‘Look what these bastards have done to Wales,’ Phil Bennett famously said in the dressing-room before a Five Nations match with their friends across the Severn in the mid-1970s. ‘They’ve taken our coal, our water, our steel. They buy our homes and only live in them for a fortnight every year. What have they given us?’ Someone could have piped up at that point, Life of Brian-style, and suggested the Severn Bridge. But they didn’t of course.
Bennett, that maestro of a fly half, went on. ‘We’ve been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English — and that’s who you are playing this afternoon.’
It is hard to imagine such fire-breathing eloquence in the professional age, but when Wales pull on their red shirts for their last match in this year’s Six Nations next weekend, the mission is the same.
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