Clive Griffiths

The pain shot like a bolt between his shoulders, unlike anything he’d ever felt. He was out running and looked towards strangers in the park, pondering whether to ask for their help. Deciding against it, Clive Griffiths ran home instead and, hours later, was in the ICU having had a heart attack.

Clive Griffiths has lived in St Helens on Merseyside for 41 years, but only now is he not leaving home every day to go to work. For the past four decades, he’s left the house every morning and travelled to wherever the rugby work may be: on his doorstep at St Helens, to Warrington, to Worcester, to all four corners, to Wales, even to Rugby World Cups, both league and union. More often than not it’s been to Doncaster, 1hr 40mins across the country on the M62, but now he won’t even be making that comparatively short trip, having stepped down as director of rugby, but denied a farewell due to lockdown. “We moved here in 1979,” says Clive, “we did move house once, but only a mile down the road. It just meant that we always kept the kids in school and I’d travel to wherever the work was: London, Newport, Swansea, Cardiff, Doncaster, it’s a bit of extra travelling, but you can’t have it all.”

The last game of his Doncaster tenure came in the 26-35 home defeat to Coventry, with his side in ninth spot, cutting his final season short by seven games. “Yeah, it’s disappointing because I didn’t get a chance to say goodbyes to so many people, people who have been a godsend over the years, that have become good friends – but a game of rugby is irrelevant now, as we’re finding out,”  he says. “It would have been nice to have the fairytale end, it was going to be Hartpury tomorrow actually – a home game, a lovely way to finish, with a wave and clap and afterwards a socialise and to say a few words in the club.  We’ve all been denied different things though, and it’s a small price to pay in the long-term.”

Clive had announced his planned departure at the end of December, just over eight years after he began his second stint with the club.  “It was just after a Christmas that had been an emotional one,” he says, “it has been the same for the last couple since my heart attack as you realise it could’ve been a lot worse and how lucky you were, whereas others aren’t so lucky. I’ve got two granddaughters, two boys that are grown up and my wife has been holding the fort while I’ve been doing these jobs, so it was time. 

“On the back of that, it was just time for the club to go in a new direction. As a leader, in any walk of life, you should know when it’s time. It was the same when I was playing, my dad had always told me I’d know when it was time, and this was right. It was all very amicable, the right people were in place, not just with Steve [Boden, who’s taking over the reins], but also having the right players, like Matt Challinor, Tyson Lewis, Michael Hills,  all having positions within the club that will continue the work that’s been laid down over the years. It’s in a good place, the transition will be seamless.”

Last season, ironically the night before they were due to play Hartpury at home, Clive went for his usual jog near his flat in Doncaster. “I was just out running, as I always do, and this bolt hit me between the shoulder blades,” he says. “I thought it could be a muscle spasm, but it felt a bit tingly and didn’t ease up. I saw some people in the park and thought about asking them to get me an ambulance, but I legged it back to the flat and phoned a doctor instead – he told me to get down to A&E right away. 

“I didn’t know what was happening, I’d even tried to have a warm shower to loosen it off – because it was my back and not chest pain, I didn’t know what it was.

A neighbour took him to hospital, where he was told he’d had a heart attack and put in the ICU. “I didn’t tell me wife or anybody until the following day, I didn’t want them driving through the night, so my friend Trevor who lived on the same complex as me was my knight in shining armour, driving me and collecting clothes from the flat.”

Clive admitted that first night in hospital, he was ‘scared to go to sleep’ for fear of what might happen if he did. Two days later he had a stent put in, and then he went home to St Helens.  He was soon back at work. “I was getting back to myself around Christmas [the heart attack was September],” he explains, “I should’ve taken more time off, but I was going stir crazy at home, although there were a host of people in the office helping me.  I like to be passionate on matchdays, I’m not one to sit there comatose. I’d get eaten up inside if I had to betray my feelings – so there were plenty of people telling me to calm down at matches.

“That first birthday after it, I wasn’t 65, I was one. I was lucky to have been given that extension to my life. Not long before we’d lost one of the benefactors of the club, Dan Gill, who’d just been out walking his dog, then boom, gone. 

