the 11 seasons stretching from 1969 to 1979 Wales either won the Five Nations championship or finished runners-up. Looking back, it was an amazing period of consistent success. Now came 1980 – a new decade, a new Welsh team, but the same level of expectancy. John Lloyd had been a very solid prop with Bridgend, but even his shoulders were not broad enough to carry such hopes and responsibility. Whoever eventually takes over from Alex Ferguson at Manchester United will quickly know the feeling. It wasn’t that Wales suddenly became a bad side overnight; they didn’t. It was just that winning only 50 per cent of Tests and losing to teams Wales had previously brushed aside was an unpalatable change of diet for supporters used to heaven’s bread. The big names had gone and the difference they made could be seen clearly. Tight matches now started to go in the opposition’s favour rather than to Wales and the coach began to take hostile criticism in the media, which had also grown accustomed to reporting success. John Lloyd spent two seasons in charge as Wales coach, and although he had some bright ideas he was replaced in 1982 by John Bevan and his assistant Terry Cobner.
Bevan and Cobner were a good mix. John, who sadly died in 1986 after an illness, had coached Aberavon, while Terry had been virtually a player-coach during his time with Pontypool. Both had played for Wales during the golden era of the seventies, both had toured with the Lions, and both knew what they were expected to live up to. They worked hard, were respected and shrewd in their handling of players and began to lay the foundations for what proved a brief period of recovery for Wales at the end of the 1980s. But Cobs and John, like John Lloyd before them, were operating in the toughest times for a Wales coach. They had so much to live up to and yet a quickly diminishing supply of talent from which to choose. Without anyone in the senior circles of the game in Wales able to identify a real shift in power, rather than just a blip, the cards were stacked against all three of them.
If someone had said to me in 1970 that Tony Gray would one day be a Wales coach then I would have thought they were either mad or had been drinking. Tony was a guy who I had toured Argentina with. He was a quiet, diffident North Walian who didn’t seem to have the size of personality to take on such a big job. But, helped by Derek Quinnell, a man everyone respected, Tony became Wales coach in 1985. In some ways they were an unusual pair. Derek had no first-class coaching experience, while Tony had cut his teeth outside of Wales with London Welsh. Neither, then, were at the top of the coaching tree but they went about their job with a quiet determination to get things back on track – and for a while they managed it.
I had a lot of time for Tony Gray. He recognised good players and got them to express themselves and play somewhere towards their potential. He had the vision and bravery to make bold selection decisions – such as picking two other fly-halves, Mark Ring and Bleddyn Bowen, alongside Jonathan Davies in 1988 when Wales won at Twickenham. With a strong pack and the finishing power of Ieuan Evans and Adrian Hadley outside the flair of the three fly-halves, the 1988 side was a strong one. It deserved the Triple Crown success and came close to a Grand Slam. They were a very good team and I think they would have given any of the sides from the seventies a real run for their money.
I can remember being in the BBC Wales TV studios a few days before Wales played France in the final game of the 1988 championship. A Grand Slam beckoned but I felt Wales had looked tired against Ireland while France were a strong-looking side who had caught my eye despite losing to Scotland. I felt very guilty tipping France to win before the match and my fellow studio guests, Ray Gravell and Allan Martin, were appalled at my lack of belief. Unfortunately, I was proved right. But that defeat was a narrow one, just 10–9, and there was real, hard evidence that Gray and Quinnell were making progress. Unfortunately, they then had to tour New Zealand in the summer of 1988 and they happened to run into one of the finest and most ruthless All Black sides ever produced. Wales lost the first Test 52–3 and the second 54–9. All of the European teams would have gone the same way. This was the period when the gap between northern and southern hemisphere rugby suddenly widened to a gulf.
Of course, instead of realising that, the WRU pushed the panic button. It was completely unfair and ridiculous but the decision was made to sack both Tony and Derek. Everyone in Wales was shocked by the scorelines, but not half as shocked as seeing the coaches dismissed in the same year as they had won the Triple Crown. Talk about overreaction! Wales had lost heavily, but to the best team in the world. Real progress had been made in the two years leading into that Triple Crown, but it counted for nothing in the minds of the incompetents on the WRU.
What was really needed was a thorough examination of why the New Zealand players were so much better than our own. What had they done to move so far ahead? But that might have pointed a few too many fingers at those running the game, so they pointed a loaded shotgun at the coaches, instead. Clive Rowlands had been given a similar bloody nose by the All Blacks in 1969, but Clive was given time to get things right and he did it. Gray and Quinnell were not given that time – despite their successes – they were just given the boot.
Jonathan Davies pleaded the case for sticking with Tony and Derek. He urged the Union to consult the players who were eager to become more professional, more organised and more skilled. Bleddyn Bowen said the same thing. But the WRU ignored Jonathan. They wouldn’t even let him address them on the subject at their own AGM. Disillusioned and demoralised by it all, Jonathan left for rugby league in the autumn of 1988. Others followed his path and Welsh rugby went from flying high with a Triple Crown into a destructive tailspin.
I felt very sorry for Tony and Derek. It was such a waste of their talent. It was also confirmation that the WRU were now reacting to defeat like the very worst kinds of soccer club chairmen. There were huge, fundamental problems with Welsh rugby in the 1980s, but the reaction to defeat now involved the forming of a lynch mob to go after the national coach, even though merely being paid to play and coach was still seven years away.
John Ryan succeeded Tony Gray in the autumn of 1988 and the bottom line for John is that he didn’t have a hope in hell. This was now the time of the mass exodus to rugby league and Ryan had to try to make silk purses from cauliflower ears. His record of just two victories in his nine matches in charge shows he didn’t make many purses.
John had not entered the job on the back of a long playing career with Wales or a sparkling record as a club coach. He was a decent man, but out of his depth when it came to rescuing Wales from the tidal wave of destructive neglect that was now starting to gather a rapid momentum. Instead of treading on solid ground established by steady progress under Tony Gray, poor old John was up to his knees in a mess that he had no chance of sorting out. Somehow, Wales managed to narrowly beat England in 1989 but by the following year the pattern of the next decade was being firmly established. Wales were well-beaten 34–6 at Twickenham and England scored four tries to one. These