Here is an article by Professor Dai Smith, my reaction is after:

Rooting for the Team

By:

PROFESSOR Dai Smith is the Professor of Cultural History of Wales at the University of Wales, Swansea, and a distinguished historian and writer on Welsh arts and culture.

He is an authority on Welsh rugby, and co-authored Fields of Praise - the definitive history of the Welsh Rugby Union.

THERE is a crisis facing Welsh rugby. And it is of enormous proportions. The challenge is not how, next season, this great Welsh XV continues to deliver international success to its glory-starved fans. I'm utterly confident that the intelligent leadership of Mike Ruddock and his backroom staff will not allow the free-flowing play or the delight in it to fade quickly. At the top, we now have room to breathe.

The problem is that no-one can be really sure that this top-down managerial revolution, including organisational change, will be sustained by grass roots which are now as dodgy in some places as the Millennium Stadium turf with which we began this amazing Grand Slam campaign.

The challenge is to root this team in an emerging Welsh society in ways that can allow both to grow Welsh rugby for decades to come. At the moment the real difficulties in the way of this ambition are being air-brushed out by newspaper hype and commercialised ballyhoo.

This high point of success, however, allows us a brief window for mature consideration which might, yet, help reconcile the divisions caused by deep and self-inflicted wounds. They won't heal by being ignored or dismissed as the minor cuts and bruises necessarily suffered by the move to professionalism.

No-one, certainly not I, can sensibly advocate a complete reversal of the vandalism that some call regionalism. But no-one who is willing to be honest rather than propagandist, could deny the shrinking of the fan base that has occurred; the despair felt in crucial rugby heartlands - the breeding grounds of Bridgend, Pontypridd, the Gwent Valleys - at the loss of top-flight rugby football north of the M4; the intermittent quality, mostly dreadful, of the Celtic League; the draining of passion from the aptly named Blues; and the fear that the deep-rooted cause of this year's triumph is the product of past not future combinations of soulful structure and sporting culture.

Let me use the 1970s for comparative purposes, though not the usual ones. Sure, the team of 2005 is only on the first rung of a ladder which back then brought three Grand Slams and a few close misses in just seven years, but the real difference is in the non-sporting composition of those teams then and this one now.

The 1970s teams were a classic illustration of where South Wales had then arrived sociologically - there was the direct leaven of a traditional industrial working class, personified by Dai Morris and Glyn Shaw, and then, overwhelmingly, the sons of coal miners and steel workers educated and aspiring to be professional men rather than professionals; Gareth, Gerald, JJ, both John Bevans, Barry John, JPR and on and on. Their decade was one in which striking coal miners defeated a national government's policy not once but twice. It was a society recognisably moulded down to its incomparable rugby teams, by its past.

If we consider the class of 2005, we look at men who are, like the South Wales they have known since their births from the late 1970s on, socially attached to the past of their forebears by only two things, rugby football and location - the two things Welsh popular culture has clung to as all else has changed. These professionals have not been made and fully formed by the virtual world of "regionalism"; they have been picked, ripe for personal achievement, from the real crop sown by determined localities.

Consider Saturday, March 19, 2005, from this perspective. First Welsh try scored by Gethin Jenkins, a Pontypridd youth product; second try scored by Kevin Morgan, a Pontypridd youth product; team captain, Michael Owen, a Pontypridd youth product; player of the tournament who kicks the final ball out of play to bring the Grand Slam home, Martyn Williams, a Pontypridd youth product.

I am not, however, about to make yet again the obvious case for the togetherness and passion forged in the fires of that club's rugby for such as Mefin Davies, Robert Sidoli, Brent Cockbain, Ceri Sweeney and Sonny Parker of Ruddock's squad. That case is self-evident and to no-one more than Mike Ruddock himself. No, the real clue provided by that Ponty chain reaction on March 19 is how those products arose from a contemporary identity which is much more place-specific than the tired cliche of the actual Valleys or any management speak about amorphous Regions.

Add to the names of that illustrious trio those of Neil Jenkins, Steve Fenwick, Gary Prothero, Chris Bridges and you see a post-1960s pattern of players coming out of a sports-mad environment which is neither traditional heavy industry territory nor one divorced from the direct physical influence of the modern world, that famous south of the M4 pull which consumes rather more than it creates.