“Then there was Ian Williams. When you think about both ends of the spectrum, in terms of age and what’s ahead of them – and any bereavement is hard, no matter what the age – but to lose Ian in his 20s, the scar never goes away. When you look at that, you tend to see life differently, not quite rose-tinted glasses, but it gives you a nudge.”

The loss of Williams hit many in the game hard, and those closest to him the most. “That rocked the club to its core,” he says. “We finished second two years before, then fourth, and then we were looking good for a top-four finish and boom, one February morning, everything changed,” he says. “Glen and Cookie were taking training as my brother-in-law had just died, so I’d gone to visit my sister. The phone went and it was Kendo, saying ‘it’s Ian’. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘He’s gone mate’. ‘Gone? Gone where?’ ‘Gone, he’s had a heart attack’. 

“It wrecked me, I broke down,” he admits. “I’m down there consoling my sister and she’s consoling me. I went straight back up to Doncaster and met Ian’s parents. 

“From that position we were in, the team disintegrated – I didn’t realise the profound effect it had on members of the team. 

“But it also showed what a great club it is and how, as a family, it kicked in and everyone grew strength together, and seeing the strength of Ian’s parents, that was a lesson to everybody the way they dealt with such a body blow, it can’t get any worse than that. 

“My boys are the same age [as Ian], and it brought it home to me. At the memorial service, I was proud of the club, proud of the way Ian’s parents embraced us. When you talk about great moments, we’ve had many: finals, landmark positions, promotions – but that was the lowest point for sure. 

“I got away with it, my heart attack, but I was lucky, there wasn’t any
escape for Ian.”

Ask any Championship director of rugby and they’ll attest to the work it takes to succeed in the role, let alone do so for eight years, but Clive was raised by hard workers. “I was brought up in a pub, so you learn about graft,” he says. “I would help me mum and dad mop out after midnight on a Saturday, you had to put up with all sorts from the punters, and those were the days when the nights went on way beyond midnight with games of cards and dominoes going on. It was a proper old-time pub, where everyone had their own tankards and we had a guy called Dai playing a piano in the corner with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. And my dad was a genius at tapping and bleeding kegs of beer – he made the perfect pint.

“My mother and father really put the hours in, but they gave me everything that I needed in sport and education, so I had it easy.”

The pub, in the village of Penclawdd just to the north of the Gower Peninsular in south Wales, was also home to the rugby club, which kept it busy for years but also brought the business to an end. “The rugby club needed its own clubhouse, which is fair enough, and built it right behind it, which was a big body blow to them,” explains Clive. “They got offered the chance to take over the clubhouse, but decided do something else, so the pub was levelled and my mum went part-time at a different part of the village and my did a bit of chauffeuring.”

Penclawdd RFC was a regular haunt for Clive, as – in the days before mini rugby – he would still head up to the field to practise. “I’d go up there to kick and run with a ball, do my own rugby stuff, kicking for goals, touchline kicks, sidestepping sticks in the ground, running around posts, anything. Then, when I got old enough, I’d play rugby for my school on Saturday mornings, come home, shower, then go and play for the youth at Penclawdd in the afternoon. The next day we’d all be back at the club again, playing touch rugby.”

At 17, he was asked to train with Llanelli. “Can you imagine that?” he says, reliving the moment. “Then I had the legendary Carwyn James taking me out on the field for a one-on-one. It was a training paddock, lit by two or three streetlamps, and he threw the ball in the air, rolled it on the ground, told me turn here, sidestep there. After that, he invited me to train with the first team.”

His first game was against Bath, as Llanelli competed for the famous ‘Rag Doll’ – a three-foot doll that’s tied to the crossbar wearing the colours of the last winner of the fixture – which has been a tradition between the clubs since 1921. “I was still at school and about to take my A-Levels and then I was playing against Bath,” he says. “I was terrified. It went okay, I didn’t have a great game or a bad game. But to think of it now, to still have been in school, and to look at the Tanner Bank fanatics, and see the boys from school screaming at me – it was like, ‘is this real?’ I then went to school on Monday and we were all reliving it and they were telling me how bad I was!”

Clive went on to study in Cardiff – at what is now Cardiff Met. “From that moment, my career was mapped out,” he says. “As long as I kept working hard, training hard, kept listening – I was in one of the best rugby institutes in rugby.”

