Our Rugby Towns #2 Talia John, Gorseinon

Before she took to the field against South Africa, it all became too much for Natalia John. The tears flowed, she broke down. She wasn’t just playing for her country, it felt like she was also playing for her livelihood, her family and, specifically, her nephew Morgan.

Connected by Vodafone

There’s one street in Gorseinon, a small town just north-west of Swansea, that stands out from the rest. It’s not the high street, it’s not because it’s the main road in or out, or because it’s home to great architecture, and it doesn’t, for the moment at least, have any houses adorned with a blue plaque. 

Yet, in recent times, it’s become the most famous in the town. It’s a road where houses and cars have yellow ribbon flowers on doors, gates and hoods. And where the kerbs are daubed every colour of the rainbow, literally paving the way to one specific house from which light has been able to shine, even in the darkest of times. Its Lego-bright exterior is a fitting culmination for anyone who has followed the rainbow-brick road from either direction. The décor is accessorised too with cars, because in recent times people have paid tribute not just in flowers, but also in toy cars, the true passion of the boy who once lived there, three-year-old Morgan Ridler. 

In June 2023, the street was abuzz, as a procession of supercars, bikes, and even a military vehicle or two, turned Gorseinon – population 9,484 – into the kind of glitzy car fest that would put Monaco to shame. “It started off with the bikers,” explains Natalie Ridler, Morgan’s mum. “Morgan loved the sound of engines revving, so one of our friends, who was a biker, was going to drive past the house, he told another friend, who told someone else … and the next thing we know we’ve got seven thousand vehicles lined up on the M4, queueing to drive past our house in Gorseinon. I don’t think the police were pleased with us that day, closing the M4 in both directions.”

“We put chairs outside of the house so we could sit with Morgan and watch everything go by,” says Natalia [Talia] John, Natalie’s sister, and the Welsh international who has brought Rugby Journal to Gorseinon. “There were also dancers, bands…”

“It was amazing,” continues Natalie, “the whole community came out. It wasn’t just supercars and bikes, there were buses, tractors, tanks.”

“Morgan loved cars,” reiterates Talia. “Whenever I’d go over, we’d spend ages parking his toy cars, and it had to be done a very specific way.”

“Big cars with big cars, small cars with small cars,” adds Natalie, “even in hospital, he’d always have a bag of cars with him.”

The parade had been part of a frenetic three weeks that followed the news Morgan’s almost two-year battle with cancer was coming to an end in the worst possible way. “When they said he had three weeks left, we all kind of went into overdrive didn’t we?” Natalie says to her sister.

An all-family holiday to Pembrokeshire was hastily arranged, giving those closest to him a precious week together; along with sister Rhiannon, they visited the Wales team headquarters in the Vale of Glamorgan to meet the men’s squad, including family friend and Gorseinon’s favourite son Leigh Halfpenny. “F1 Mercedes decided they’d be extravagant and sent an F1 car down to our street, and offloaded it in the middle the street, so the road was closed,” says Natalie. “There were just all these people that wanted to give Morgan these memories; he even went on a ride in a plane from Swansea airport, because he’d never flown.

“And people were donating money too,” explains Natalie, who set up the Morgan’s Army charity to help other families in the same situation. “We raised £12,000 that day for our charity, it’s incredible what a community can do when it comes together.”

Six days after the supercars came to Gorseinon, on 28 June 2023, Morgan passed away, just days before his fourth birthday. 

Natalie and Talia recount their story from the clubhouse of Gorseinon RFC, a fitting venue. “The amount they’ve supported you, and us as a family, has been incredible,” says Talia, of the club. “Any event to raise money, they’re so willing to help out. They gave us a platform to create something incredible and that’s been the best thing to come out of this: Morgan’s Army, a charity my sister’s worked so hard to set up in his memory to really push on and help families in Wales, which is incredible, so something so negative breeds something so positive.”

