Saturday lunchtime at Ebbw Vale rugby club, and the high sides of the valley are spectacular in the spring sunshine – quite inaptly if you believe Welsh rugby is lost in the dark. On this spring day I find hope here, and while it takes some doing, and you might say it needs blind faith over reality, the alternative of losing what Wales gives to the world is too awful to accept.
Pulling up to the gates at Eugene Cross Park, I say that I believe my name should be on the parking list, and the man asks: “Are you the one from London?” and I reply, yes, that’s me, although I have been to visit my Welsh uncle and auntie in nearby Nantyglo in the morning.
Why come to see Ebbw Vale versus Newport? Because it’s Ebbw Vale and Newport! Valleys against townies; green, red and white battling black-and-amber. As Jon Jones, chairman of Ebbw Vale, tells me: “Wales is street against street, area against area, village against village, village against town, town against town, city against city. My dad was always: ‘Bloody hell, don’t care as long as you beat Newport and Tredegar every year’. That’s the Welsh psyche, right?”
Yes, right, and that rivalry can be the basis for teams people want to watch, but is it working for the national team; for the nation? It is one week since Wales beat Italy for their first win in the men’s Six Nations for three years. In my last three matches watching Wales in person they have lost 68-14 and 48-7 to England, and 73-0 to South Africa. It’s not so long since they were winning Grand Slams and reaching World Cup semi-finals, so maybe it’s just a cycle. But Jones speaks worryingly of fan apathy: “Last year was the first time I struggled to sell our allocation of tickets for an England game. For the Scotland game this year, I’d get around 200 tickets, and we sold maybe 30.”
The i Paper’s Hugh Godwin (left) speaks to Ebbw Vale chairman Jon Jones (Photo: Ebbw Vale RFC)A plaque inside the Ebbw Vale clubhouse says it was opened in 1959 by the sporting legend Wilf Wooller and the general secretary of the South Wales area of the National Union of Miners. You take a sharp turn off Steel Works Road to get to the gates. The club’s badge bears their nickname of “The Steelmen”. But the collieries and the steel works and the factories making brass taps and washers and shoes and all sorts have long since closed down. The Welsh economy has a limit, and rugby is no longer the only attraction.
And then there’s the organisation. In 2003 the WRU decided the thing that definitely worked – the rivalry of clubs like Ebbw Vale and Newport, and Cardiff and Neath and Swansea and Aberavon and the rest – was the thing that could no longer work. The players and money and suitable stadiums would be concentrated into five regions, which soon became four. Today, the WRU thinks it needs to be three. Maybe.
So this match is in Super Rygbi Cymru (SRC), the semi-professional league which forms a bridge between the four full-time regions (Cardiff, Dragons, Ospreys and Scarlets) in the United Rugby Championship (URC) and the grassroots. When Ebbw Vale played Pontypool over Christmas, they put 37 empty barrels out on the Sunday morning. Today, a crowd of about a thousand are split between the grandstand and the vast terrace opposite, where a few dozen “Ebbw Addicts” are not quite rubbing shoulders with their Newport visitors.
Newport’s fans cheer their team after a 44-17 victory (Photo: Hugh Godwin/The i Paper)Standing on these stony steps, we get local. Paul Turner, who is here scouting for the Dragons, reminisces on being fly-half and captain for Monmouthshire against Australia on this ground in 1992. In 1973 he walked up here from school to see the All Blacks. Great days, big crowds. Today, with a red card for a headbutt, and injuries to their captain and scrum-half, Ebbw Vale, despite leading the league, lose 44-17. The rugby is okay; mostly tightly structured but with good contributions from Newport’s dogged flankers and a Dragons centre in Joe Westwood.
Some of the Newport supporters say Ebbw Vale are going against the spirit of the SRC, by not bringing enough Dragons players through. Ebbw say the regional team shares its coaches with Pontypool and Newport, who therefore get the best players offered to them. The SRC has a £160,000 salary cap, and Ebbw Vale tell me it is being broken by seven of the league’s 10 clubs, and while they, Ebbw, are sticking to it, the WRU aren’t auditing them, anyway.
How about the regional thing? “I’ll watch Newport but not the Dragons, because of all the politics,” says Simon. Does that go for all of you? “I watch both teams,” says Tim, whose son Oli has just scored two tries for Newport; he was in the Dragons academy for a while but is now at university.
Andrea Smart, Ebbw Vale’s general manager, and secretary of the Gwent district, talks through the schools structure and the WRU’s change to regional engagement officers. “Schools rugby is still there,” Smart says, “but it’s not as strong as when we were growing up, and every school had a PE teacher who was a rugby player, more often than not.” Still, Ebbw Vale are running 13 teams, including one for mixed abilities – another positive sign.
‘On this spring day I found hope for Welsh rugby’s future’ (Photo: Ebbw Vale RFC)I don’t hear anyone advocating a return to the pre-regional set-up. What some do say is Swansea makes more sense than Ospreys, and Llanelli is small, so that’s tricky, and Cardiff are pretty much a super-club already, and Dragons – who on this weekend are playing away to the Stormers in Cape Town, which is a saga of its own – might as well be Newport.
The answer clearly lies in who looks after what, and finding trust. Reorganising the regions’ academies on national lines is gaining traction. Jason Strange, the locally-born Ebbw Vale head coach who played for six senior clubs in Wales and England, and coached Wales’s under-20s to a Grand Slam in 2016, says: “I go back to 2005 to 2015, in what I call the golden era, and all those players – George North, Sam Warburton, Dan Biggar – came through the National Academy. Who had control of the National Academy? Wales.” Strange also thinks the WRU missed a big trick in not hiring David Nucifora, who reorganised Irish professional rugby, and now works for Scotland.
Turner would like the 10 SRC clubs to play a cup with the 14 in England’s Champ, even if the English Prem appears uninterested in going Anglo-Welsh. Threads and links have always reached beyond the valleys. Over our post-match chicken and sweet gravy, Strange says he is coaching skills at Warrington rugby league alongside Sam Burgess. The Ebbw Vale assistant coach, Ieuan Probert, has worked with the England attack coach Lee Blackett at Scarlets.
Ebbw Vale run 13 teams, showing there is still a thriving community game (Photo: Ebbw Vale RFC)For what it’s worth, Strange thinks the WRU will end up sticking with four regions. He would favour three: east, central and west, with the latter including the north. “You’d have three separate regional entities, whatever you want to call them – red, black, white. And then underneath that, a thriving club game with promotion and relegation, and make that really strong,” Strange says.
“The clubs in Wales, for me, is still where everything is built. We are confused at the moment; Cardiff and Newport get two bites of the cherry – a club and a region. To call them regions is completely fake. Let’s not try and kid everyone, supporters, administrators, players, by saying that they’re both.”
Strange rubbishes a huge part of a popular theory on central funding when he says a comparative lack of cash is not Wales’s fundamental problem, citing how Hull Kingston Rovers on a £2.5m budget beat the much wealthier Brisbane Broncos in rugby league’s World Club Challenge.
And while some would say it’s madness to turn down private investors, Strange’s overview is compelling: “Wales are bringing in a turnover of 100 million [pounds]. With that, you could get control of the game. Why would you want to give that away to a couple of benefactors and super clubs, and give your academies away? You are basically shooting yourself. The WRU should be able to tell that [regional] team where they are playing, who’s coaching them, who’s being centrally contracted and aligned to Steve Tandy and the national team.
“Can it be recovered? It definitely can, but it’s going to take strong leadership, because all the problems are self-inflicted. Leadership is the problem and the solution.”
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