Our Rugby Towns #1 Meg Webb, Bridgend

In a south Wales town where prisoners of war once went to great lengths to escape, there’s one person who would never leave. With castles, beaches, McArthurGlen and Nando’s, Meg Webb from Bridgend has everything she could ever want.

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The story of Camp 198 is akin to something from The Great Escape, albeit without Steve McQueen and James Garner, and in this case with the Germans – 84 of them – doing the fleeing, from Bridgend, south Wales.

Tins and cutlery from the canteen were used to dig two tunnels, bits of oak bench and bed legs ensuring they didn’t cave in, and two groups of German officers escaped as far as Southampton and Birmingham, before being recaptured. 

The tale of the ‘Great German Escape’ is the kind of random yarn you might hear when in Bridgend, where everyone is willing to spare time for a chat. 

Conversation could be about the Old Bridge, dating back to 1425, which gives the town its name, traversing the River Ogmore, one of the town’s two rivers; it might be about the three Norman castles, Newcastle Castle overlooking the town, Coity just to the north, Ogmore to the south; it could be about the industries that once fuelled the town – coal, iron, and brickworks; but, odds are, any chat you have is going to centre around one topic: rugby.

“Bridgend, the Ath, Maesteg Harlequins, Tondu, Pencoed, Bridgend Sports, Pyle, Kenfig Hill … there’s a lot of rugby clubs in Bridgend,” explains Meg Webb, the Bristol Bear and Wales centre, and our tour guide for this visit to her home town. “We’ve got nice beaches, we’ve got the dunes (the expansive Merthyr Mawr Nature Reserve),” she continues. “I say to the girls we’ve got everything and more, but what I mean is we’ve got beaches, McArthurGlen and a Nandos.”

Which seems more than enough for anyone really. Such is Meg’s affinity with Bridgend, it’s even become her nickname within the Welsh set-up, where she’s one of the union’s full-time contract players. “The girls make a joke and call me, ‘Meg Webb from Bridgend’,” explains the 23-year-old. “Purely because when we were in Canada, kayaking, the instructor asked me where I was from, and I didn’t say Wales, I just said Bridgend. Being Canadian, he didn’t have the slightest clue where Bridgend was, but that’s the joke now, so the nickname has stuck.”

Not that she minds, she loves Bridgend, where she lives with her mum, while her dad and younger siblings – Thomas, 14, and Sophie, 13 – live nearby and her nan is  just around the corner, not to mention a plethora of other aunties, uncles and cousins. “I think they’re all here to be honest, both Mum and Dad’s side,” she says of her family. “The only relative that’s properly moved out of Bridgend is Tommy [Reffell, the Wales flanker] and he just lives in Leicester, so it’s not like he’s the other side of the world. But to my nan that’s far enough.”

“The Webbs are a large family in the Bridgend area,” chips in mum Michelle, who’s been keeping everyone topped up with teas and coffees, while showing us pictures of Meg. “I think everyone knows the family – there’s probably about thirty of us here, all following the rugby, all rugby mad really.

“Meg’s grandad, he got a Welsh cap in his youth,” continues Michelle. “Gary, Tommy’s father, in his heyday, he was a good player, bit small mind, but could’ve gone all the way if he was a bit bigger.”

Michelle talks of the influence of all the family on Meg, especially the rugby-playing ones, but one person stands out. “The bond of Megan and her nan is something special,” she says. “They speak to each other a couple of times a day, always going back and forth, and then they just live within two minutes’ walk, bit too convenient sometimes! But she’s always here popping her head round the corner for a little chat with Megan, she’s just so proud of her.”

Nan is key to everything. Even as we sit in the lounge talking over Meg’s career, Nan and Gramps call via FaceTime from their holiday in Torquay. They waste no time in telling us how proud they are of what their granddaughter has achieved, not just the rugby, where she’s won thirteen caps with Wales and appeared in a Rugby World Cup, but also for the nursing degree she’s just completed. “She’s done good, has Meg, we’re very proud,” says Gramps.