So good, that even when Llanelli reached the Schweppes Cup final at Cardiff Arms Park – then, the big day out in Welsh club rugby – a clash with a college fixture meant he had to miss out.  

After college, he took up a position at a grammar school in Cardiganshire. “I was going for interviews, but I couldn’t get the jobs,” he says. “The rugby was in the way. If I was playing for Llanelli at weekends, then I wasn’t going to be able to take the teams on Saturday.”

The grammar school job saw him oversee swimming education, while also coaching rugby during the week. 

He needn’t have worried, as soon a move that would last more than 40 years would be put on the table. “St Helens had approached me after I played for Cardiff schools, then again after Wales B, and it was only after I got my first cap, that I went,” he says. “My father had passed away by then, but I’d never have gone before that first cap, because I promised him if I got that opportunity I would do it for him – that was always an extra spur.”

In the days when a substitute was only used for an injury and injury had to be at least a limb partially hanging off, Clive found himself behind not only the greatest Welsh fullback of all time, but also the toughest. “I trained with them first at Sophia Gardens, and I’ll never forget it,” he says of his first training session with the national squad, still sounding like the excited schoolboy from the Rag Doll game. “It was the day before the Scotland match and they were putting high balls up like Andy Irvine, I was taking them and the Welsh team were smashing me. I remember Bobby Windsor coming off after training, saying ‘well done, lad’ – that’s all he said. This fearsome Pontypool front row had said that to me and I was like, ‘did that actually happen?’”

After the session, he was handed a letter by one of the selectors. “It said I was going to Scotland as a replacement. I was like ‘are you serious?’ I couldn’t wait to get home and tell everyone.”

Just being in the squad meant the world to Clive. “We had the first team photograph in the red Adidas tracksuits in Sophia Gardens, I’ve still got the picture now – it wasn’t that long before me and my mates had been at the Arms Park shouting and balling, ‘come on Wales’ from the stands.”

In that Five Nations campaign, the idea of a first cap didn’t cross his mind. “I knew l’d be keeping the bench warm, JPR never gets injured, he was as hard as bloody nails. 

“I just thought ‘let’s soak this up, maybe one day I’ll get an opportunity’. JPR was good, he didn’t say many things, but he was great, he told me this would ‘stand me in good stead for when it’s your shirt’. Did he know something I didn’t? There were some great fullbacks around at the time.”

It took until the final match of the campaign, against England at home for Clive to get his chance. “The unthinkable happened,” he says. “JPR gets injured, and this was a proper injury. I went down into the [physio] room, and walked in to see JPR lying face down on the bed, and his calf looked like a Stanley knife had been through across two inches. 

“Richard Cardus [England centre] had accidentally stood on him and studs back then were like four inches long and like needles. I remember thinking ‘he can’t go back on now’ and JPR called me over, he said ‘Clive come here, calm down, get out there and play your normal game. 

“It was 3-3, the Triple Crown on the line, a full house, 30 minutes gone and he said, ‘play a normal game’. So I did, I went out and missed the first tackle,” he laughs, repeating one of his favourite after-dinner lines.

“There’d been no warm-up, I just put on as much Deep Heat as I could. I can still see the vision of the stadium and hear the noise now. I looked up to the skies to see my dad, my mum was at home, and I ran on sprinting – I could’ve pulled a hamstring!”

Instead, he played a key role in an epic turn around, as Wales went from 3-3 to 27-3. “It was all over in a flash, Gareth Davies gave me pass around me ankles, Mike Slemen [England wing] slid off to cover Elgan  [Rees Elgan, Wales wing], the gap opened up, and there’s Alistair Hignall [England, full-back], and I chip over the top, and as I ran around him, bloody Elgan had the better line and got there first and put the ball down.”

The score was the first to put daylight between the sides and set Wales on their way. 

“The final whistle went and the crowd was on field to salute heroes,” he says. “And here I was in the middle. My college mates came on, and all of us were hugging each other in the middle, and then JPR put his arm around me, I swapped jerseys with Alistair Hignall, and then I got my cap presented in the Angel Hotel, it was Roy of the Rovers stuff.”

