Watson, a wetting, and the Wales win

Press, 13 May 1981, Page 28

Watson, a wetting, and the Wales win

By

KEVIN McMENAMIN

The seed to the All Blacks’ great win against Wales in the centennial test at Cardiff last November was not sown at any selectors’ conference, on any practice field, or in any team meeting.

According to the Auckland sports journalist, Don Cameron, the starting point came on a balmy evening in Nandi towards the end of the All Blacks mid-winter tour of Australia and Fiji.

It was the day that the All Blacks had won a tempestuous game against Nadroga, the match finishing prematurely when the crowd invaded the pitch.

Later the All Blacks were relaxing around their hotel swimming pool when it was noticed that the coach, Eric Watson, was missing. A posse was dispatched and, cutting a long story short, Mr Wal-

son finished up fully dressed in the pool. Later still, Cameron quizzed Mr Watson on his reaction to his dunking and he replied that he was delighted by the experience. “For the first time I realised, as the lads were dumping me in the pool, that I had been accepted by the players. I felt that they did it because they liked me,” said Mr Watson. Continues Cameron:— “From that point onward, from an action which might have been a token of disrespect but which Watson realised was an act of affec-

tion, the erratic course of Eric Watson, the All Black coach, changed to a straight and tolerably smooth path. And at the same time, the course of the All Black team was set true and straight to that great moment at Cardiff Arms Park.” Cameron’s assessment of when and how Mr Watson found his rugby road to Damascus can be found in his book, RUGBY TRIUMPHANT (205 pp $14.95, Hodder and Stoughton). It is a book which covers the All Blacks tours, last year to both Australia and Wales, tours which Cameron

covered for his newspaper, the “New Zealand Herald.”

In addition to Mr Watson's unscheduled dip at Nandi, Cameron offers much of intest from the year’s two tours. He explains, probably as well as anyone can, how a team which experienced such anguish in Australia, could just a few weeks later, and with just one or two changes, perform so magnificently in Wales.

Cameron, the author of other tour books on both rugby and cricket, writes with a nice touch. His match reports are fulsome without ever becoming boring and there are some lovely descriptive passages of places visited and people met. One of the most engrossing chapters in “Rugby Triumphant” is one in which Cameron, who was making his first visit to Wales, relates his endeavours to separate myth from fact about the principality, more especially in rugby matters. Another very readable chapter is one devoted solely to Andy Haden,, the highpoint being an explanation by Haden of how he came to make his famous dive from a line-out at Cardiff Arms Park in 1978.

Summing up the wonderful Welsh tour, Cameron describes it as “turning two rugby nations back to sanity.”

Much the same view is expressed by the best-known

of all Welsh rugby writers, J. B. G. Thomas, in his 1980 epistle,. “Wounded Lions and other 1980 rugby” (168 pp Pelham, $24.10).

This book, as the title suggests, focuses mainly on the Lion, South African tour, but the All Blacks visit to Wales does rate a chapter under the “other” happenings.

Over the years New Zealanders have become accustomed to Thomas being less than kind in his writings about the All Blacks. This time he has nothing but bouquets to dispense, even to the extent of being “glad at heart” that the Llanelli game, in which Graeme Higginson appeared to be ordered off, ended as it did. Nevertheless, the Thomas doubters, might like to challenge his strange argument that had the test been played a week later then it could have been a very different game. His basis being that any team, no matter how good, and he is talking here about Wales, can have an offday.

There might also be some wonderment at his final sentence: "The All Blacks left the country happy men; they had done a good job, particularly for their own image, and that was so important.”