>> PAUL REES SAYS IT WAS HARD NOT TO FALL IN LOVE WITH RUGBY AS A YOUNG BOY, WATCHING HIS HERO PLAY FOR CARDIFF
RIP the Lion King. Barry John, an outside-half who slowed down time and had spectators disbelieving their own eyes, died last week 57 years to the day when he made his first appearance for Wales in the Five Nations. He was a player beyond compare, his rare natural talent blended with a fierce desire to win. Simply the best.
It was hard not to fall in love with rugby as a young boy when John joined Cardiff from Llanelli in the 1967-68 season. He formed what became the half-back partnership with Gareth Edwards and outside him had Ken Jones, a Lions centre, Gerald Davies, a wondrous wizard, and Keri Jones, a sprinter on one wing with the formidable Maurice Richards on the other. The alternatives included Frank Wilson, a mercurial three-quarter who scored East Wales’s try in their 3-3 draw against New Zealand that season, and the barnstorming wing PL Jones. Five of them went on the Lions tour to South Africa the following summer.
Cardiff played 10 matches in the opening month of that season, winning nine and drawing one. They scored 50 tries and conducting their attack was John, then 22, a slender figure who seemed out of place in the jungle that was Welsh club rugby. His second game for Cardiff was against Neath at the old Arms Park, the ground where Wales were then tenants.
Neath had not come to make friends and the match was a battle from the moment they kicked off and their forwards ran forward yelling ‘charge’, ready to exchange unpleasantries with their hosts. Neath’s flanker Randall Davies was sent off and so violent was the game beyond the standards of the time that Cardiff, in victory, suspended fixtures for three years in protest.
Above it all stood John, whose unhurried temperament acted as a balm to the ugliness. It was his ability to rise above the fray, to almost play on a parallel pitch, that defined his career. When he retired less than five years later, the disbelief that someone so young, he was 27, could walk away, and at his pomp, was mingled with nationwide acknowledgement of how he had changed the game, not just by his brilliance on the pitch but the badly needed profile he gave the sport after his exploits with the Lions in New Zealand in 1971.
It was John’s second tour with the Lions. The first, in South Africa in 1968, had ended less than 15 minutes into the first Test when he broke his collar bone as he was tackled just short of the tryline by Jan Ellis. Less than two weeks after returning home, having cut short a holiday in north Wales with his future wife Jan because they ran out of money, he walked two miles from his home village of Cefneithin to sign on the dole in Cross Hands because he had lost his job as
