Peter Jackson: Wales must speak out over shame of Mike Phillips

According to Alain Afflelou, only his presidential intervention prevented Bayonne giving Mike Phillips the order of the boot 12 months ago. Afflelou should know. This time last year the Welsh Lion had been suspended by the Basque club after they found him guilty of “unacceptable off-field behaviour”.
“I had already kept him on a year ago, against everyone’s advice,” Afflelou told the Bordeaux-based newspaper Sud Ouest. “This summer I even invited him to my house to offer him a contract extension of two years. I trusted him. This is treason.”
Bayonne’s allegation that their scrum-half turned up the worse for alcoholic wear at a video session will surely have evoked embarrassing memories within the Welsh Rugby Union hierarchy. They might even have had a smidgen of sympathy for Bayonne, not that they would dare admit as much.
The WRU know from personal experience that some players are more high-maintenance than others. In the summer of 2011, they were left to clean up the mess over Phillips’ 3am scuffle with security staff outside a fast-food outlet in central Cardiff.
A video of the incident posted on YouTube rather scuppered any hope the WRU might have had of keeping it hushed up. Given no choice but to suspend him, they were always going to reinstate him in ample time for the pre-World Cup matches later that summer.
They did so, they said, after the player had agreed to seek counselling. An apologetic Phillips confessed then to being “ashamed” and “embarrassed”.   He also admitted that he had an “issue with the pressures of my current environment and have sought, and will continue to seek, help and advice in relation to that”.
That makes his showing of the door at Bayonne all the more regrettable. Back in Wales, Warren Gatland took a pragmatic stance on the issue, that of a head coach who appreciates that his team’s prospects of beating South Africa next Saturday ought to be all the better for Phillips being in the team than out of it.
Gatland’s laid-back take on the issue (“We’ll sit down and have a quiet chat”) could be interpreted one of two ways. It was either a means of shielding Phillips from further public opprobrium or a case of turning a blind eye to what went on at Bayonne.
A news conference at the Wales squad base gave Phillips an opportunity to express some regret over the fact that he hasn’t got a club, a chance to show a little contrition. Instead he gave the impression that he had nothing to apologise for.
There has not been a peep on the subject from Gatland’s employers, the Welsh Rugby Union. Their silence during the last six days rather suggested that if they ignored the matter for long enough perhaps it would go away.
The fact of the matter is that one of their highest-profile players has been sacked over a serious allegation, serious enough, surely, for the WRU to have expressed some concern. What, the management board ought to be asking themselves, was the point of all that counselling?
The last case, on their own doorstep in June 2011, prompted them to read the riot act and make it “absolutely clear that Welsh rugby will not tolerate inappropriate behaviour. The message is now abundantly clear that we represent certain standards which will be maintained at all times both on and off the field of play.”
To have said nothing in similar vein this past week on the basis that the problem is Bayonne’s, not theirs, is to duck the issue.
Rugby players falling into alcohol-induced rucks are not a new phenomenon – think Gavin Henson, Andy Powell, Zac Guildford, Kurtley Beale, James O’Connor, Danny Care and the dwarf-throwing English players in New Zealand.
Apart from a stain on his cv, Bayonne’s sacking of Phillips does nothing for the Welsh image at home or abroad. As the national team pussy-footed around the issue, only one figure in the Welsh game appeared to tackle the issue – Lyn Jones, Phillips’ coach at the Ospreys who now runs the Dragons.
Typically, his advice came straight from the shoulder. In a nutshell, he urged the player to sort out his discipline, a cri de coeur which ended with the stark warning: “If not, I think it’s best he retires.”
Wales will not want Phillips to do that because their prospects at the next World Cup in two years will be the poorer assuming he maintains his status as Europe’s best scrum-half.
Nobody is suggesting they take disciplinary action but at the very least they ought to be asking Bayonne to present them with the facts which led to their action.
Their message of two years ago has not been repeated. The danger therein is that unwittingly they are sending out a very different message to the rest of the players – that you can be sacked in France and carry on with Wales as if nothing untoward has happened.
What was that they said about the players being ambassadors for the game?
Click here to see the Wales team which will take on South Africa at the Millennium tomorrow,