Читать книгу Martyn Williams - Marty Williams - Страница 10

The whole of my Wales career has been something of a rollercoaster ride, with extreme highs and desperate lows coming in pretty much equal measure.

Just look at recent times. In the space of four years, we’ve had two Grand Slams, but in between those you had the whole Ruddockgate saga – of which more later – and the World Cup disaster of 2007.

That latter failure was all the more painful for me, because at the time I thought it was the end of my international career, as I had decided to retire from the Test arena after the World Cup.

In my dreams, my last game for Wales was going to be at the Stade de France in Paris as part of a World Cup-winning team. Instead it was in Nantes, against Fiji, and it was to end with us bombing out of the tournament and Gareth Jenkins losing his job as coach.

Having made up my mind to quit, I had been desperate to finish my 11-year test career on a high. But unfortunately, the tournament was to finish on a real low for us. So where did it all go wrong? To my mind, it all goes back to the fall-out from the 2005 Grand Slam. That championship clean-sweep – Wales’ first since 1978 – stands out as a real highlight of my career and the memories will stay with me forever.

But it was to have another legacy, one which ultimately culminated in that dark day at the Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes in October 2007.

We won the Grand Slam playing a particular brand of fluid, running rugby – a style that I truly believe suits us best as a nation – the ‘Welsh way’ as it’s been dubbed. However, the following season, we found ourselves missing a lot of key players through injury and we didn’t do too well. Suddenly, everyone was saying the way we were trying to play couldn’t work any longer. The argument went that our opponents had worked us out so we had to change the way we were playing.

Now, I’m the first to admit that the game moves on and you’ve got to develop as a team, but at the time I honestly didn’t think we had to change that much. Yet it was to be a case of all change.

By the end of the 2006 Six Nations, the last of the southern hemisphere architects of the ‘Welsh way’ had gone, with skills specialist Scott Johnson and former head coach Steve Hansen and fitness guru Andrew Hore returning Down Under. In came a new home-grown management team, headed up by long-serving Llanelli coach Gareth Jenkins, who had finally landed the job he had wanted for so long.

Before I go any further, I want to say that I’ve got a lot of respect for Gareth and that I think he’s a genuinely great guy. But I just feel that perhaps he tried to change too much too soon, when there wasn’t really a need to do it.

When a new coach comes in, they are obviously going to have their own ideas and their own views on taking the team forward. That’s fine. But I just think there was a knee-jerk reaction because we hadn’t had a successful Six Nations in 2006. It was difficult for us as a group of players, because for three or four years we had worked so hard on developing a particular style and then we found ourselves having to move away from it. It was as if three quarters of the way through a journey, we were told to head to a different destination.

From midway through 2002, we had worked on avoiding contact and playing to our natural strengths by keeping the ball alive and moving it wide, with as much of an emphasis on the forwards’ handling as on the backs. But Gareth wanted us to be a more physical side, with the onus on the forwards to act as carriers.

Looking back, we spent a hell of a lot of time in training doing contact work, really climbing into each other and smashing each other. It was more than we’d ever done before under any coach during my time involved with Wales.

The older you get as a player, the less you like doing that in training – you just want to play. I think there is a time and a place for getting physical and if you get something out of it, then fine. But, sometimes, I thought we were doing it for the sake of it. We were also doing it instead of other skill-based work that would have benefited us more.

The physical, direct approach had been successful for Gareth at Llanelli, where he had based a lot of his strategy around big men like Scott Quinnell, Martyn Madden and Salesi Finau smashing the ball up. But at international level, it’s different. In those matches, you are coming up against players who are just as big and powerful as you and often bigger and more powerful. We are not the biggest nation in the world physically and I don’t think it suits us to get dragged into a confrontational, set-piece game.

But when Gareth came in, I felt there was an attempt to try and copy the power game of the likes of England, South Africa and France. I just don’t think that’s a natural game for the Welsh and, for the majority of players in the squad, it was an alien way to play.

In Wales, we have a tendency to look at other sides, see where they’ve been successful and think we must copy them to get results. But just because one side has been successful, it doesn’t mean that replicating their technique will do you any good.

I feel you’ve got to play to your strengths and our strength is that we’ve got a lot of people who are natural rugby players with great skills – people like Shane Williams, who showed in the 2008 Slam what he could do when given the freedom to express himself. So let’s try and build on what we are good at rather than trying to become something we are not and never will be.