Even though it’s still in its infancy, Meg’s rugby life has been far from easy. “It has been a bit of a rollercoaster,” she admits. “Because of the way rugby used to be in the region, I didn’t play much rugby at youth level, and I got picked for Wales when I was eighteen – my first international cap was also my first senior game, so it was pretty overwhelming.”

Making enough of an impression on her debut, she played two more autumn Tests that year (2019) against Ireland and Scotland, before appearing in the double-header against the Barbarians at the Principality, ensuring the speediest of elevations into senior rugby. She’d return to the squad for the Six Nations in 2020, another cap, against France, only for Covid to put her rugby on pause. It did, however, allow her to continue her other education, in nursing. “I was working on the wards during Covid,” she explains. “It was pretty intense because at that time, nobody really knew the extent of what was actually going on, everything was changing, and you just had to quickly get up to speed with everything as it happened.”

Student nurses played a key role in supporting an under-pressure workforce, but with the experience came a threat. “It was scary,” she admits. “I think I was scared of bringing it home to my family. Me and my mum are like polar opposites, I’m really laid back and whatever happens happens, adapt and deal with it. Whereas my mum puts more thought into stuff and is a bit more strict. She was on edge more, nervous that I was going into placement.”

What also impacted Meg were the restrictions on the care she was able to offer. “It was hard to do a lot of the stuff that you would normally do for patients, and the amount of time you were able to spend with them. 

“When it was really strict,” she explains, “you could only go in, wash, dress, bath, clean, give them all the medication and speak to them for a little bit, but you couldn’t spend as much time with them as you normally would. 

“Then you had to arrange times for families to visit and if they couldn’t do that, arrange FaceTime calls. It was the emotional side that was difficult too, empathising with them not being able to be with their families. You had to step up in a lot of ways.”

Unfortunately, but understandably given the times we were in, Meg saw the worst of being in medicine. “There were quite a lot of deaths on the Covid ward and you don’t get taught exactly how to deal with it, but that said there is always somebody you can talk to. 

“It’s hard,” she continues, “because you build relationships with patients, you get on with them and speak to them and get to know their family and the little stuff about them. It’s never nice when it happens, but sometimes with how much pain they were in, it was more of a blessing at times, kind of bittersweet really.”

With her placements being at Bridgend’s Princess Royal Hospital, she obviously saw some familiar faces. “There was one man who I knew from when I worked at my auntie’s bar, one of the regulars in there, and he sadly passed.”

Rugby was in a holding phase at the time, meaning fitness was maintained, without any game time, but it still needed to be timetabled. “Coming off the wards you always just think you’ve got to have a life outside of nursing and rugby, and managing that,” she says. “My family is really close and I’ve got a group of friends around so it was just finding distractions, like going for a walk with the dog. It was intense. We’ve done the worst part, it’s still not great in the hospitals to be honest, but still better than it was.”

Her dog, Willow, proved to be the best of companions for Meg, as always. “She’s a golden retriever and she’s the biggest baby ever, she’s a diva,” explains Meg. “I love taking her down the beach for a coffee and a walk, just different places.”

The clubhouse for Bridgend Athletic is in the centre of town. Like all Bridgend clubs, it has always played second fiddle to the Ravens – and, for a while, the Celtic Warriors, the ill-fated region formed with Pontypridd and Bridgend – yet Athletic’s alumni is still impressive. Welsh international shirts cover the walls belonging to players spanning the club’s fifty-year history – Tom Prydie, Josh Navidi, Matthew Morgan, Lee Byrne – and even a cousin or two (Rhys Webb), and Gramps, who’d played youth representative rugby for Wales. “I was always going to join the Ath,” she says, “because Gramps was one of the players who started it.”

