Peter Jackson: Rowlands remains Top Cat of the lineout

The 50th anniversary of perhaps the strangest of all Wales matches has come and gone with scarcely a mention. Admittedly it did not merit anything as grand as a State occasion, nor a 21-gun salute at the National Assembly.  Even so, golden jubilees are worth a bit of a fuss but with this one, it was almost as if it had never happened.
It wasn’t as if it had been so forgettable that nobody could remember it, more a case of unfortunate timing which meant the landmark coincided with the whole of Wales preoccupied by another home defeat. The sound of teeth being gnashed at every point of the compass reflected the nation’s mood.
Someone with a sense of history ought to have ensured some reference was made to it somewhere in the match programme because 50 years ago to the very day – February 2, 1963 – Wales beat Scotland at Murrayfield and the consequences of that match have been felt all over the rugby world ever since.
Clive Rowlands grins at the memory of a match-winning tactic which caused others to grimace. Having captained Wales on his debut the previous week against England in Cardiff and lost 13-6, Rowlands had to do something to avoid a similar fate in Edinburgh.
He decided that could best be achieved through the power of the Welsh pack. In doing so, Rowlands condemned his entire threequarter line to an afternoon without the ball. In retrospect it was perhaps just as well because by the time the skipper had finished kicking the leather off it, there wouldn’t have been much more than a bladder left to play with.
He worked the touchline with such unrelenting severity that the match degenerated into one long lineout.    There were 111 of them, a seemingly impossible total given that referees then rarely made allowance for more than a minute or so of stoppage time.
In the days when rugby was still blissfully immune to the American obsession with statistics, nobody kept an official count, except, it would appear, the man behind the microphone.  The late, inimitable Bill McLaren arrived at the figure of 111.
“Imagine trying to make that interesting and riveting for the BBC television audience,” he once said. “I received a letter from a brigadier in the Scottish Highlands telling me that I was off my onions as there simply could not be 111 lineouts in a match. I had to write back telling him that indeed there were 111.”
Rowlands, his place among the pantheon of colourful Welsh rugby men long assured, throws his hands up in mock horror at being accused of ensuring the ball at Murrayfield that day was probably out of play more often than it was in it. His claim that Wales had 48 lineouts meant he must have kicked the ball into touch 63 times.
However implausible the total, it was alarming enough to force the IRB’s lawmakers to safeguard the game from any repetition. They outlawed a direct kick into touch outside the 22-metre line, a change amended more recently to prevent players outside their 22 passing back inside. The concession of a lineout from a point parallel to where the ball was kicked has proved an effective deterrent.
Rowlands has always been splendidly defiant over his tactic, content to point to the record book for justification.
He did find time that day for one other kick, a drop-goal in a 6-0 Wales win and when McLaren pointed out that the ball had not crossed between the uprights, the jubilant skipper told him: “Read the papers tomorrow.”They didn’t call him ‘Top Cat’ for nothing.
The only Welshman to fill the roles of captain, coach, chairman of selectors and president, ‘TC’ still lives within a short touch kick of Cwmtwrch Rugby Club. When it comes to passion for the old game, his valley is not what it used to be.
Swansea City’s Premier League success has changed the flavour. The football club’s white replica shirts tend to outnumber the Wales rugby jersey these days and their passage into the League Cup final at Wembley later this month is bound to increase their popularity in rugby country.
“The passion for the Swans at the Liberty Stadium is greater than the passion for the Ospreys at the same venue because they don’t get the same support,” he says. “I see my wife’s passion for Swansea City FC and she used to be a real rugby widow!
“Swansea City is now a big family and the family will be going en bloc to Wembley. Cardiff City have also got it right judging by their results and attendances.   Two Welsh clubs doing well in the Premier League will be wonderful for Welsh sport as a whole but it will be a problem for rugby football.
“There’s more football played in Wales than rugby and all of that increases the need for Wales to have a good Six Nations. It’s a bit of a disaster at the moment. The price of tickets has gone crazy. There are also so many international matches. And that at a time when Wales is being hit pretty hard in terms of people losing jobs.”
He talks a lot of sense, as usual.