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Martyn Williams the Magnificent Seven
The Autobiography
By Martyn Williams, Simon Thomas John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Martyn Williams
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84454-692-3
CHAPTER 1
the red rollercoaster
The whole of my Wales career has been something of a rollercoaster ride, with extreme highs and desperate lows coming in pretty much equal measure.
Just look at recent times. In the space of four years, we've had two Grand Slams, but in between those you had the whole Ruddockgate saga – of which more later – and the World Cup disaster of 2007.
That latter failure was all the more painful for me, because at the time I thought it was the end of my international career, as I had decided to retire from the Test arena after the World Cup.
In my dreams, my last game for Wales was going to be at the Stade de France in Paris as part of a World Cup-winning team. Instead it was in Nantes, against Fiji, and it was to end with us bombing out of the tournament and Gareth Jenkins losing his job as coach.
Having made up my mind to quit, I had been desperate to finish my 11-year test career on a high. But unfortunately, the tournament was to finish on a real low for us. So where did it all go wrong? To my mind, it all goes back to the fall-out from the 2005 Grand Slam. That championship clean-sweep – Wales' first since 1978 – stands out as a real highlight of my career and the memories will stay with me forever.
But it was to have another legacy, one which ultimately culminated in that dark day at the Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes in October 2007.
We won the Grand Slam playing a particular brand of fluid, running rugby – a style that I truly believe suits us best as a nation – the 'Welsh way' as it's been dubbed. However, the following season, we found ourselves missing a lot of key players through injury and we didn't do too well. Suddenly, everyone was saying the way we were trying to play couldn't work any longer. The argument went that our opponents had worked us out so we had to change the way we were playing.
Now, I'm the first to admit that the game moves on and you've got to develop as a team, but at the time I honestly didn't think we had to change that much. Yet it was to be a case of all change.
By the end of the 2006 Six Nations, the last of the southern hemisphere architects of the 'Welsh way' had gone, with skills specialist Scott Johnson and former head coach Steve Hansen and fitness guru Andrew Hore returning Down Under. In came a new home-grown management team, headed up by long-serving Llanelli coach Gareth Jenkins, who had finally landed the job he had wanted for so long.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I've got a lot of respect for Gareth and that I think he's a genuinely great guy. But I just feel that perhaps he tried to change too much too soon, when there wasn't really a need to do it.
When a new coach comes in, they are obviously going to have their own ideas and their own views on taking the team forward. That's fine. But I just think there was a knee-jerk reaction because we hadn't had a successful Six Nations in 2006. It was difficult for us as a group of players, because for three or four years we had worked so hard on developing a particular style and then we found ourselves having to move away from it. It was as if three quarters of the way through a journey, we were told to head to a different destination.
From midway through 2002, we had worked on avoiding contact and playing to our natural strengths by keeping the ball alive and moving it wide, with as much of an emphasis on the forwards' handling as on the backs. But Gareth wanted us to be a more physical side, with the onus on the forwards to act as carriers.
Looking back, we spent a hell of a lot of time in training doing contact work, really climbing into each other and smashing each other. It was more than we'd ever done before under any coach during my time involved with Wales.
The older you get as a player, the less you like doing that in training – you just want to play. I think there is a time and a place for getting physical and if you get something out of it, then fine. But, sometimes, I thought we were doing it for the sake of it. We were also doing it instead of other skill-based work that would have benefited us more.
The physical, direct approach had been successful for Gareth at Llanelli, where he had based a lot of his strategy around big men like Scott Quinnell, Martyn Madden and Salesi Finau smashing the ball up. But at international level, it's different. In those matches, you are coming up against players who are just as big and powerful as you and often bigger and more powerful. We are not the biggest nation in the world physically and I don't think it suits us to get dragged into a confrontational, set-piece game.
But when Gareth came in, I felt there was an attempt to try and copy the power game of the likes of England, South Africa and France. I just don't think that's a natural game for the Welsh and, for the majority of players in the squad, it was an alien way to play.
In Wales, we have a tendency to look at other sides, see where they've been successful and think we must copy them to get results. But just because one side has been successful, it doesn't mean that replicating their technique will do you any good.
I feel you've got to play to your strengths and our strength is that we've got a lot of people who are natural rugby players with great skills – people like Shane Williams, who showed in the 2008 Slam what he could do when given the freedom to express himself. So let's try and build on what we are good at rather than trying to become something we are not and never will be.