The more physical approach wasn’t the only big change under Gareth. In the late summer of 2006, he and his assistant Nigel Davies went to South Africa to watch the Tri-Nations tournament and they realised that those teams, especially New Zealand, were kicking a hell of a lot. So again, it was time for us to become copycats. It did make sense to try and develop our kicking, as it’s very useful to have a big kicking game in your armoury.

But we were suddenly being asked to kick an awful lot when it was something we weren’t used to doing that much, so it was always going to be difficult to bring it in over a short space of time.

It’s like anything in rugby. You perform at your best when you don’t think about it and just play by instinct.

The boys were being told to kick here, there and everywhere and it just wasn’t natural for them. The first thought from the likes of Gareth ‘Alfie’ Thomas and Kevin Morgan would be to keep the ball in hand and run. It always has been. To suddenly change that mentality takes time, and unfortunately, with the next international challenge on the horizon, time was one thing we didn’t have.

I don’t want to give the impression that the 2005 Grand Slam was based purely on running from everywhere and throwing the ball around for 80 minutes. Yes, we did play some great rugby and we did score some great tries. But we did the dirty stuff as well, the nitty-gritty work up front and we also had the kicking covered by Stephen Jones and Gavin Henson.

The key was that everyone understood what needed to be done in any given situation. Under Gareth and Nigel, things just became a bit confused.

In meetings, they would emphasise that they wanted us to get the ball in hand and play with width, because we have got dangerous runners and attackers. But then when we went out onto the paddock, we weren’t really training like that. We’d just do a hell of a lot of contact, piling into each other. This is where our confusion came from.

You’d go into games with an idea that you wanted to play a certain way, but because you’d been training so much the other way, you’d be caught between two stools. We were talking about playing the Welsh way, but training to play a tighter driving game and a kicking game. There was a sense of confusion about how we were supposed to play. In the end, we played like we trained, with lots of endeavour and commitment, but that contact game just didn’t really work for us.

A number of the senior players, myself included, did try and express our views about this. There were a few times where I said I felt we were doing far too much meaningless contact, while other players made other points. We were concerned about a few off-the-field matters as well, but the management group took us as being negative rather than constructive. It felt as though they only wanted to hear positive comments. In the end, I felt I might as well give up trying to express my views, because it just wasn’t worth it, and I know other players felt the same.

One thing a lot of people outside the camp probably didn’t realise was that it was Nigel who did most of the coaching. Gareth largely did the overseeing and would give the emotional spiel. All the tactical stuff would be done by Nigel.

He ran the show in terms of the coaching and he would be the one doing the majority of the talking at meetings. Most of the public wouldn’t have been aware of that.

The only time Gareth really did any hands-on coaching was before the World Cup warm-up match against England in August 2007 when our forwards coach Robyn McBryde was up at the National Eisteddfod in Mold. Normally, Nigel would do the backs and our attack, Robin would do all the set-piece work with the forwards, Rowland Phillips would do the defence and Neil Jenkins worked with the kickers.

You feel for the head coach sometimes at international level, because they take all the flak when things go wrong, but it’s very much a collective effort with the team management and the players all having a part to play.

Gareth’s time in charge began with a summer tour of Argentina in 2006, which I didn’t go on, and then came the autumn internationals, where we came from behind to earn a creditable draw with Australia. That result offered some hope for the 2007 Six Nations, but, for the most part, it was to be a hugely frustrating campaign.

It began with a defeat at home to Ireland, when the little things just didn’t go our way and the bounce of the ball went against us. People talk about the luck of the Irish and that was never more evident than on that Sunday afternoon at the Millennium Stadium.

But while there were some plusses to come out of that game, the same couldn’t be said about our next match, against the Scots up in Edinburgh. That proved the low point of the campaign in more ways than one. It was our worst performance of the championship by some distance and we were rightly criticised for that, but what earned us the fiercest flak is what we did after the match.

Our ‘crime’ was to go out for a drink in a city-centre nightclub, something that was to become headline news back home in Wales a couple of days later.

The background to the incident is that the boys hadn’t had the chance to relax and let off steam for a couple of months. We’d had all the Welsh derbies over Christmas, then in January we had the Heineken Cup games and after that you are pretty much straight into the international period. It was agreed that the night of the Scotland game would be a good time to let our hair down and just relax a bit, because we didn’t have a fixture the following weekend. But no one had envisaged what that Murrayfield match was going to be like.

