the France game, the new senior coach, Steve Hansen, came down to tell us that we were all starting with a clean slate. I was determined to make my mark. We beat France 17–6 and restricted them to a couple of penalties. I managed to win good ball at the lineout, controlled the back of the scrum and did well in the loose. Another good day at the Arms Park, I had made a good start to my senior international career.
After I’d signed that first contract with Ceri Sweeney, I got talking to Dai Thomas, the physio, in the pub at the end of my first season, about contracts. It was chat about contracts being fair and being paid what you deserved and it led to the club moving me straight from a junior contract onto a standard playing contract in 1999. Around this time I got the Vauxhall Corsa, which was sponsored by a local garage in Llantrisant, but when I signed my second contract in 2001, the Buy as You View owner Bernard Jones leased me a Mercedes with my name on the side. It was an unbelievable car, a Mercedes coupe CLK compressor. Bernard handed out a Mercedes to five players, including Gareth Wyatt and Robert Sidoli. He told us that we were the future, that he wanted us to make something of the club and that Buy As You View were in it for the long haul. That was typical of Bernard Jones. He was a self-made millionaire and was a hugely impressive man while at the same time remaining genuine and generous. He always used to tell me that I was going to captain Wales. After we won the Grand Slam in 2005, I phoned him up to chat about his foresight on this. He had also played his part in that Grand Slam success by sponsoring the new gym at the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel, where we trained.
Until Pontypridd won the Welsh Cup in 1996, the club had not won a major official trophy. Richie Collins had been part of that team and they went on to win the Welsh Premier League the following year. The club hadn’t won any major honours since, but in 2001/02, we reached two finals: the Welsh Cup and the Parker Pen.
In the Welsh Cup we had played against a strong Cardiff team in the semi-finals. The match was played at the Millennium Stadium, it was a great game and was hailed as the type of game needed to be played regularly if Wales were to progress. We won 35–21 and all of a sudden Ponty were being hailed as one of the top teams in Wales. We were through to the final to play against Llanelli, who were going well in the European Cup. It would be a really tough match-up, but although they were better than us for large parts of the game, with Scott Quinnell particularly impressing, Ceri Sweeney played brilliantly at ten, controlling the game with his kicking and pinning Llanelli back. Lyn had put a huge amount of work into our kicking game and this really helped Ceri. Brett Davey was also superb and kicked a late penalty and scored all of our points in a 17–15 victory. We went back to the clubhouse at Ponty and celebrated with our fans. It was a great day! Off the field, on the back of this success, each of the team was honoured with a special accolade that is a big part of the Welsh rugby culture – a personalised Grogg in your image. Everyone in Welsh rugby knows how unique it is to have one and I have been lucky enough to have several made over the subsequent years, each taking pride of place next to my Welsh caps in my parents’ home. I always enjoy going to down to the Grogg shop as all of the family are so warm and welcoming and the shop itself is a treasure trove of Groggs from iconic people and moments in rugby.
Back on the field, the Parker Pen may, initially, have seemed like a step down from the club’s previous adventures in the Heineken Cup, but we were playing really well under Lyn Howells and reached the quarterfinals, where we had to play Saracens. They had a team that contained players like Jannie de Beer and Tim Horan and no one gave us a chance. Before the game, Chief told the press that although Saracens might have a team of superstars, Pontypridd did as well – it was just that no one knew it yet. We all played well. I scored a try in the first half and we were winning 17–15 deep into injury time, when Saracens won a last-minute penalty and a chance to win the game. The entire crowd was silent as their fly half, Jannie de Beer, who scored five drop-goals against England in the 1999 World Cup quarterfinal, lined up his kick. The clock read eighty-two minutes. I later found out that Lyn Howells had gone to the toilet because he couldn’t bear to watch, but we all had to stand there and watch. We erupted with joy when de Beer failed. Ponty were in the semi-final. Of that Pontypridd XV, ten players went on to win full caps, proving Chief right. The players and staff celebrated wildly at the final whistle. I remember seeing Dai Thomas, our physio, running around like a mad man. I ran over to him and gave him a big bear hug. We had such a great time coming back on the bus and were still on a high the following Monday. Dai, however, was conspicuous by his absence. I asked around and discovered that he was laid up and in bed: it seems that I squeezed him a little too hard in my excitement and popped a few of his rib cartilages. Funnily enough, Dai avoided me at full time in future wins.
After that game, the Saracens manager Francois Pienaar graciously said he thought we could take the trophy outright. Before we could think of that, however, we had to win our semi-final against London Irish, which was to be played at a neutral venue. The Kassam Stadium in Oxford was the choice and loads of fans came down the M4 from Pontypridd. The atmosphere at the ground was brilliant, full of Pontypridd fans who had made the journey down and the match was superb, too. London Irish were riding high in the Premiership at the time and had just won the English Cup. Like us, they didn’t have many stars, but worked really hard for each other. The moment of the match came on about sixty minutes with London Irish playing really well and coming back at us strongly. Their player-coach and talisman, Brendan Venter, ran as hard as he could at Johnny Bryant, who put in a Chief-like tackle on him. It gave all of our players a huge lift and remains one of the most inspiring acts I ever experienced in my career. When you watch the game and see Nick Kelly, our unsung flanker, next to John in the defensive line jumping up and down like a lunatic you can see what it meant to all of us. We weren’t going to lose from that point onwards and eventually went on to win a great game. Games like this were putting us on the map as players.
We returned to the Kassam Stadium for the final against Sale Sharks and, once again, the ground was full of Pontypridd fans. We would get 3,000 or 4,000 for most club matches at Sardis Road, but for really big games there would be 8,000 or even 10,000. Pontypridd were the first Welsh team to reach the European Challenge Cup final and, after Cardiff in 1996, during the early days of European rugby, only the second Welsh team to reach any European final. Getting off the bus to be welcomed by the amazing Ponty fans was a really emotional moment: it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and, more importantly, made us feel invincible as a team.
It wasn’t to be, however. We were 15–3 up at half-time, but let our lead slip and ended up losing 25–22. We made two or three errors during the match that we hadn’t made all season and lost a game that we should have won. This meant we had missed out on Heineken Cup qualification for the second successive year after we had left ourselves too much to do in the league after our bad start to the season. It was a shame as we were probably becoming one of the best Welsh teams. Afterwards, the Ponty fans, who had been brilliant throughout, sang ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Losing was gutting, but that song gave us all a really big lift and all those fans showed just what strength of feeling there is for the club in the Valleys.
Despite the disappointments we had suffered against Sale and in the league, however, the season had been an unbelievable one for both Pontypridd and for me and it finished in the best possible way. I was called into the senior Wales squad for that season’s Six Nations game against Scotland as cover for Nathan Budgett. He subsequently recovered and I went back down to the A team, but at the end of the season, the senior team were going to South Africa for a two-test tour and I was determined to be a part of it.
Wales had endured a miserable Six Nations campaign, beating only Italy and being thrashed 50–10 by England at Twickenham. This was a difficult period for Wales; they weren’t doing well and the lack of forward planning and muddled thinking was characterised by Iestyn Harris’s crazy transfer from rugby league. Iestyn was a great league player and would do well at union, but he was signed as the answer to all of Wales’ problems. It was a ridiculous quick-fix solution: no single player could make that much of a difference. Iestyn did pretty well for Wales in a struggling side, especially considering he was thrown in at the deep end and would have got better, but he could never fulfil the WRU’s hopes for him – no single player could.
There was a chance that Steve Hansen might bring in some fresh faces. After the last