This rugby nursery comes from the satellite existence of Llantwit Fardre, Church Village, Beddau, post 1945 developments, old and new work types and patterns, rugby clubs founded by bus travelling grammar school boys benefiting from the post-war educational settlement and then sustained by the Comprehensive schoolboys who, from Bryn Celynnog to Brynteg, mark out Ruddock's Raiders more distinctly than scrum caps, tattoos or hair gel. From around Bridgend to Neath, and from around Carmarthen to Cilfynydd, this life is the shared experience of the players, including now the overseas crop, and of the fans they all mirror. Localities coalesced around rugby at all levels.

The wisest head of all the Anti- podeans we have imported belongs to Scott Johnson. He has been instrumental in seeing that the players have a sense of history and tradition, but, much more importantly, he connects to their social umbilical cord, saying, "This is a working-class people. I consider myself a working-class boy, Mike Ruddock is a working-class boy and you have got to stand up for what you stand for and I think the team epitomises that."

Brilliant, Scott. And that's why promoting myths and legends - marketing in today's terminology - will only provide a quick adolescent fix and a fast buck. You have to stand up in such a way that the reality of the Hero connects intimately to the actual people from whom he comes and to whom, in their dreams and on the street, he returns.

Kevin Morgan was mobbed in Pontypridd last week because of a real identification. Then the adrenaline flows. Then the production line continues in localities, all over South Wales, which continue to shape themselves, anew and in different forms, as communities of purpose.

To this working class, often in a fragmented and fragile society, rugby is a key purveyor of the need for togetherness, and hence citizenship.

It is as important as that because that is just the way it has happened here. First Minister Rhodri Morgan has acute historical antennae and so knows that celebration, if it is to be meaningful beyond the passage of an open-topped bus in the capital, has to water its essential, local roots.

In the interests of that wider future, but also in its own self-interest, Welsh rugby should now lift its hooded eyes from the bottom line of the ledger and contem- plate how the vital connection bet- ween its grass roots and international triumph can be secured.

In an older Wales the answer was certainly to be found in the First Class rugby clubs which reflected their surrounding society.

In this changing Wales, that real identification can only be rediscovered by sustaining equivalence which will also serve to cradle and show the supporters back to themselves.

To affirm what both stand for.

It is not sentiment which bemoans the demise of Ebbw Vale, Bridgend, Pontypridd, Swansea, and so nearly Neath, but the clear hard-headed understanding that only on such traditions and localities as that of Neath can a sure-footed future be based.

We may already have the model we seek in what the Ospreys, in a new stadium, are building towards between Neath and Swansea and their adjacent Valleys.

Llanelli have always been the Scarlets and for decades have marketed themselves as West Wales and all points North.

The Dragons are a split personality with a crowd as loyal to Newport as it is yearning for a new hatching. And the Blues are the paradigm case in point; a playing disaster and a cultural mess, neither proud Capital club nor feisty Valleys commandos.

They are, quite simply, not real, not reflecting, not recognisable.

In the interest of sanity we should scrap the Orwellian fiction of Regions and, with four franchised and renamed clubs, preferably in new stadia or, for the time being, in genuine ground-sharing alliances; pull together localities over sensitively allotted areas to support what we all need to stand up for, a game that is as democratically based as it is professionally run.

Or kiss it all a Long Goodbye.

A few weeks ago Dick Best said the Welsh revival was "Built on Sand", he was well off the mark as he was talking about a much underrated Welsh forward pack, if however he had been talking about the domestic scene that backs up the Welsh national side then he may have been "spot on the dollar". (Did I just make that saying up?)

The current Welsh domestic set up with the 4 "Regional Sides" and the mass nothing below it known as the Premier league serves as only a hinderence to the national sides success.

It is IN SPITE of the current structure and not because of it that Wales have been successful.

After England won the World Cup, the English club scene has boomed, Northampton recorded operating profit of £250k, Bristol in National league 1 had a sell out crowd of over 10,000, will the Welsh domestic scene be able to boom after our Grand Slam success?

I fear not, many of the same players that played in the 6 Nations decider played at Rodney Parade on Friday night in front of a half empty stadium.

I say it and keep saying it, "Its not working"

Can someone do something about it? 10 Years down the line I’d love to see Wales recording their 10^th consecutive Grand Slam and on course to become the first nation to win 3 world cups.

As it is this side could have a shelf life of 2/3 years and then we’re right back where we were.