The fact that we were out at all after such a poor performance didn’t go down well in the slightest with some fans and the story ended up making the papers.

I can see why people got upset and especially given the hard time a lot of fans had been through getting up to Edinburgh, with the bad weather that weekend causing some horrendous delays. But I am a big, big believer that socialising off the field brings you together as a group of players more than anything else. I’m not saying you should do it all the time by any means, but once in a while it’s just good to spend time together away from the training field.

Of course, if we’d beaten Scotland there wouldn’t have been any problem at all. Nobody mentions the times when the boys went out after the French or Irish games during the Grand Slam campaign in 2005 and those were much wilder nights. But because we played so poorly, people were looking for anything to have a go at us over.

If we’d had a game six days later then fair enough, it probably wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, but our next match wasn’t for another two weeks. We still had to get up for a pool recovery the next morning as well. It’s not as though we were just lying there in bed all day Sunday.

When you are a professional sportsman and in the limelight you’ve got to accept that people are going to scrutinise your actions. But it wasn’t as if we smashed the place up or were involved in a mass brawl, like the one I experienced as a young player with Pontypridd out in the French city of Brive. We were just out with the Scottish players and having some time to ourselves. It was Dwayne Peel’s fiftieth cap and Simon Taylor’s fiftieth for Scotland as well and we just wanted to relax and have a couple of drinks. Believe me, it was tame compared to some of the things I’ve seen during my career. But one or two fans didn’t take kindly to seeing us out. A few comments were made and a couple of the boys made remarks back, which led to one or two people complaining to the Welsh Rugby Union and apologies being made.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, the boys will just walk away. But we are only human, and there’s only so much you can take. Sometimes you will bite back and say something. It’s hard to bite your tongue all the time. There’s going to be instances where the boys are going to react to things that are said. It’s natural. The problem is once you do it a big deal is made out of it.

As players, we hugely appreciate the efforts Welsh fans make to come and cheer us on and we realise how frustrating it must be for them when they don’t get the result they are hoping for. But I don’t think people always realise just how frustrated the players are as well when that happens and just how much we want to win when we play for our country. However much the supporters are hurting, we are hurting just as much when we lose. You are as frustrated as anyone and you take it more personally than anyone. It’s just a horrible experience.

The journey back home as a Welsh player when you’ve lost out in Dublin or Edinburgh is something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. You go through the airport, with all the fans there, which is an absolute nightmare, because you feel guilty that you’ve let people down after they’ve had such high expectations.

Then, when you get back home, you don’t want to go out anywhere. You just want to stay in. Your missus is saying, ‘Come on, let’s go out’, but you just don’t want to leave your front door. That’s what it’s like being a Wales rugby player after a defeat. You don’t want to go to the supermarket, you don’t want to see anyone, because you just end up having to explain yourself a thousand times over, trying to explain what went wrong. It’s a tough time.

When you’ve got a game the next week and you’re straight back to training, that’s fine, but when you’ve got a couple of days off, you mull over it all and that’s the worst bit. You don’t sleep properly for days afterwards. It just goes round and round in your head.

That’s what it was like during the majority of the 2007 Six Nations, with further defeats following out in France and Italy, leaving us staring at a whitewash, with only the England game in Cardiff left as a final shot at redemption.

Going into that final fixture, I had made my mind up that it was going to be my last Six Nations match, so I really wanted my daughter Mia to be there as she wouldn’t have another chance to see her dad play in the tournament – or so I thought at the time. The day went like a dream, as we ended what had been a torrid campaign with a 27-18 victory over the old enemy and it meant so much to me that Mia was there to see it. It was also a result that gave us fresh hope for the World Cup that was coming up later in the year.

One of the big decisions facing Gareth and his back-up team in the build-up to that tournament was how to treat the summer tour to Australia and the three warm-up games against England, Argentina and France.

In the end, it was decided that a group of about 18 of us would miss the trip Down Under and stay at home to do a 12-week block of fitness work. I can totally see why it was done, because they wanted to get us in peak condition for the World Cup. But I remembered the summer of 2003 when we all went away on tour to Australia and New Zealand. We ended up getting hammered by the All Blacks, but what that trip did was to knit us together. We became really close as a squad and saw the benefits at the World Cup later that year.

It’s a really difficult balancing act and hindsight is a great thing, but I think it would have been better for us if we’d all gone to Australia. You can do as much conditioning as you like and all the training in the world, but you can’t replicate the game situation or being exposed to pressure moments in big matches.

