ON THE Sunday morning after Wales went out of the World Cup last October, Alan Edmunds arrived in work and switched on his computer. As editor of the Western Mail– the self-styled national newspaper of Wales – Edmunds needed an idea for the front page of Monday's paper.
With the country’s dudgeon so high on the back of Sam Warburton’s sending-off and the subsequent defeat by France, he knew a normal, everyday woe-is-us front page wouldn’t do.
So he sat down to write an email to the newsdesk. He didn’t really have much of an idea what to say, but he knew he wanted to put down in words what he was feeling. He tapped out a few sentences and half thoughts as they came to him, stitched them together and hit send. The whole thing only took a couple of minutes.
“We took the words and put it on the page,” says Edmunds. “We played around with how it would look with a couple of page designers. We tried it with a picture, but it didn’t work – it made it quite hard to read. We messed about with a few fonts and put the heart with the crest in it down the bottom corner. Then it was just a matter of going, ‘Well, is this great or is it awful?’ You can never really tell.”
That afternoon, they decided to send up a test balloon by posting the page on Twitter. The response was enormous. A whole nation had been scrabbling about for just over 24 hours not really knowing what to do with themselves, but straight away this seemed to chime.
“Is This How You Feel?” asked the banner across the top.
It was.
By the next morning, it was a worldwide hit. It zipped around the internet – it even showed up on the Huffington Post, not exactly what you’d call a rugby stronghold.
“Journalism is funny,” says Edmunds. “When I think of the amount of times I’ve spent hours over a front page, reworking it and tweaking it until I’m proud of it and nobody notices. And then this thing that I wrote in a couple of minutes and had absolutely no confidence in at all, all of a sudden it takes off and people latch on to it.”
In the end, Welsh people got up and got on. They watched the World Cup final and spent the 80 minutes in the same mood as most rugby followers in the Northern Hemisphere, tutting and shaking their heads at the one that had, very obviously, gotten away.
That France were able to match New Zealand for so long and keep the result in doubt right up to the last whistle made it all the more galling. It’s a strange World Cup that leaves so many nations wanting to punch a wall, convinced they’ve left it after them.
In truth, Wales are probably the country most entitled to lay claim to such a feeling.
Full of momentum and brio after beating Ireland in the quarter-final, they were young and frisky and having the time of their lives.
Even without Warburton, they’d almost skittled France out of the tournament and, with New Zealand limping along and seemingly having to call up a new replacement outhalf every day, the final wouldn’t have scared them a whit. But then, if ifs and ands were pots and pans . . .
“They’re over it now,” says recently-retired centre Tom Shanklin. “But at the time it was quite hard to get over just because of the way they were knocked out. To go out because of a sending off was tough.
“Now in saying that, the way I look at it, they would have been without Rhys Priestland and Adam Jones for the final, even if they’d got through, and you only really realise what a great asset Adam Jones is when he doesn’t play. So you can’t really say that we lost the World Cup because of it. But even so, I’d say they’re probably still a bit annoyed at the manner that they went out.”
Whatever about the players, the nation itself had some shaking off to do. The Western Mail front page had been such a hit because it had caught the public mood. A freight train had smashed into a wall and they were staggering around in a daze now. In Alain Rolland they had a scapegoat, which always tends to make grievances linger longer. For Shanklin, it was the fact that hopes had soared that made the crash landing so spectacular.
“It did take a while to get over it,” he says. “People were still talking about it in December at the Australia game and still getting annoyed. There was just such a euphoria following the Welsh team during the tournament and they were playing the best and most exciting rugby out of the home nations. You just got a massive buzz, a huge feeling about it. And then to go out on that bombshell was so disappointing.
“But once a new competition kicks in like the Six Nations, the World Cup is forgotten about. Everyone will be judged now on this competition rather than the World Cup. There’ll be a huge disappointment now if things don’t go right during the Six Nations because we’ve got a taste of what could be with this Welsh team.”
So what of Wales now? If the Six Nations had come a month after the World Cup, they’d have been nailed-on favourites. As it is, they’re easy enough to back at 3 to 1 in some places – the same price as you can get about England, ludicrously enough.
