KEY POINTS:
Martyn Williams, the best flanker in the British Isles by some distance, played only the last two minutes of the final Lions test against the All Blacks in 2005 - a gratuitous waste of talent if ever there was one.
It was as if the record label executive
famously responsible for knocking back The Beatles had been reincarnated as a rugby selector. Come to think of it, this is as good an explanation as any for the shambles masquerading as a professionally managed assault on the most forbidding stronghold in the world game.
Clive Woodward and his fellow coaches could hardly claim ignorance of the Welshman's gifts - Williams had, after all, been garlanded as the outstanding performer in that year's Six Nations, which his country had won in Grand Slam style. When Woodward went so far as to suggest, a few days before departure, that more than half his test team might be drawn from the Red Dragonhood, it was assumed not only that Williams would be among the 50 per cent but that he was first among equals.
It is now a matter of sorrowful record that things did not come to pass in the way either Williams or the Welsh nation imagined. Those with an ear for coaching doublespeak were reluctant to take Woodward at his word, partly because they knew him to be capable of contradicting himself in the space between two commas and partly because they expected him to wrap himself in the flag of St George when the chill wind of the tests started blowing through the South Island.
Sure enough, he picked an out-of-form Englishman, Leicester veteran Neil Back, for the first test in Christchurch and when that failed, he turned to the injury-prone Lewis Moody. Same club, same nationality.
Williams did not deserve these rejections, for despite failing to subdue the ruthless Marty Holah during the defeat by the Maori in Hamilton, he played a creative hand in many of the tourists' better performances during two painful months in purgatory.
Yet there was barely a murmur from him at the time - Gavin Henson took a rather different approach - and he holds no grudges now.
"What did I discover about myself during the Lions trip? That I needed to sharpen up my act," Williams said as the horizontal rain battered the windows of the Cardiff Blues training base.
"I learned more about playing openside flanker during those weeks in New Zealand than I had in the previous 10 years playing everywhere else. What happened on the tour opened my eyes, and opened them wide. I'm grateful for the experience."
Could this really be true? Is it possible a player as accomplished as Williams, a hardened professional with a half-century of caps, could find himself learning the game anew a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday?
This is his belief, startling though it may seem. "I think every one of us on that trip would accept we were taught a lesson," he continued, "particularly in the tackle area, where the modern game is won and lost.
"For a player in my position, it was obviously going to be a demanding tour. Everywhere you go in New Zealand, the openside flanker is king. The fourth or fifth-choice No 7 over there would walk into most sides here. But the thing that made them different to us, better than us, was that they all contested the breakdown, from one to 15. They were all brilliant at it. Some were more brilliant than others but that wasn't much consolation.
"The intensity was phenomenal and it took us a long time to get to grips with the fact that while we were picking and choosing when to make nuisances of ourselves, they were doing it all the time. "It was only against the Bay of Plenty and the Maori in the early stages of the Lions tour - games in which none of us knew what hit us in terms of the contest for the ball on the floor - that I realised how far things had slipped."
Now he is back in his pomp, aided by an upturn in the fortunes of the Blues, who won a competitive game in France for the first time when they kicked off their Heineken Cup campaign by beating Bourgoin last month.
Cardiff were pipped 21-17 by Leicester in their second Heineken Cup match last weekend but Williams is sure his club and national team will continue to seek the expansive game.
"Look, the wide game still suits us, as a team and as a nation. We're not massive specimens, like the English or South Africans, so the more expansive we make things, the better it is for us. But I do believe we're more capable of achieving something approaching parity up front - by 'we', I mean both the Blues and Wales - and if we can get ourselves 50 per cent of the ball or close to it, we should back ourselves to win most matches.
"Like a lot of Welsh players, I know what it is to live off scraps year after year. You do your best but the novelty wears thin and the frustration kicks in."
- INDEPENDENT