St Helens returned and, after a tour to South Africa with Llanelli, he made the decision to head north. “When I went up to see them rugby league was semi-pro, it wasn’t full-time,” he says. Instead, the offer came with a job opportunity at Cowley School, where famed dual-coder Ray French taught. “He became a mentor of mine,” explains Clive. “I came up and met Ray and it was on a games afternoon, and there was hundreds of kids playing rugby and I thought, ‘this is what I’m looking for’. 

“Ray had gone through it himself, rugby union to league, and he got through it and even to this day I ask him for advice on certain things. I went to see him before the start of this season and sat in his back garden having a chat – you couldn’t have had a much better mentor than Ray French.”

The money was also a life-changer. “You went for the money,” he admits. “I’d been living in a council house, a brand new one mind, but I also had to park my car at the top of the hill every day just so I could bump start it.

“When I went to St Helens, I was handed a new house and a car I could start every morning and then a job at an outstanding school with great prospects.

“The biggest thing was I couldn’t get the job I wanted in Wales,” he continues. “People criticise you, and you were outcast from society for that. 

“The press said you were a ‘defector’, a ‘North Defector’ – spies defect, not rugby players,” explains Clive. “I remember taking a hire van to empty my little council house and the nextdoor neighbour came out, looked at me weirdly, then went back inside the house. I got a letter saying I’d been struck off the WRU coaching register, I was struck off by the Barbarians, I was struck off for international tickets and, when I went to watch Llanelli play, I was told to leave the committee box there. People around me had to shout him [the club official telling him to leave] down, but as a parting shot, he still said, ‘you’re not welcome here anymore’.”

He’d spent eight years of his rugby life at Llanelli. “I looked at my wife and thought, ‘we’re in it now’,” says Clive. “I was going to see some of the players afterwards, but instead I just got in car, and didn’t go back for donkeys’ years.

“Look, I was warned it was going to happen,” he acknowledges, “but it was a shoddy time in rugby history. The only real difference between the two codes, was the pay packet. 

“The one I had at St Helens had tax deducted, whereas in Llanelli you didn’t pay tax on those brown envelopes,” he says, alluding to the ‘boot money’ that was renowned across the amateur game. “We all know it went on, it was just rugby league paid tax and union didn’t.

“Do I have regrets?” continues Clive, pondering his move. “I lost friends and face with some people, but do I have regrets about going to St Helens? Not in a million years, I’ve had a fantastic career since, mostly as a coach, but I enjoyed my time as a rugby league player.”

When he arrived in St Helens, he didn’t have to wait long to get his first taste of the sport that would fill the rest of his playing days. “I signed on the Friday night, and I played Sunday,” he says. “I’d never picked up a rule book, I’d never played the ball between my legs, I didn’t know ‘1’ was full-back, I didn’t know where to stand – one player just told me, don’t pick up the number fifteen shirt, that’s a sub.”

Clive also witnessed an intensity in sport, he’d never seen before in union. “I played Wigan on Central Park and, blimmin’ hell, the atmosphere, it was like football. The chanting, the hostility towards you, people calling you a bag of shit a couple of metres from you, it was so aggressive. 

“People talk about tribalism with Llanelli v Swansea or Cardiff v Newport, but this was another level.”

In league, he’d become a dual-code international, winning two caps for Wales, and also score almost 600 points over 100 games for St Helens, before moving to Salford, where he finished his playing days, aged 32.

There are few things Clive Griffiths hasn’t done in coaching, often at the same time, as he’s coached club and country [not necessarily a club from the same country either] and also coached league and union concurrently. It gets confusing keeping track, almost impossible to write a timeline, but the CV is smattered with big names including (in league): St Helens, Warrington, Great Britain, South Wales Dragons, North Wales Crusaders and Wales (leading them to a famous Rugby League World Cup semi-final against Australia in 2000). 

In union, it’s even more convoluted, not least as some of his finest achievements in league happened while he was also coaching in union [he held the role of Wales boss in league for ten years, which spanned several union jobs, including Worcester and the first spell at Doncaster Knights]. 