When we were about four or five weeks into our training programme, we were joined by the boys who had gone on tour to Australia and it was an awkward scenario to be in. It wasn’t a case of us and them, but it was just horrible because you knew some people were going to miss out on the final 30-man squad for the World Cup.

At the end of July, all 40 of us who were in the frame went out to Brittany in France for a week’s training camp and, to put it mildly, training was a little bit intense. It got out of control a few times and there were a few dust-ups because of the pressure, with everyone wanting to make that final cut.

To finish off the week, we had a trial match at our training ground in Saint-Nazaire, where we were split into two teams. To a lot of the boys, it was a bit of a farce. There were about 4,000 French people there to watch, but it was right at the end of a really demanding week and boys were just chucked in to make up the numbers. The team I was in had a back row made up of me at No 8 and Adam Jones and Richard Hibbard – a prop and a hooker – on the flanks!

I’m totally against trial matches. Everyone knows each other so well and they are just trying to get one up on each other. And how can you pick somebody on just one game? But, saying that, if anybody played themselves out of the final 30 that day it was Gavin Henson. I think the coaches really wanted to take Gav to the World Cup, but the way he was in that trial there was no way you could pick him.

It was gutting for me because on his day he’s a huge asset – as he’s proved during two Grand Slams. He’s a great player and I would go as far as to say that when he’s fit and on form, Wales are a different side with him in there. He’s great with the ball in hand, he can kick 60-70 metres down the field and can be as good a tackler as anyone.

When you train with someone every day, you know the ability they’ve got and how good they can be. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone with all the talent in the world not fulfilling their potential. It’s hugely frustrating. We were all thinking it would be great to have Gavin back in the squad. But you can’t blame them for not taking him after that trial. So when it was announced the following week that he was being cut from the training squad, there was no surprise among the boys. You could see it coming from the time we’d had out in France. The boys knew there was no way Gavin could form part of the team.

What’s been great to see is the way he’s bounced back from missing out on a second World Cup – having also been left out of the squad in 2003 – to play his part in a second Grand Slam. Hopefully there will be plenty more highs to come from Gavin, because there’s no questioning his ability.

If his omission from the World Cup party wasn’t a surprise, then the team to play the opening warm-up game against England at Twickenham at the beginning of August certainly was.

Gareth decided to stick mainly with the boys that had been on tour Down Under and picked what was dubbed a ‘second string’ side.

I really was shocked at the selection. I’d expected a lot more players who were going to figure in the World Cup to be involved. If you didn’t play in that game, it meant you were only going to have one-and-a-half matches before the tournament kicked off. It was kind of a missed opportunity to get some game time because there were quite a few boys who played in that England match who didn’t go to the World Cup.

But I think the game was kind of an inconvenience to Gareth. He chose a second, or even a third-string side, with his attention focused on his key players sitting out the match and working on their fitness ahead of the World Cup. He thought we would get more benefit by having a couple of weeks more conditioning rather than playing.

I don’t think he’d anticipated the kind of beating we ended up taking at Twickenham. If we’d put in a good performance and just lost narrowly it wouldn’t have been too bad, but to go up there and get thumped 62-5 was something else. The Welsh public never likes losing to England at the best of times, but the manner of the defeat magnified everything. That scoreline was hard to bear and Gareth took a lot of flak for his team selection.

I really felt sorry for the boys who played that day. Chucked together, they only had a week to prepare before they were taken up to Twickers, so you felt for them. They were kind of lambs to the slaughter.

Our World Cup preparations couldn’t have got off to a worse start really and camp wasn’t a great place to be on the Monday morning. You really didn’t know what to say to the boys who had played. Everyone was shocked. No one could see it coming and I think Gareth was surprised by what had happened. He took a lot of stick in the media and the defeat put a lot of pressure on everyone. Thankfully, we just managed to hold on for a win against Argentina before losing to France. With the warm-up over, it was time for the trip across the Channel and the real thing.

The build-up to our opening World Cup group match against Canada in Nantes was to be pretty eventful. By that stage, Gareth had stopped talking to the Western Mail, the national newspaper of Wales, because he was unhappy with their coverage.

The dispute came to a head at the official reception for the squad at the town hall in Saint Nazaire. It was quite a formal affair, with all the civic dignitaries present, with Gareth sitting at the front of the hall accompanied by the rest of the management team while all the official greetings were made.

