SPECTATOR SPORT
I HAVE the knack of upsetting the Welsh. Perhaps it is something I share with most Other English people, or perhaps it is a spe- cial talent. I was in Wales last weekend, on what turned out to be an extraordinary weekend for Welsh sport, though I was there in pursuit of the red kite. I was rather dismayed to discover that my gift was intact.
I was staying near Machynlleth — a name always guaranteed to set an English table on a roar — with a part-Welsh Swedish baron who is an expert on African birdcalls. Arriving in a pub from a sudden s.naking, I asked the landlord if there was a f I think I would have got less outrage if I had asked him politely if I might sleep with his wife. 'Fire! The radiator's on! You don't need a fire! Got to move with the times, you know!' Over the weekend, the Welsh rugby revival continued with a defeat in France. I watched part of the match on television with a commentary in Welsh. Was it terri- bly wrong of me to feel glee at the French and their Napoleonic luck? I expect so. Wrexham, by one of those strange quirks of footballing fate, got through to the last eight of the FA Cup that same afternoon, and they could well advance a round fur- field being drawn against mighty Chester- neld next. I rejoiced, as anyone with sport- ing blood must at any giant-slaying. Though I also recalled my last visit to the
Inspiring Welsh wrath
Simon Barnes
Racecourse, Wrexham's unexpectedly named football ground. The club officials had lost the bit of paper requesting my press ticket. 'You come from London and you think you can just walk in; typical that is, you're so arrogant.' A fine Welsh contral- to, she was, pursuing me along the corridor with this recitative of abuse. I wanted to applaud, shout bis! The word 'London' seems to have the same sort of effect on the Welsh as the word 'fire'. 'I wonder if I might have a duplicate ticket?' I asked the chairman of Merthyr Tydfil Football Club. 'I'm afraid you have sent the ticket to London in error.' I might have asked to sleep with his wife and his teenage daughters as well. `Then go back to London and fetch it!' He then told me, rather loudly, in a fine tenor, that he had been forced to accom- modate squadrons of journalists for this match, the biggest Merthyr had ever played, and that it had cost him a fortune in lost earnings. 'The kind of publicity money can't buy,' I ventured.
`Blackmail!' he said, bafflingly. 'Black- mail that is! We don't like blackmail in the valleys!' I give you my word of honour, those were his very words. The chance to play the stage Welshman was altogether too much. I was going to write beastly things about absolutely everybody, but the team, ludicrously playing against a top Ital- ian team, Atalanta, in the European Cup Winners' Cup, played their balls off, and anyway they were such a nice bunch I could only rejoice, in print and in spirit.
However, it remains one of the great sad- nesses of my sporting life that I was not present on the occasion when Wales, play- ing in the rugby union World Cup of 1987, were shocked beyond words at their defeat by Western Samoa: a stadium full of people with faces as long as a Welsh Sunday, bar- ring a few English hacks aching to get on the train east where they would have room to laugh.
I finished my weekend at a pub which, less conscious of the need for ultra-moder- nity, had a fire that could have taken Joan of Arc in comfort and a landlady who warmed my heart by calling me cariad. I raised a glass to mighty Wrexham, and to red kites, too. Cariad? 'Oh, much better than darling,' I learned, when I called Ger- ald Davies one of the finest rugby players Wales or anywhere else has ever produced. `Much better. Love.'
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