But wherever he went, he was rated. After his then employers, the league side South Wales Dragons, went bust while Clive was touring with Great Britain, he returned to Welsh rugby union with Treorchy, where Lyn Jones led an ambitious side on the rise. Then came three years at London Welsh, then bankrolled by Kelvin Bryon (a man Clive says he ‘owes so much’).  In doing so, he helped Ulster create history.  “Ulster offered me the job at the same time as London Welsh,” he says, “and I made it happen for Ulster as I didn’t take the job and they went on to win the European Cup that year – I was the one that started that all off for them.”

When he left London Welsh,  having got them promoted to the Championship, he went to Swansea where he helped build a rock-solid defence that caught the eye of Wales coach Graham Henry. “Graham came in for me and it was, here we go again, flippin’ heck, rugby league, rugby union, rugby league, doing both, going back to coach your country – wow, who’s writing my script?”

Henry proved to be another of Clive’s great mentors. “He was fantastic,” he says. “Certainly the best coach I’ve worked with, without a shadow of doubt. Nothing technical in terms of of laptops and powerpoints, all flipcharts and hand-written notes, he was an ex-headmaster, and had a fertile brain and proved to be one of the best coaches in the world.”

If working with Henry was at one end of a scale, his replacement Steve Hansen proved to be the other. “I was disappointed I couldn’t have worked with Steve Hansen, there was clash there, and it was six of one, half a dozen of the other,” he admits. “I didn’t help the situation, I did some things I shouldn’t have done, but it wasn’t only me, I didn’t set out to be one to stir it. 

“I do feel that sometimes with some ex-players they saw me as someone who didn’t want to make it work, but I did.

“Because it was Wales, I knew I was going to be there after him, and I tried to put across aspects of Welsh culture but it was falling on deaf ears, and I was looked at as ‘only the defence coach’, in the same way someone was ‘only the kitman’ or ‘only the analyst’. 

“I could’ve turned a blind eye [to Hansen’s methods] but I didn’t and I was farmed out to Newport Dragons, still as a WRU employee, to work with Mike [Ruddock].”

The move worked in Clive’s favour as they led the region to their best-ever season, playing for the title, albeit missing out and finishing third, on the last day of the season. Nonetheless, the pair had done enough to earn them one more crack with Wales in 2004, putting together a team that would make history.

“There’s nothing like playing for Wales,” says Clive, putting his Wales cap at the very top of achievement list, “running out on that field in 1979 was something else. And doing the double as a Wales rugby league international that was special too, as not many had done that.

“But to carry that cup and walk around on a lap of your honour, having won it for the first time in 27 years well, it doesn’t get much better than that,” he says, referencing Wales’ 2005 Six Nations’ Grand Slam. “It’s another surreal moment, you watched that from the stands, you watched your heroes go around, now they’re clapping you. I’m so grateful, so proud, you can’t imagine. 

“They showed the game the other day, and even though I knew the score, I was nervous, especially when they [Ireland, the opponents on the final day] were coming back in the second half. I was living every moment as if it was live, and then there was the pure elation.

“I’m so proud,” he repeats, “it’s nice for my kids to see that now, it sends shivers down your spine.”

Less than a year later, Mike Ruddock quit amid a backdrop of controversy with certain players said to be talking to the WRU chiefs behind their coach’s back. The clandestine nature of it all, clouded the incredible achievement of only the year before. “Well, it has been written about too many times, but it wasn’t great,” he says. “What went on that year, from a Grand Slam to all that happened, in the media, on the television, then Mike resigning…”

The Australian Scott Johnson became caretaker coach. “Not in a million years would the WRU have looked at me [for the job],” says Clive. “I’d been Wales rugby league coach for nearly a decade, I’d been director of rugby, but I wasn’t seen as advanced as the southern hemisphere intellect – they peed on my chips really. 

“Scott was good though,” he adds, “we remained friendly through the ups and downs, but the writing was on the wall and, as Jiffy [Jonathan Davies] put it, I was a ‘dead man walking’ when Gareth [Jenkins] came in. I won’t go into the politics, but he wanted to go his own way.

“To coach Wales, to be head coach, would’ve been off the Richter scale,” he admits. “But I’m content that I was part of the Welsh Rugby Union coaching set-up at an historic time.”

He did get the chance though, once. “When I was at Warrington, I was asked to be Wales coach, because my street cred was high, I’d just got Wales to the semi-final in the Rugby League World Cup,” he says. “That’s how it works isn’t it? Even as a writer, do lots of good columns and everyone loves you, do a bad one, you’ve had it.”