Then came the questions from the press and as soon as he was asked one by a Western Mail reporter, Gareth turned his head away and refused to comment. The trouble was our French hosts didn’t know the background to the situation and didn’t understand what was going on. So there was this awkward silence, while the interpreter, who had been waiting to translate the reply, stood there looking bemused.

Everyone handles the press in different ways and Gareth had his own strategy, so that’s fair enough. It can be hard when things get personal, which is how he saw it. He wanted to make a point and that was his way of doing it, but I’d never seen a coach do that before, so it was a bit of a surprise.

What was even more surprising, though, was what he had in store for us with his team selection to face the Canadians.

Over the summer, the big talking point had been who would be chosen as skipper for the World Cup. Would it be our fly-half Stephen Jones, who’d been in charge the previous season, or would it be ‘Alfie’ – the 2005 Grand Slam and British Lions captain. Personally, I think the captaincy had been allowed to become too much of an issue. It had become a huge talking point in the press, when speculation could have been nipped in the bud a lot earlier to avoid distractions from the task at hand.

In the end, it wasn’t until the day of the squad announcement, in mid-August, that Gareth made his announcement, with Alfie being handed the reins. Stephen was probably disappointed that he wasn’t going to be captain because it’s a huge honour. But he’d picked up an injury in that trial match out in Brittany and I think his priority was to be fit and to get to the World Cup. He is just about the nicest bloke in the world – he and Alfie get on really well, so there was no problem.

It had all been resolved, we had got out to France and everyone knew where they stood. Or so we thought. Just when it seemed as though the whole issue had been put to be bed, Gareth dropped a bombshell by announcing that our scrum-half Dwayne Peel was going to be captain against Canada, with Alfie on the bench!

We didn’t see that one coming at all. It came totally out of the blue and everyone was really stunned. I think Dwayne definitely has what it takes to be Wales’ captain one day, because he’s got all the attributes you would want from a skipper. It was just a big shock at the time, because we all thought Alfie would be playing. I know Alfie well and he was gutted. He was like everybody else, surprised and shocked by the news.

I told him he was probably in the best place on the bench because the first hour was going to be a dogfight. He could then come on and make a big impact. As it happened, I was spot on, because that’s exactly how it panned out.

It was our first match of the World Cup, so there were a lot of nerves which showed in our play. It was a huge game for the Canadians. They obviously targeted that we could be beaten and they really came out firing. Not long after half-time, we were losing 17-9 and on course for the worst possible start to our campaign. But that was the cue for Alfie and Stephen to come on and save the day.

There had been a lot of talk before the tournament about who should start at fly-half and it was young James Hook who had got the nod. James had been picked out as one of the players to watch in just about all the supplements and tournament guides, so there was a lot of expectation riding on him. Unfortunately, we didn’t really give him a platform to express himself in that first 50 minutes against Canada, so it was always going to be difficult for him and it didn’t help when his pass was intercepted for their first try.

When he was taken off, along with Kevin Morgan, we were in big trouble. But then Stephen and Alfie came on and started pulling the strings. We started to get on top and to show what we can do.

But then just as the game began to open up, I was taken off! I was hugely frustrated because we had done all the hard work and you just knew we were going to put them to bed. There was 20 minutes left, we were two scores in front, the game was going to open up and that’s what I’m best at. But I got pulled off and Colin Charvis came on and did awesomely. I’ve never been so frustrated. The red head and the spoilt kid came out in me and I kind of threw my toys out of the pram when I came off.

That night I had really mixed emotions about the game. I was delighted that we’d won our opening fixture but very concerned about my place in the team for the next match. I was thinking they would go with the boys who had finished off the game.

It had been obvious from the way I’d reacted when I was taken off and from my manner when I got back in the changing room that I wasn’t happy. So, the next day, Gareth asked me what my problem was and I told him. He insisted it was just a case of bringing on fresh legs, that there was nothing more to his decision and that I’d play the next week against Australia. I obviously felt a lot better after our conversation so I was able to turn my attentions to the Wallabies.

That match was to be played at the Millennium Stadium and it was strange coming back into the country. It was nice to get home and see the family, but it didn’t really feel like the World Cup. It felt more like the autumn internationals.

On paper, the prospects looked pretty good for us. We had home advantage and the Aussies were missing their influential fly-half Stephen Larkham, who was out injured. But by half-time, we were 25-3 down and the game was over as a contest.