The club was only formed in 1972: after a boisterous Bridgend Youth tour the team didn’t want to get lost in the world of senior rugby, so decided to create their own club. She joined at under-9s, with her dad trying to find a way to channel the energy of an eight-year-old keen to try her hand at anything and everything. “He played for the Ath as well, but then so it did all my family,” says Meg of dad, John Carter. “It’s weird, when I go down the club, my uncles, my gramps, everyone is up on the captain’s board. It’s like a proper rugby family.”

Rugby training also came from non-Ath players in the family, such as Pencoed’s Tommy [Reffell]. “You know when you’re younger and you fight with your cousins? Even though it’s not aggressive, you’re rugby tackling each other and stuff like that. I’d have been doing that with Tommy. And with my other cousins like Josie, and I think my dad just thought, ‘if she’s going to be doing this in the house, you might as well put her in a rugby team to try and calm her down a bit’.”

A second girl in the side, Ffion – still a friend today – made up the female rugby playing contingent not just of the town, but the area. “We wouldn’t see many girls playing,” Meg says. “Or it’d be a surprise when we turned up to another game and there’d be another girl there.”

Nonetheless she loved the challenge of taking on, and beating, the boys at ‘their’ game, and her dad – who joins us at the club for a chat – recalls countless times she won player of the match or tournament. 

When age forced the girls to split from the boys, Meg pursued her rugby with Cardiff Quins. “Fair play to the coaches, they made a big effort to find regular games for us,” she says. “Rather than just play the few Welsh sides, they’d organise matches against English sides so we played as much as we could.”

And while she took the step up to international level in her stride, other factors took their toll. Covid was the first, but as soon as rugby resumed, she was hit with glandular fever. “I had to do no running or contact for twelve weeks,” she explains. “It just makes you feel run down, all you want to do is sleep and you lose quite a lot of weight. I looked horrendous too, I think I lost just over 12kgs. I’ve found it hard to put it all back on and, even now, I’m still trying to put weight on. I was 76kg, I went down to 64kg at the lowest, and now I’m about 71kg.”

The timing of her return was far from ideal. “All that happened at the start of the Six Nations camp, so by the time I came back, it was two weeks before pre-season, so that felt even harder.”

In what is a huge testament to how highly she’s rated within the Welsh set-up, she was part of the second tranche of full-time players revealed before the Rugby World Cup in 2022. “I had a text off Ioan [Cunningham], the head coach, asking if I was free for a chat,” she recalls “And I had glandular fever at this point so I was just thinking the worst, but when he rang me, he offered me the contract… I was just buzzing on the phone. I kept on muting it while he was talking, because I was squealing a little bit, I was excited. And then I’d unmute it, to be cool, and say ‘oh yeah, thank you, really appreciate it’, but I was buzzing when I had that phone call.”

The World Cup in New Zealand saw both Meg and Michelle (who travelled over) breaking new ground. “Growing up it would only ever be the boys that this was happening for,” says Meg. “You’d always be wanting that opportunity and something to aim for, but now that’s actually happened, it feels crazy to be in this position.

“I think in a weird way,” she considers, “even though when I was growing up, there was no contract for Wales women, because of  what my cousins achieved, I think I always wanted to do this, even though it wasn’t there [as an opportunity].”

But this being Meg Webb (from Bridgend), the Rugby World Cup didn’t go to plan either. While she faced the Black Ferns in the quarter-final, that ended in defeat, she also suffered an injury that’s become all too common in women’s sport. “They kicked the ball and I went back to chase and, it sounds so stupid, but I was decelerating, I wasn’t even in contact. The ball bounced back and I thought it was going to bounce forward and as I stopped my ACL ruptured. 

“The only way to describe it is that it’s as if somebody had an elastic band around your knee, and then just pulls on the back of it. It was painful to start with, and then it just eased off.

“I don’t know what I thought it was, but I didn’t think it was going to be my ACL, that was a bit of a shock.”