“A lot of it is built on the back of the rugby,” says Natalie, who is Gorseinon’s physio, having done the same job for Bridgend Ravens, and within the WRU set-up. “When it came to the funeral, it didn’t feel right to put him in a hearse, he felt too young, so we got a camper van, which was just really cute. 

“He never got to play rugby, he wasn’t even old enough to start little rugby,” she explains, “and the only team he’d even been a member of was Gorseinon RFC because he’d be on the sidelines every weekend while I was physio, he was a mascot for them couple of times too. 

“At Bridgend, I was pregnant with him,” continues Natalie, “so he was on the field with me there and then obviously the [Wales] women are important, so it felt natural for me to ask those teams to escort him on his final walk.”

“We had all the women one side [of the coffin], Gorseinon on the other,” says Talia, “followed at the rear by the Bridgend boys.”

“It was incredibly touching that they all agreed to do it,” admits Natalie. “But that’s rugby for you.”

Gorseinon doesn’t make the news very often. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it town within the Swansea region, on the northern edge of the Gower, with few claims to fame. Even the ‘Einon’ it’s named after – ‘Gorseinon’ means ‘Einon’s marsh’ – has had his story long since forgotten in the endless, unwritten realms of history. 

“The next thing we know we’ve got seven thousand vehicles lined up on the M4, queueing to drive past our house in Gorseinon”

That said, it impressively grew from a village of hundreds to the near ten thousand of today, through the tin and coal industries, and it even made cinematic history for more than fifty years, as home to the smallest cinema in the UK, located within an old railway carriage. 

That closed in 2008, and since then, aside from the opening of the big Asda in 2010, rugby has perhaps given the town the biggest reason to cheer. While both Ross Moriarty and Dan Biggar have played in the junior sections of Gorseinon RFC, it’s without doubt 101-cap Gorseinon-born Leigh Halfpenny that is most synonymous with the town.

But, as both Natalie and Talia attest, there’s substance in the town, plenty of it. Not just in the doorstep sandwiches – more of a staircase – of Lucy’s Best Bites on the high street either, where we momentarily break for lunch. “This is an incredible community,” reiterates Talia, as we pick up conversation again after attempting to politely consume a gargantuan club sandwich. 

While Talia also now lives in Gorseinon, with her boyfriend Ryan – a second row at Welsh Premier Division (soon to be Super Rygbi Cymru) side Carmarthen Quins – as does mum Nova and dad Gareth, the first family home of note was in nearby Killay, specifically The Commercial pub. “We moved to the pub in Killay when I was six,” explains Talia. “We literally lived in a flat above the pub because my parents used to run it. There were four of us: I’m Natalia, then there’s Natalie, Natasha and Nathan and then my half-sister Vicki.

“There was always a joke about the N thing,” explains Talia, “that it was just so that my mum could always open our post, because she’s called Nova. Even the dog was called Nelson, so it was definitely a thing.”

The four ’N’ siblings who lived in the pub all had birthdays just weeks apart, but timed, perhaps unfortunately, to coincide with the Six Nations. “They were the busiest weekends, because everyone was rugby mad,” recalls Talia. “We’d often say our birthdays came second to the Six Nations.

“There was always a party going on, but the downside was, it was a Saturday night, when there’s a band on and you’re absolutely knackered, or when it was around Christmas time, and I’d always be like working because it’d be my Christmas holidays and I’d always get roped in. 

“But I definitely made a lot of friends through the pub,” she admits, “and when I was a kid, we had a play area at the back and I’d be out there like every day making millions of new friends. It was probably the best part of it, growing up.”

With Nova and Gareth both Ospreys season ticket holders, Talia’s life was wall-to-wall rugby, but a lack of local opportunities meant she only picked up the ball at eighteen, when she was studying at Swansea University. She followed in the footsteps of older sister Natalie, who’d played while at Leicester University. “She always jokes with me, saying if she was still playing, she’d be better than me.”