After that we had nothing to lose and it was a case of let’s just go out and play. The new game-plan went out of the window and we reverted to our natural game. The shackles were off and we started to cause them problems. But it was just too much of a mountain to climb, and we were beaten 32-20.

There were a lot of changes made for our next game against Japan and originally I was due to be on the bench. At the eleventh hour I was drafted into the starting line-up when Jonathan Thomas was ruled out with a damaged thumb. I was more relaxed going into that game than I normally am because I hadn’t had a lot of time to think. It turned out to be a good night for me as I scored two tries in a 72-18 win.

Then it was back out to France for the group decider against Fiji. I must admit that by this stage I was getting a bit sick of our base in Pornichet on the Brittany coast, about an hour’s drive from Nantes.

It was our third stay there, after the training camp in July and the week or so leading up to the Canada match. The hotel was fine and the area was nice enough, but there wasn’t much to do and it did become a bit boring. I generally feel it’s better to stay in a city if you can because you can go for a walk and wander around the shops or just for a coffee to break up the day a bit.

But that’s no excuse for what happened against Fiji.

It’s since been hailed as one of the all-time great World Cup games and I guess it must have made good viewing for the neutral – but it’s a match to remember for all the wrong reasons if you’re Welsh.

We knew Fiji were dangerous from broken play, so the game-plan was to take them on at set-piece, spoil their ball in the line-out and attack their scrum. Yet we ended up getting dragged into a game of Sevens, which is the last thing we needed to happen. There’s no one better at that in the world than the Fijians and they cut us to ribbons in the first half.

Then suddenly we started to play. We kept the ball, went through the phases and showed what we could do. We’d turned the game round, got our noses in front and it looked like we’d come through the storm, only for the Fijians to come again and go back in front.

Then, with time running out, came the moment when I thought I’d saved our bacon. As soon as their fly-half Nicky Little threw out the pass, I knew the interception was on and I went for it. Suddenly I had the ball in my hands and there was no-one between me and the line. I was something like 60 metres out, so I was thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got some of the quickest players in the world around me – just pin your ears back and go!’

I’d like to think that throughout my career I’ve not had tunnel vision and that I’m quite aware of what’s going on around me. But for that moment I didn’t.

If you are someone like Shane Williams or Mark Jones, who’ve got natural gas, then you don’t think anything of running in interceptions from 60 metres. But when you are somebody that’s not used to it, it’s a different story. I just panicked and thought I’ve got to get to the line as quick as I can. I was expecting a Fijian winger to cut me down at any second. It could have been a second row as they are so quick!

As I was crossing the 22, I could just see their wing Sereli Bobo out of the corner of my eye and that made me panic me even more. So when I got to the line, I just touched the ball down straight away when I should really have gone under the posts. I’ve had a fair bit of stick off my mates over that and I know it was something of a talking point after the game. But, at the time, I was just caught up in the moment and I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t feel I was too far out, but unfortunately Stephen hit the post with the conversion.

We were still four points in front though, with only a couple of minutes left. Surely we could hold out? But the Fijians claimed the kick-off and came roaring back at us. And once again I was to find myself at the centre of the action. I tackled Viliami Delasau just short of the line and there was the ball lying between the two of us. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Should I roll away or stay in here and give away the penalty.’ In the end, I rolled away and they scored the try that won the game. To this day, I regret not killing that ball. It’s such a fine line at moments like that.

If I’d given the penalty away, got sin-binned and they scored from the driving line-out, then I would have been the villain of the piece. But it’s still in the back of my mind that I shouldn’t have let that ball come out.

There was no way back from that try and a minute or so later the final whistle sounded. I just remember feeling shocked and totally gutted. We were as devastated as the Fijians were delighted. As far as I was concerned, it was the end of the road for me with Wales, so I made a point of going round all the boys to shake hands with them. It was a sad way to finish because I’d been through so much with a lot of those guys.

In a way, that last game summed up my time playing for Wales. One minute we’d been awful, the next we’d been brilliant. It was a really strange feeling in the dressing room afterwards. Everyone was just walking round in absolute shock. We hadn’t expected to go out and the thought that we would be going home the next day was horrible.

For me, it was quite emotional because I thought I was never going to put the jersey on again and it wasn’t the ideal way to finish, on a down, rather than with a bit of glory. We knew it was going to be a tough couple of days after that, but we didn’t realise how fast things would happen.