While a lengthy spell on the sidelines loomed, her Welsh team-mates did whatever they could to keep her spirits up. “The girls were great,” she says. “Because we were out in New Zealand for a couple of days still after the game and Auckland is really hilly, I was saying to the physios, ‘I’m just going to be stuck in my room now, I can’t do much’, because the crutches were awkward with the hills. 

“And then when we got back to the hotel one day, they’d rented me out a mobility scooter, so I was able to see a little bit more of Auckland and at least I got to spend time with the girls, going out for coffee or food.”

The ACL has become one of the hot topics in recent times. “There’s wasn’t much research out there,” she says, “but there’s more happening now because so many women’s rugby players, women’s football players, netballers, so many women have had ACL injuries. Only now are all these reports starting to be published so more people now can look into it and do our own research on it rather than it just being on the men. 

“It’s quite a lot to do with the ligaments and that females’ ligaments are more lax than men’s and the hips of females are wider – it’s not a straight line with your legs as with the men.”

Now, the Welsh women cover a lot of ACL injury prevention in gym sessions. “It’s mandatory,” she says. “All the girls do it and we focus a lot more now on landing mechanics. We know it’s still a risk, but we also do what we can to prevent it as much as we can.”

A return to rugby arrived just in time for the WXV, where she’d face the “easiest” of opponents on her comeback, the Black Ferns. “As soon as you make your first tackle, as soon as you’re in the game, you don’t have time to think [about the injury],” she says about her comeback. “You’re just focusing on what’s in front of you and the girls around you. That said, as soon as the game was over, I quickly went to my physio Carl just to check my ACL was still there!”

This being Meg Webb (from Bridgend), before we get completely up-to-date, she still managed to fit in another spell in hospital. “I had my tonsils out, after WXV,” she says, “but I was only out for two weeks with that.”

And now she’s back playing for Brython Thunder, one of the two Welsh Celtic Challenge sides (a competition against sides from Ireland and Scotland), who are based at Parc y Scarlets, as well as Bristol Bears and, of course, the national side. “It’s good that there’s a proper pathway now, the hubs are good, my little sister’s playing too,” she adds, “and now this Celtic Challenge, even though it’s still new, we’ve been having regular rugby, and it’s developing consistency among the players. We’ve also seen how much talent there is in Wales; there are some really good girls in the system.”

Having already taken us to Newbridge Fields – where Ath have their pitch – to the castles, to the dunes and, of course, the Old Bridge, the last stop on our Bridgend tour is Cabo Roche, the bar owned by her aunty, Kelly Reffell. “Tommy was here earlier, playing darts,” we’re told as soon as we arrive. “You’ve just missed him.”

Meg is close to her aunty too. “Sometimes I have to remember she’s my aunty,” says Meg, “I think I forget sometimes and speak to her like she’s my best friend and tell her too much.”

Aunty doesn’t seem to mind. “My two children [Tommy and Josie] always used fight over Megan, because Megan was in between their two ages,” she explains. “They always wanted to sit by her, so we always used to call her ‘Megan in the middle’. 

“To be fair,” continues Kelly. “I didn’t see this coming, with how far she’s got with the ladies rugby, so fair play to her, she’s done us proud.”

While we chat to Aunty Kelly, Meg’s catching up with the locals. “They are friendly,” she says, talking of the wider Bridgend folk. “You know what it’s like, it’s the same everywhere a bit, you get some crazy people, but they’re friendly, everyone speaks to everyone.

“I do enjoy living in Bridgend,” she summarises. “As I said before, you’ve got everything here, but I would like to travel at some point and go different places and explore the world a little bit more. But when your family are all in one place like this, that’s what kind of makes it hard to leave. I know that if I ever did leave, I wouldn’t stay away for long, I’d always come back.”  

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by  Henry Hunt

This extract was taken from issue 25 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

This Our Rugby Towns story was created in Partnership with Vodafone, Founding Principal Partner of Wales Women’s & Girl’s Rugby.
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