There was rugby pedigree in the family however, and not just from mum, who played a bit for Barry Ladies. Dad Gareth – who coached Barry Ladies at the time – was perhaps the cloth from which the forty-cap Talia was cut. “He played for Penarth, he played for Bridgend, he went out to South Africa during apartheid and played rugby and worked out there too,” she says. “He played against the Barbarians too, which is pretty cool, I’ve got a news article from when I played against the Barbarians [for Wales, the 15-29 defeat at the Principality in 2019] and I also played in a number four jersey against them, just like he did.”

Today, Talia is a starter for her country and a leading force for the newly formed Brython Thunder, having also spent time with English Premiership sides Bristol Bears and Worcester Warriors, but her start in rugby was an inauspicious one. “I got absolutely smashed,” she says of her university debut. “I was literally set back five metres. I came off afterwards, having been absolutely drilled and I was like, ‘that’s not happening again’, and it’s never been as bad since. 

“I knew I wasn’t great, I dropped a lot of balls,” she acknowledges, “and it kind of twigged, ‘right if I want to get really good then I’m going to find a club’.”

That club was Bonymaen, where she cut her club rugby teeth, winning player of the year at the same time, but she knew she needed to push on again. “I trialled for Ospreys, didn’t get in, and while I was one of the better players at Bonymaen, that was only because I’d touched a rugby ball before, whereas a lot of the other girls hadn’t. That’s the only reason I was alright.”

Although clearly doing herself a disservice, to push herself further up the rugby ladder she joined the now defunct Swansea women’s side, then in the top flight of club rugby in Wales. She soon made it into the Ospreys, and quickly found herself in the Welsh squad. “I rang my mum, she was working behind the bar, and she started crying, screaming around the pub, ‘my daughter is in the Wales squad’,” she laughs. 

When she made her debut, while still a student, in 2018, against Scotland in Colwyn Bay, it was the turn of Gareth, who still today looks every inch the pub enforcer, to show his softer side. “The first time I ever saw my dad cry, was when we were singing the anthem,” explains Talia. “When you play, you always look for your family, and I saw him cry, then I started crying, and then they used that clip of me crying for the rest of the Six Nations. 

“Horrific,” she says of her tearjerking fame, “worst thing ever.”

At the time she was studying material science and engineering. “It’s research science into what materials are used for what jobs and how they break,” she helpfully explains. “I loved my course, I did it for four years and went for an engineering job, and they asked how serious I was about rugby. They said I’d have to go here, there and everywhere, and might not have time for it.

“So, I said, ‘I don’t want to be an engineer then’,” explains Talia, “I didn’t want to give up on rugby, I’d won a few Welsh caps and wanted to win more, so I had to find a job to balance both.”

Instead, she became a physics teacher, and joined Bristol Bears, along with a huge tranche of fellow Welsh internationals. In the pre-contract days, she had her work cut out. “I’d finish teaching at 3pm, drive straight to Bristol, then not get home until 11pm, and then get up at 7am to do it all again. 

“That was the toughest,” she says. “I don’t think people realise how tough we had it before.”

In 2021, Talia’s world would change dramatically, with huge moments personally and professionally coinciding to make for the most tumultuous period of her life, and that’s without the consideration of covid. 

Talia had only just welcomed her niece Rhiannon into the world, in April, when the family started to notice changes in the newborn’s older brother Morgan, then just two. “He’d put on a lot of weight over six months, and was proper swollen, but the doctors were just saying he was just too fat, they were overfeeding him,” explains Talia. “But he was also growing hair that kids that age shouldn’t have, and so in the end Natalie and [her husband] Matt paid to go private, and that’s when they found the tumour. 

“I think it was like the size of a grapefruit, about thirteen centimetres in diameter.”

Around the same time, news of potential full-time contracts for the Welsh squad began to swirl around, just ahead of the autumn internationals. “I was like, ‘right, I’m playing for a contract, I’ve got to play some of the best rugby I’ve played, so I can be given a full-time contract, so I can earn it’. 

“And so my family didn’t tell me a lot about what was going on, because they were scared that it would affect how I was playing at the time, if it was going to cause too much stress. 