The more physical approach wasn't the only big change under Gareth. In the late summer of 2006, he and his assistant Nigel Davies went to South Africa to watch the Tri-Nations tournament and they realised that those teams, especially New Zealand, were kicking a hell of a lot. So again, it was time for us to become copycats. It did make sense to try and develop our kicking, as it's very useful to have a big kicking game in your armoury.
But we were suddenly being asked to kick an awful lot when it was something we weren't used to doing that much, so it was always going to be difficult to bring it in over a short space of time.
It's like anything in rugby. You perform at your best when you don't think about it and just play by instinct.
The boys were being told to kick here, there and everywhere and it just wasn't natural for them. The first thought from the likes of Gareth 'Alfie' Thomas and Kevin Morgan would be to keep the ball in hand and run. It always has been. To suddenly change that mentality takes time, and unfortunately, with the next international challenge on the horizon, time was one thing we didn't have.
I don't want to give the impression that the 2005 Grand Slam was based purely on running from everywhere and throwing the ball around for 80 minutes. Yes, we did play some great rugby and we did score some great tries. But we did the dirty stuff as well, the nitty-gritty work up front and we also had the kicking covered by Stephen Jones and Gavin Henson.
The key was that everyone understood what needed to be done in any given situation. Under Gareth and Nigel, things just became a bit confused.
In meetings, they would emphasise that they wanted us to get the ball in hand and play with width, because we have got dangerous runners and attackers. But then when we went out onto the paddock, we weren't really training like that. We'd just do a hell of a lot of contact, piling into each other. This is where our confusion came from.
You'd go into games with an idea that you wanted to play a certain way, but because you'd been training so much the other way, you'd be caught between two stools. We were talking about playing the Welsh way, but training to play a tighter driving game and a kicking game. There was a sense of confusion about how we were supposed to play. In the end, we played like we trained, with lots of endeavour and commitment, but that contact game just didn't really work for us.
A number of the senior players, myself included, did try and express our views about this. There were a few times where I said I felt we were doing far too much meaningless contact, while other players made other points. We were concerned about a few off-the- field matters as well, but the management group took us as being negative rather than constructive. It felt as though they only wanted to hear positive comments. In the end, I felt I might as well give up trying to express my views, because it just wasn't worth it, and I know other players felt the same.
One thing a lot of people outside the camp probably didn't realise was that it was Nigel who did most of the coaching. Gareth largely did the overseeing and would give the emotional spiel. All the tactical stuff would be done by Nigel.
He ran the show in terms of the coaching and he would be the one doing the majority of the talking at meetings. Most of the public wouldn't have been aware of that.
The only time Gareth really did any hands-on coaching was before the World Cup warm-up match against England in August 2007 when our forwards coach Robyn McBryde was up at the National Eisteddfod in Mold. Normally, Nigel would do the backs and our attack, Robin would do all the set-piece work with the forwards, Rowland Phillips would do the defence and Neil Jenkins worked with the kickers.
You feel for the head coach sometimes at international level, because they take all the flak when things go wrong, but it's very much a collective effort with the team management and the players all having a part to play.
Gareth's time in charge began with a summer tour of Argentina in 2006, which I didn't go on, and then came the autumn internationals, where we came from behind to earn a creditable draw with Australia. That result offered some hope for the 2007 Six Nations, but, for the most part, it was to be a hugely frustrating campaign.
It began with a defeat at home to Ireland, when the little things just didn't go our way and the bounce of the ball went against us. People talk about the luck of the Irish and that was never more evident than on that Sunday afternoon at the Millennium Stadium.
But while there were some plusses to come out of that game, the same couldn't be said about our next match, against the Scots up in Edinburgh. That proved the low point of the campaign in more ways than one. It was our worst performance of the championship by some distance and we were rightly criticised for that, but what earned us the fiercest flak is what we did after the match.
Our 'crime' was to go out for a drink in a city-centre nightclub, something that was to become headline news back home in Wales a couple of days later.
The background to the incident is that the boys hadn't had the chance to relax and let off steam for a couple of months. We'd had all the Welsh derbies over Christmas, then in January we had the Heineken Cup games and after that you are pretty much straight into the international period. It was agreed that the night of the Scotland game would be a good time to let our hair down and just relax a bit, because we didn't have a fixture the following weekend. But no one had envisaged what that Murrayfield match was going to be like.
The fact that we were out at all after such a poor performance didn't go down well in the slightest with some fans and the story ended up making the papers.
