Peter Jackson talks to Maesteg coach Richard Webster about the startling decline of Welsh club rugby

There was a time when the Welsh club game was the envy of the rugby world, when popular legend had it that the pithead superintendent had only to shout down the mine to call up an entire team.
Every village, town and city across the 65-mile rugby belt of south Wales ran their own multiple-team operation. The old tribalism generated crowds which nobody could match season in, season out, not even in the working-class hotbeds of Gloucester and Limerick.
When Gosforth beat Waterloo in the 1977 English Cup final, an attendance of 7,000 made Twickenham feel like a mausoleum. In the same season, more than five times as many turned up at Cardiff Arms Park to watch Newport win the Welsh Cup against ancient rivals Cardiff.
The apparently endless conveyor belt of players provided rich pickings not just for Wales and the Lions but the Rugby League clubs of northern England. Not anymore. Like the traditional industries of coal and steel, many rugby clubs are struggling to stay open not because the money is running out but, more alarmingly, because they can’t find the players to raise a team.
Last month, on the opening day of the Six Nations, one national broadsheet devoted its front page and two more pages inside to the state of the Welsh club game beneath the headline: ‘The Union doesn’t give a toss. Welsh rugby is going to the dogs.’
Peter Jackson has lived in Wales for almost half a century, witnessing the boom and bust of the club game. This is his revealing story of one man’s fight to keep a famous old club doing what it’s done throughout every season in peacetime since 1877 – put out a team on Saturday. In The Valley of Decay, even that appears to be a losing battle.
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Early November at Maesteg RFC and Richard Webster has started tackling the weekly chore of finding out how many, or how few players he has for Saturday’s match.  His problem, as usual, is not who to leave out but who to put in.
As it turns out, this is one of his better weeks. After Tuesday night’s training, he has 14 to pick from, a full hand except for a prop, ideally a tighthead but beggars can’t be choosers.  Any old prop will do.
Webster gets on the phone. Another week, another case of begging and borrowing. After a few calls, the coach finds his man.
“I’ll play Saturday if you’re stuck,” the reluctant prop tells a relieved Webster.  “Only one problem. I don’t have any boots. Get me a pair and I’ll be there. Size eleven.”
Far from telling the would-be prop where to go, Webster springs into action. His concern about raising a full team over-rides any annoyance at finding himself the one coach in the Welsh game whose duties extend to ensuring his latest ‘signing’ is suitably shod for the job.
“The first shop had the right size but they were lime green,” Webster tells me. “Lime green? I can’t have a prop in any team of mine wearing lime green boots. So I spent another two hours looking at every sports shop in driving distance. Eventually I found a black pair for eighty quid.”

He buys them out of his own pocket and leaves the impression that it’s a small enough price to ensure that Maesteg have a full team. The bench will be empty but then it’s been empty before.
“Once when I badly needed a prop as bench cover, I got this fat guy and so he says: ‘What’s in it for me?’ As a joke, I said I’d buy him a Chinese take-away.  As it turned out he didn’t get on and then a few hours after the match, he rings me up from the Chinese and says: ‘Where’s my meal?’
“Why do I do it? I do it for the ten or twelve committed boys at the club.   They come and play for me and give everything they can. I feel I owe them something. What I can’t give them in return is five more players but then that’s the reality of life at a lot of clubs these days.”
Webster’s devotion to the cause has also driven him to buy more than boots. “The worst time is when they start crying off on a Saturday morning,” he says. “One guy phoned up and said: ‘Sorry, can’t play. Got a puncture.’
“I bought a spare tyre and changed the wheel for him. And he still didn’t turn up. They throw some excuses at you for not playing. Some’ll say: ‘Can’t make it. Got to take my boy to hospital.’
“So you say: ‘Sorry to hear that. Is it life-threatening? If not, then can’t you go another day?’
“Then another guy rings up and says: ‘Can’t train tonight. Got a new puppy and I have to look after it.’ At least it made a change from them saying: ‘Won’t be there tonight. My gran’s fallen over…
“If you get one or two crying off, fair enough. But when you get ten, then you realise that the game doesn’t mean much to them. I can never remember missing a training session for family reasons and I’ve been in the game for 34 years.”
Then there was the day when Webster, a hard man, broke down before the team and cried. He wept for their ineptitude and is not afraid to say so.
“We played a friendly match and I’d never seen us so uncompetitive. We were all so disgusted that I started crying. I’m not ashamed to admit that.   Some of them must have been thinking: ‘Why is he crying?’”
Webster insists, damningly, that his struggle at Maesteg is no different to  elsewhere in Wales. “Most junior clubs now face the same issues every week,” he says. “They are all having to fight to survive.
“I’ve had hammerings before but I looked at those boys after that match.   Some may have thought it was only a friendly and what did it matter? It mattered to me and it should have mattered to them because we’d come together from a dark place and there we were in a darker one…’
Webster is old school and proud of it, a fearless wing-forward who grew up in a game where you took it on the chin, settled your own scores when the chance came and forgot about it over a few beers.
“I loved the game and so it was easy to think everyone else loved it as well.   But then I can understand those who think: ‘Why would I want to go out, get soaking wet and get my head stamped on? And then when I get back to the dressing-room to have some idiot of a coach shouting at me?’
“You say to yourself: ‘Why can’t you get 20 players to turn up on a Saturday.   We had 28 players at the start of the season. Then when the weather starts getting nasty, the numbers take a big hit. Maybe that’s the Nanny State for you.”