 “It was hard, it was really hard,” she adds, “because they were talking about how he could lose a kidney, and I just kept thinking like, ‘fuck, you know, he’s never going to play rugby, I have to do it for him’.”

The pressure came to a head, and she felt the need to win, to perform, not just for herself, but for her family, for Morgan, when Wales faced South Africa in November. “I remember the night before and I was talking to the team doctor, and I just sat down and cried,” recalls Talia. “I can picture it so vividly, being in that hotel, sitting on the sofa, and crying.”

Soon after, though, at least one problem resolved itself: the days of balancing work with club and international rugby were coming to an end, as Talia was one of just twelve players to be handed a full-time contract. “I remember the phone call,” says Talia. “I was about to teach year eights about the heart, and Ioan [Cunningham] rang me. I answered, saying ‘oh, I’m about to teach can you phone me back in an hour?’. I put the phone down, then I realised he might have been calling about the contract so I think I finished the lesson in forty minutes, saying, ‘let’s just watch a video’, then called him back.”

Another phone call to mum, more tears, and the rugby part of Talia’s life became less complicated. “I remember countless times, driving home from training, so upset with myself because I was so tired, and I’d dropped a few balls,” she says. “I wanted to give everything in my life 100 per cent and I just couldn’t balance it all, I was only giving fifty per cent to rugby, fifty to work, and I really wanted to give everything my all.

“I was in a vicious cycle of always feeling like I’d not done enough. I think the hardest game was when we played France away on a Sunday, got back at 3am, then up for school at 7am, and getting gyp from year sevens by nine.”

“I was in a vicious cycle of always feeling like I’d not done enough. We played France on a Sunday, got back at 3am, then up for school at 7am, and getting gyp from year sevens by nine.”

Unfortunately, around the same time, while one world was levelling out, the other was being turned upside down. In December, just after the contracts had been announced, Morgan’s operation to remove the tumour took place. It was complex, the position and size of the tumour – especially on such a small child – meant the operation required a liver surgeon, a kidney surgeon and an oncology surgeon. Combined with the other essentials of such an operation, fourteen medical professionals were involved in the surgery. 

The family had waited eight weeks from the tumour’s discovery to the operation, by which point it had grown to the size of a honeydew melon, about sixteen centimetres. A ten-hour operation ensued, and initially seemed to be successful. “The surgeons told us that it was really good news,” says Natalie, picking up the story from her sister. “They were able to get all of the tumour and it was actually just pressed up really tightly against his liver and his kidney, so he didn’t lose either.

“We had to stay for eleven days in Birmingham (where the operation took place), because, bless him, they’d cut him from hip to hip, and done a lot of rummaging around in there.”

“He called it his shark bite,” recalls Talia. “Yeah,” responds Natalie, “we were in Llanelli one day, and he’d told this lady in a café that he had a shark bite, and she responded, ‘I didn’t know we had sharks in Llanelli’.”

“We thought everything was going to be fine at that point,” says Talia.

Everyone’s thoughts had begun to turn to having a good Christmas, but it was only days later, after the biopsy, they were to find out the tumour had been cancerous, and chemotherapy would have to begin, starting the day after Boxing Day.  

 The reality of the situation, admits Natalie, was the tumour was unlikely to be benign due to its growth, but they’d unsurprisingly, clung on to the hope. “There was eleven days of a kind of elation,” she says, “and then we found out he would need six rounds of chemo.”

The cancer, adrenal cortical carcinoma (or ACC) was very rare. “We started Googling it, which is never good,” says Natalie, “the survival rates weren’t great, nothing looked good, but they said they were going to chuck the kitchen sink at it and that they did.”

“It was when he was going through all of his treatment that I was playing in the Six Nations,” adds Talia, “and I just remember, like, there was one session where I just completely messed up so many layouts, and I was just like, ‘oh,
I can’t do this anymore, and I just remember just sitting in the physio room crying for ages, for like no reason.”

“People like to cry in the physio room,” laughs Natalie, “we’re used to that.”