I can see why people got upset and especially given the hard time a lot of fans had been through getting up to Edinburgh, with the bad weather that weekend causing some horrendous delays. But I am a big, big believer that socialising off the field brings you together as a group of players more than anything else. I'm not saying you should do it all the time by any means, but once in a while it's just good to spend time together away from the training field.
Of course, if we'd beaten Scotland there wouldn't have been any problem at all. Nobody mentions the times when the boys went out after the French or Irish games during the Grand Slam campaign in 2005 and those were much wilder nights. But because we played so poorly, people were looking for anything to have a go at us over.
If we'd had a game six days later then fair enough, it probably wouldn't have been the right thing to do, but our next match wasn't for another two weeks. We still had to get up for a pool recovery the next morning as well. It's not as though we were just lying there in bed all day Sunday.
When you are a professional sportsman and in the limelight you've got to accept that people are going to scrutinise your actions. But it wasn't as if we smashed the place up or were involved in a mass brawl, like the one I experienced as a young player with Pontypridd out in the French city of Brive. We were just out with the Scottish players and having some time to ourselves. It was Dwayne Peel's fiftieth cap and Simon Taylor's fiftieth for Scotland as well and we just wanted to relax and have a couple of drinks. Believe me, it was tame compared to some of the things I've seen during my career. But one or two fans didn't take kindly to seeing us out. A few comments were made and a couple of the boys made remarks back, which led to one or two people complaining to the Welsh Rugby Union and apologies being made.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, the boys will just walk away. But we are only human, and there's only so much you can take. Sometimes you will bite back and say something. It's hard to bite your tongue all the time. There's going to be instances where the boys are going to react to things that are said. It's natural. The problem is once you do it a big deal is made out of it.
As players, we hugely appreciate the efforts Welsh fans make to come and cheer us on and we realise how frustrating it must be for them when they don't get the result they are hoping for. But I don't think people always realise just how frustrated the players are as well when that happens and just how much we want to win when we play for our country. However much the supporters are hurting, we are hurting just as much when we lose. You are as frustrated as anyone and you take it more personally than anyone. It's just a horrible experience.
The journey back home as a Welsh player when you've lost out in Dublin or Edinburgh is something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. You go through the airport, with all the fans there, which is an absolute nightmare, because you feel guilty that you've let people down after they've had such high expectations.
Then, when you get back home, you don't want to go out anywhere. You just want to stay in. Your missus is saying, 'Come on, let's go out', but you just don't want to leave your front door. That's what it's like being a Wales rugby player after a defeat. You don't want to go to the supermarket, you don't want to see anyone, because you just end up having to explain yourself a thousand times over, trying to explain what went wrong. It's a tough time.
When you've got a game the next week and you're straight back to training, that's fine, but when you've got a couple of days off, you mull over it all and that's the worst bit. You don't sleep properly for days afterwards. It just goes round and round in your head.
That's what it was like during the majority of the 2007 Six Nations, with further defeats following out in France and Italy, leaving us staring at a whitewash, with only the England game in Cardiff left as a final shot at redemption.
Going into that final fixture, I had made my mind up that it was going to be my last Six Nations match, so I really wanted my daughter Mia to be there as she wouldn't have another chance to see her dad play in the tournament – or so I thought at the time. The day went like a dream, as we ended what had been a torrid campaign with a 27-18 victory over the old enemy and it meant so much to me that Mia was there to see it. It was also a result that gave us fresh hope for the World Cup that was coming up later in the year.
One of the big decisions facing Gareth and his back-up team in the build-up to that tournament was how to treat the summer tour to Australia and the three warm-up games against England, Argentina and France.
In the end, it was decided that a group of about 18 of us would miss the trip Down Under and stay at home to do a 12-week block of fitness work. I can totally see why it was done, because they wanted to get us in peak condition for the World Cup. But I remembered the summer of 2003 when we all went away on tour to Australia and New Zealand. We ended up getting hammered by the All Blacks, but what that trip did was to knit us together. We became really close as a squad and saw the benefits at the World Cup later that year.
It's a really difficult balancing act and hindsight is a great thing, but I think it would have been better for us if we'd all gone to Australia. You can do as much conditioning as you like and all the training in the world, but you can't replicate the game situation or being exposed to pressure moments in big matches.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Martyn Williams the Magnificent Seven by Martyn Williams, Simon Thomas. Copyright © 2008 Martyn Williams. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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