Unfortunately, with Warrington refusing to let him go, his chance passed. 

Bottom of National One [now the Championship] Doncaster was his next stop. “John Lowe and Paul Morris had driven down to meet me, on behalf of Steve Lloyd [Doncaster president], to tell me about the ambition to get into the top four, that they had good benefactors and a good budget,” recalls Clive. “I thought I’d have a look and went up to see their next game without telling them, I just went to the terrace, watched the match and left early.”

He’d seen enough to sign a two-year deal and, in his first season had them pushing for promotion. Just as the club had begun to think that the Premiership could be a possibility, Mike Ruddock was appointed as Worcester director of rugby and wanted to bring Clive on board. “Leaving union to join league was one of the toughest decisions of my life, and this was another,” he says. “We’d been top at Christmas and I went into the office and they had all these architectural drawings up about how they’d make it work with temporary stands if they went up.”

Clive stayed until the end of the season before re-joining Ruddock. “We finished third, the highest the club had ever achieved, we had a fantastic season,” he says. “Why change? The lure of coaching in the Premiership – I’m an ambitious sod, but all that sparkles isn’t gold.”

At Worcester, Clive and Ruddock couldn’t rekindle the 2005 magic. “We achieved things, we got to the final of the Challenge Cup, but it didn’t work out for me, Mike and I were at loggerheads over style and selection, but parted amicably.”

He then had a stint at Ampthill, where Mark Lavery – the current DoR – told him about massive plans to reach the Championship. “He was hell bent on doing it and he put his money where his mouth is and Ampthill beat Doncaster this season!”

Also fitting in a stint at Sedgley Park, he then returned to Doncaster. “I was sorry I left, and now it was a great opportunity after I’d left them in the lurch, I had unfinished business,” he says. “The second season could’ve been big, Paul Morris always says if I’d stayed we’d have got promoted.”

Focusing on the present, he couldn’t stop the side from being relegated, but he got them back to the Championship and to within a two-legged final of the Premiership in four years. “Losing was gut-wrenching,” he says of the 2016 final against Andy Robinson’s Bristol. “But even if you compare the two budgets and two teams, to still lose in the manner we did was gut-wrenching.”

Doncaster had won the second-leg in front of 16,000 in Bristol, but the 28-13 first-leg defeat cost them the aggregate score. “It was still one of my proudest moments, taking a club in depths of 2012 when they were relegated to 2016 and in the final in front of 16,000.” 

Success at Doncaster can also be marked by those around them. “That season, when we finished third, was unique: Leeds beat us twice, Rotherham beat them twice, and we beat Rotherham twice, and the three of us finished top three,” explains Clive. “But those two clubs would give everything for that now. 

“When I get asked if I think my time has been a success, well, I think other people can answer that, but never mind the grand final, the B&I cups, to be brutally honest just look at where we are compared to Leeds and Rotherham.”

Whether or not Doncaster will ever make it to the Premiership, will depend on changes being made in the system, reckons Clive. “Now with teams coming down with such big parachute payments it’s always difficult,” he says. “Next year Saracens are down and so why on earth would a shrewd businessman spend £1m extra of their hard-earned money when they’re playing a Champions Cup-winning team at Castle Park? 

“There’s probably six full-time sides and six part-time in the division next year, so without sounding defeatist, why are the five other sides going to go mental next season [with Saracens in the league]? They’ll keep their powder dry for another season. But then who’s going to come down next year? Another massive Premiership club. Until that parachute payment is levelled out or someone like Ealing says ‘right we’re going to have a massive go this year’, it won’t happen.”

What will happen, is Clive will get back into rugby. Even after coaching half of the clubs in both codes, he’s not done yet. He’s currently coach mentoring with the RFU and helping out his son at Bury Grammar School. “I might get another job to go to another club,” he says. “I can’t just sit about and do the garden or play golf all the time, I’d go mental. I’m 66 but I don’t feel 66, even if I may look it.

“While everything is on hold at the moment, my ambition isn’t, I can’t admit defeat just yet.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures from John Ashton and Han Lee de Boer

This extract was taken from issue 10 of Rugby.
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