Sorrowful shadow blights the game

FOR month after miserable month, Welsh rugby had been crying out for someone to give their apology of a season the last rites.

- PETER JACKSON

Those left to clean up the unholy mess, namely chairman Ieuan Evans and acting chief executive Nigel Walker, had done the decent thing and gone into just about every confessional box in the land from The Seneydd to the smallest club. They said they were sorry for what had happened before their time.

Sorry for the scandal over allegations of sexism and misogyny within their very own Welsh rugby union.

Sorry that their international players feel so neglected they threatened to go on strike instead of playing England.

Sorry for the Union driving them to the brink of industrial action through their long delay in notifying at least half of their professional players, some 200 strong, whether they would still be employed beyond the start of the summer.

Sorry, above all, for the cumulative effect which dragged their national sport through the gutter.

The resignations, the tsunami of public anger, the warnings of big sponsors ready to cut their losses and walk away, were bad enough. A largely losing team and a community game left to rot by years of neglect made a bleak landscape appear bleaker still.

Despite the ever-darkening spectre, nobody spelt out the consequences the way Private (‘We’re all doomed’) Frazer used to do in Dad’s Army, not until one day last week when one of the game’s more enlightened young men revived the old soldier’s lament.

Ashton Hewitt, whose courageous stand against racism has won him legions of admirers far beyond the boundaries of the sport itself, spoke out in his capacity as chairman of the Welsh Rugby Players’ Association. The Dragons’ wing may be too young to remember Private Frazer but what Hewitt said about the state of the Welsh game would have struck a chord with those who do.