The next morning, the top two men in the WRU, Roger Lewis and David Pickering, turned up at the team hotel, so I started to put two and two together. If they had travelled all the way out from Nantes, we had an idea of what was coming – and so it proved. Roger stood up in front of us and explained they felt it was time for Gareth to go. Then Gareth spoke to us himself. He was really dignified. He said he’d dreamed of doing the job and that he had no regrets. It was just that things hadn’t worked out as he’d wanted.

It was a really sad moment and I felt really sorry for him. We were all devastated for bombing out of the tournament. This announcement meant more misery was being heaped upon us.

Let’s be realistic, we knew this was the end for Gareth after getting knocked out at the group stages. I would have been amazed if he had stayed on after that. But I thought it would be done during the week of our return.

Personally, I felt he should have been allowed to come back as the coach. We went out as a squad and we should have come back as a squad. Instead, when we got back to our base at the Vale of Glamorgan hotel, on the outskirts Cardiff, Gareth got off the bus before the rest of us and just walked away on his own. It was a horrible way for it to finish. The focus was taken off the team and was put solely on Gareth, as though he carried the can for everything.

For all the mistakes I think were made along the way, I’ve still got a lot of respect for the guy.

I hadn’t worked under him until he became Wales coach, apart from a couple of midweek games on the 2005 Lions tour to New Zealand, and I didn’t know him that well.

In fact, I didn’t really get to know Gareth properly until myself, him and Shane Williams went up to a Labour Party dinner at the new Wembley Stadium in July 2007. We’d been invited by Alastair Campbell, who’d been a media advisor on the Lions tour which we’d all been on together.

Gareth drove us up to London and it was the first time I got to know him outside of rugby. The event was to celebrate 10 years of sport under Labour and it was just an unbelievable do. We were in the VIP room with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and Shane and me were saying, ‘What are we doing here?’ It was totally out of our league! Mick Hucknall from Simply Red was singing live at the event and I ended up sitting next to his manager at the dinner, so he brought Mick over and he said ‘nice colour hair’.

It was just an amazing function. At one point, Gareth, Shane and me went up on stage along with Sir Alex Ferguson for an auction, in which the audience bid for a day with the Welsh team and a day with Manchester United. Someone paid £20,000 to spend the day with us, and I think the United day went for £80,000.

I spent a lot of time with Gareth over that weekend talking about things other than rugby and I came away thinking a hell of a lot of the guy. He’s a great character and such an upbeat bloke.

We knew there were times when he was under a lot of pressure as coach because things weren’t going that well. But you’d never think it from looking at him and it would never knock on to the players. That’s a huge strength of his. He was so positive and so upbeat that sometimes he could lift you as a team and you would always have a great talk off him before you left the hotel to go to a game.

Looking back, I think it’s unfair the way so much has been blamed on him. We failed as a group, yet he’s the one who will always be associated with that failure. You can’t put it all down to one guy. I think as players we’ve got to take an equal share of the responsibility. It’s the million dollar question why it all went wrong.

It’s been suggested that the players weren’t playing for Gareth towards the end, but there was never an issue with ‘player power’ as far as I’m concerned. Everyone was trying to buy into everything that was being taught to us, but we couldn’t implement it as well as what they wanted because we weren’t used to playing in that way.

We were a group of players who had been going in one direction for quite a while and then all of a sudden we had to go another way and it was difficult. Everyone – players and management alike – gave it their best shot but it just didn’t work out. At the end of the day it was a collective failure, just in the same way as one person didn’t win the Grand Slam in 2005 or 2008. It’s down to everyone in the set-up.

As I say, I’ve been through some real highs and some real lows with Wales, but in a way that’s what’s made it all the more special as when you’ve been down the bottom, you appreciate it all the more at the top. From the day when I won my first cap as a 20-year-old against the Barbarians in August 1996, it’s been a privilege and an honour to pull on that red jersey.

The best part about playing for your country is when you run out of the tunnel. The actual game is one thing, but that feeling you get when you run out onto the pitch and when you stand there for the anthem is just something else altogether. I realise more and more now just how lucky I have been to do that, because it’s so many people’s dream and one I have lived.

Playing for Wales is what I wanted to do from about the age of nine. If someone had said to me then that I would get just one cap I would have been more than happy.

As it turns out, I’ve been lucky enough to get more than 80 – and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.