The loss of Gethin Jenkins for the first few games will hurt and with doubts over Priestland, Jamie Roberts and Dan Lydiate too for the early weeks, they might well be short of full bore when they arrive in Dublin next Sunday. Also, it’s not been a historic trait of theirs to follow a sold-out show with any sort of encore.
“This has always been a problem with Wales,” says Shanklin. “It was the big issue even when I was playing – can Wales be consistent? Can they back it up and be more than just one-offs who go up and down? That’s always been the trouble with us.
“Even when we’ve won the Grand Slam, we’ve never really been able to back it up with a big performance the year after. They need to find that level of consistency.”
By Christmas, the Western Mail was selling their iconic front page on T-shirts and tea-towels and making quite the killing on them.
“You can’t control what strikes a chord,” laughs Edmunds.
If the Welsh players are wondering, winning a Grand Slam would probably do the trick.
HOW ALAIN ROLLAND BECAME PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE
IN THE wake of Wales’ exit from the World Cup, the internet did its reliably unpretty worst when it came to Alain Rolland.
Twitter crackled and popped even as the game continued and the day wasn’t out before a rash of Facebook sites were set up, each with a less dainty title than the next. From “Ban Alain Rolland from officiating Rugby ever again!!!” to “I Hate Alain Rolland” and all the way down to the grimly prosaic “Alain Rolland Abuse Page”, opportunities to vent and foment were many, if not especially varied.
His Wikipedia entry was predictably altered within an hour of the full-time whistle, albeit with some small measure of restraint as he was declared: “The fool who erroneously sent off Sam Warburton.”
A second entry did, however, call him a “bit of a knob”.
The Wiki elves who keep the site going made sure it was all changed back inside a couple of hours.
By that lunchtime in Cardiff, the airwaves were heaving. Welsh first minister Carwyn Jones rummaged around for his tuppenceworth and happened to find a microphone to toss it into. “It was the wrong decision and it wrecked the game,” he said. “Sam was unlucky. I thought it was a penalty – it was a clumsy tackle and a yellow card – but not a red card. The game was destroyed from that point on. It’s not easy being a referee, but Alain Rolland got that wrong.”
His verdict chimed with the rest of the Welsh nation. It didn’t take long for the fact that Rolland’s father was French to emerge, or for his fluency with the French language to become not just a damning indictment, but also apparent evidence of bias.
The decade he’d spent refereeing both internationals and club matches involving French teams was cast aside and forgotten.
If most of the reaction was heartfelt, some of it veered into mawkishness. An 18-year-old student from the valleys named Peter Hughes wrote a song called Sixteen men against 14 Dragons that got airplay all week between then and the third-place play-off. A three chords and the truth job featuring just Hughes and his guitar, it featured the positively David Brentian line: “Started out good but kept getting better/Little green man made us lose our best fella.”
The wind really only started turning in Rolland’s favour when Warburton himself came out with his hands up. He told an IRB disciplinary panel two days after the game he accepted he had deserved a red card and later said as much in the media.
Former Welsh referee Clive Norling backed the decision, as did various ITV pundits who had initially scalded Rolland live on air.
Still, it was obvious that the stink would linger for a while. In mid-November, Rolland did an interview for the Western Daily in which he stood his ground and insisted he would do the same again in similar circumstances. He did concede, though, that it would take a while for Welsh people to think kindly of him. “The thing you have to remember is that straight after the game there was huge emotion everywhere, which is understandable. But in time, maybe in 10 or 15 years, it might calm itself down.”
That interview has been Rolland’s only public utterance on the matter – the IRFU turned down a request from The Irish Times last week for him to contribute to this article. But he has, in fact, been back to Wales to referee, taking charge of the Scarlets versus Northampton game on January 14th.
Despite fears beforehand that he would get a thorny reception, he was merely greeted by a small outbreak of half-hearted booing as he took the pitch accompanied by two policemen.
As it happened, there were no real flash points in the game, although he did sin bin Northampton’s Tom May in the second minute.
Scarlets lost 17-29, but the home fans went away far more aggrieved at the lack of imagination in their midfield than at anything Rolland had done.