Webster’s innate passion for the game still burns brightly but not quite as much as it used to. In the days before the club scene began to implode, Webster would never have traded two tickets for Wales-New Zealand to watch Swansea City-Manchester United instead.
It was not simply because he wanted to treat his 13-year-old son, Bleddyn. “I go to see the Swans whenever I can and I have to say this – I find the football as a spectacle better than watching Wales at the Millennium Stadium. These days I’d much rather go and watch a game of football.
“You go and watch Wales play rugby and there are drunken people everywhere. Look, I’ve done some dull things in my time so I don’t want it to sound all goody-goody.  There’s something wrong with Welsh rugby and I just find that football offers more.”
Maesteg is not just any old valley club fallen on hard times. They were the last unbeaten Welsh club champions of the amateur era and, if the fixture list could have been stronger, their achievement reflected the fierce local pride which went into the club, surrounded as it was by three junior ones – Maesteg Celtic, Maesteg Quins and Nantyffyllon.
“It was a great year for the Llynfi Valley club who, since the war, have shown remarkable enterprise and determination,” the Playfair Rugby Football Annual for 1950-1 reported.  “Starting from scratch in 1945 without even the pavilion which had been burnt down during the war, they were soon challenging the big clubs.
“An alert, hard-working committee tackled the problem of accommodation bravely.  They built a grandstand and dressing rooms in their own time.  Last season’s team was a combination of local talent headed by a resourceful captain, Trevor Lloyd, and several players who could not obtain regular games with the neighbouring clubs of Aberavon, Bridgend and Neath.”
Nor was their success confined to the immediate post-war era. Maesteg finished in the top three of the Welsh championship during the last two seasons of the Seventies in the days of John Morgan, Billy Pole, Brian Morris, Wilson Lauder of Scotland fame, Leighton O’Connor and a wing in Colin Donovan who touched down 71 times during those two seasons.
Their belated centenary season, in 1982, brought the club’s most famous result of all – a 10-10 draw with the New Zealand Maori. The decline in Maesteg from giving an international team a serious run for its money to a place not far from skid row had long set in when Webster took over in November 2011.
He has never been one to shirk a challenge but then he’d never had a challenge of this magnitude.
“A friend of mine phoned me up from Maesteg and said: ‘We’re in a mess, ‘Webby’. Can you sort us out.  Be great if you could…”
“They weren’t just bottom of the League although they did have a few points – 24. The trouble was they were minus 24 points because they couldn’t find a team for six matches. And the punishment for each one was minus four points.
“When I started, I had four players. The rest had all left. When you get stuffed, nobody wants to play for you.   Before I joined, they’d lost 149-11 to Cwmllynfell. They started that match with 14 players and finished with ten.
“Who wants to get beaten by 149 points? So most of them left. Some were getting paid and I put a stop to that. If I was going to do the job, then it had to be like it used to be in the amateur days when you played the game with your mates.
“I wouldn’t call a lot of what I do coaching. It’s more about making phone calls and trying to make sure we have a side to play every Saturday.    Players come and go and they keep coming and going.
“With the ones who stay, you’ve got to coach them properly. If you do that, sometimes you get aggressive and then some more leave because they can’t be bothered with me shouting at them.   I’ve learnt to be as much a psychologist as a coach.
“Raising a team for a cup match is a bigger problem because other clubs don’t want their players cup-tied.  We were due to play Heol-y-Cyw and I phoned the WRU to say we couldn’t play the game because we didn’t have a front row. I wanted it postponed.
“They said it had to be played as arranged. I couldn’t get them to see the bigger picture of a club fighting to survive. What does losing by 60 or 70 points do for morale? All I wanted was a bit of help. Instead they stuck by the rule book and said we’d be thrown out of the competition and fined £500.
“I said if it came to that I’d pay the fine myself because Maesteg RFC couldn’t afford it. The club give me petrol money but I refuse other expenses. I leave work early and there are times when I could do without it.  It’s not for the love of the club because Maesteg is not my home-town. I do it out of respect for the players who have helped me. I still have a passion for the game.”