The Welch are a bunch of horrid , yellow-bellied, servile, bicycle seat sniffing lickspittles. A very weird bunch.
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Welsh rugby is like football in the north east of England. A tradition forged, almost literally. You could almost feel the forging - bare hands, faces black with soot, molten furnaces, the clunking of steel, union banners, communities standing together and singing in unison.
You can imagine what men like Jackie and Bobby Charlton, Bobby Robson, Jackie Milburn, Brian Clough, Don Revie, even Paul Gascoigne, what they might have been had their lottery of birth been just a little bit different and they had been born in South Wales.
And you can imagine what the greats of Welsh rugby might have been had they been born in the north east of England.
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No. Why?
Iām not going down pit!!
This song reminds me of what you are talking about and never fails to bring me to tears.
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Agreed with this in the main. Cardiff is some shithole as well.
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+1
The Welsh are cunts to a man.
The fuckers gave us that Patrick bastard and destroyed our people.
I was eating a ham & cheese toastie when I started into this piece. Superb actually, to the point I re-read it slowly to myself again allowing the toastie go cold.
If I had an eyebrow raising moment it was at the inclusion of Gavin Henson - who, while extremely talented, was a bit of a charlatan in many senses.
That aside a worthy tribute. 
The Jack Charlton documentary was a remarkable piece of work. Like the Welsh voice, the concept of trust is indivisible from a great north east of England accent. That trust was built on deed. These voices resonated in your gut of deep intelligence borne of experience. Voices that were simultaneously soft yet hard as nails, that had sought out and experienced every sort of human interaction and come through them. A certain type of Scottish voice had it too. Shankly, Stein, Ferguson. These voices are the voices that can lead men, people, to achieve remarkable things.
Cardiff on Six Nations days was and will remain all about voices. The belly of the beast. People step into a different place entirely. Whatās amazing is that what we now think of when we think of Wales in Cardiff is not a nostalgia trip, itās a 21st century creation, in a stadium that looks like a spaceship, in a post industrial society, and yet it still feels as rooted as it ever was. They took a tradition and somehow made it better.
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Lovely people the Welsh. Something very special about Welsh rugby.
Maybe overall he proved to be, but for just a short while, he wasnāt. He is integral to the modern rise of Welsh rugby.
Walesās performance against New Zealand at the 2003 World Cup was their equivalent of Ireland going mental out of nowhere against Scotland in 2000. Henson was not involved in that. That was the start of the tide turning.
If that game against New Zealand was a leg up, the 2005 Grand Slam was a leap up. Everything Wales under Gatty did later on was dependent on that having happened. That Grand Slam could not have happened without Henson. He was the man and he dragged them with him. He picked up Matthew Tait with one hand and he walked into the sunset with him.
It was a toss up between the Munster hurling championship and the six nations as the greatest sporting competition on the planet but then the gaa decided to destroy the Munster hurling championship.
The six nations is very special:
āIt arrives like the spring and it too like the spring lifts the heartsā.
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A very interesting documentary from the 1960s on Union v league and shows a young Welsh player being approached by League clubs and the importance of the game at grassroots.
Goes to show why league never spread, it was always a splitter sport and regional. League scouts were all over Wales for talent, not to spread the sport.
The twee posts are coming thick and fast today
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Was it Davy McIntyre or joe molly that asked warren gatland what was the difference between coaching Ireland and wales.
Gatland said the Irish were extremely well educated and would question everything so you better be right in what your telling them.
He said the Welsh were sons of miners and theyād run through brick fucking walls for you.
Thereās a genre of modern rugby punditry which seeks to reduce the game to a cold, clinical, esoteric science, referenced mainly through jargon like at a corporate conference. The Irish rugby scene has become especially bad for this. Shane Horgan would need a translator to be understood.
Youāve seen it with golf too. The Peter Alliss tradition shunted aside for the Paul McGinley one. GAA. Brolly and Spillane taken down and replaced by a revolving cast of brand aware blancmanges.
Butler stood against all that and was the modern standard bearer of the storytelling tradition which is integral to the gameās appeal.
Rugby is both a physical battle and a mental battle. It is pitch warfare. The moments we all remember most are the ones where a perceived greater enemy is somehow overcome in glorious torrents, where the human spirit breaches dams and rushes forward in a way that seems to make no rational sense.
Ginger McLoughlin rampaging over the English.
āWhereās your fuckinā pride.ā
Scotland defeating the infinitely stronger and more well armed Yeomen to win the Grand Slam.
Ulster channelling the spirit of the Somme, except successfully, to win the Heineken Cup.
France sweeping New Zealand aside in a raging torrent of glory.
Ireland terrorising Scotland after 12 years of nothing.
Munster and the many miracle matches.
Wales being carried to glory in 2005 and several times since by something metaphysical.
Butler understood all of this. He got it. The viewer got it because he did.
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RIP Mr Butler.
An enormous amount of predominantly rugby football related scutter posted too, though.
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@cheasty that clip of Butler paying tribute to Phil Bennett set against clips of Bennettās career got me thinking about Nigel Starmer-Smith who featured in the commentary. I canāt be certain but I think I saw a tweet from his son a while back. But I canāt recall if it was announcing his death or an illness. Could you please update me on Nigel? Back when it was acceptable to watch rubby, thereād be a highlights show on BBC Wales of a Sunday evening. I remember being very annoyed when Mark Ring left someone like Bridgend or Pontypool to join Cardiff. It felt like a betrayal. Theyād also show some highlights from England and thatās when Nigel Starmer-Smith would come into his own.