“Rugby is probably the one thing that really kept me going because I just wanted to do well,” says Talia. “I was really grateful for the fact that I had something to throw myself into, I was so adamant I wanted to do well.

“I was just pushing myself really hard,” she continues, on the edge of tears, “I just wanted everyone to have positive news, I really wanted to give that to my family. That was a gift that I could give. 

“I got so frustrated with myself when I did badly because I felt like I was jeopardising everything and it was going to make everything worse if I didn’t get selected.”

“I was very busy being a cancer mum,” says Natalie, perhaps one of the most impressive people you could ever wish to meet. “You’re like a nurse, a doctor, a medical secretary, and we had Rhiannon at home as well, so we were also trying to keep them both together. Luckily, Morgan was very good, he was the sort of kid that would stop, vomit, and then carry on throughout chemo. He just wanted his cheese.”

“So much cheese,” agrees Talia, “he probably kept Babybel in business.”

On the rugby field, Talia struggled with life as a Bristol Bear, and made a move to Jo Yapp’s Worcester Warriors in the summer of 2022, where she immediately found her rugby home. “I love that club,” she says. “That was probably the first club that I ever felt truly part of; it was such a family. Jo Yapp is probably one of the most incredible coaches I’ve ever had. I remember she just said to me, ‘I will never take rugby away from you. You tell me when you want to stop, if it is getting too hard’. And that to me was so important, because I didn’t get that at Bristol.  

“She really like nurtured me,” continues Talia. “They always say like, ‘go somewhere where you know your worth. You know, I felt like I was coal in Bristol, but I was a diamond in Worcester, that’s why it was the best switch for me.”

The move also coincided with a change in Morgan’s fortunes. “I think it was after his eighth round of chemo, and he’d had his third birthday [7 July] in hospital,” says Natalie. “And when they scanned him, he had what they call ‘no evidence of disease’. They don’t really use the word remission cancer for solid tumours anymore, because I think that gives the impression that you’re all clear. But there’s always this kind of thing in the background that chemo can kill cancer cells, but on a microscopic level, they might still be there.

“Someone had come out and painted the whole road and the front of her house in bright colours ... it was like the whole town had put their arms around us all.”

“It was then November when we noticed his tummy was swelling a little bit,” continues Natalie. “It wasn’t huge, but it was enough, Matthew was panicking, I was kind of going ‘no, it’s all fine, you’ve got scar tissue and all sorts going on there and, you know, he’s had a big meal’.”

Ultrasound proved otherwise; another tumour had grown back in his abdomen. More surgery.

At times, things again seemed positive, as the fight in Morgan meant he had good days, including when he led out Wales with Talia. “He seemed so healthy,” says Talia of the day Morgan joined her on the pitch, before she faced England at Cardiff Arms Park. “I got to carry out Morgan as a little mascot before the game, and it was awesome. That was his first game since being diagnosed because he obviously hadn’t been well enough before. It was good to have him with me, even if I did get injured. 

“It was still an incredible day,” she surmises, “because I got to share those memories with him.”

“I think the assumption was that he was doing okay,” says Natalie, “we probably thought that maybe it was working. But it wasn’t long after that, that they decided to try chemo again. We did one round of chemo and then it was fairly obvious that it wasn’t working, you could see the tumours growing by that point. 

“It wasn’t long after that, he went on palliative care. I think it was the start of June, and then he was gone fifteen days later.”

Just as the two sisters finish each other’s sentences, often overlapping, so too can they tell when the other has had an unspoken memory jogged. Natalie’s words cause them both to, understandably, well up. “Oh, we’re terrible at this,” says Talia, wiping the tears. “We’re not good at crying, not like our parents. We’re ugly criers for a start. But we just end up laughing.”

“Laughter is good for you,” says Natalie with the confidence of someone who’s had to say that an awful lot in recent times. “It releases all the happy hormones, it’s good,” she repeats, “it’s always good to laugh.”

The story has gone full circle. The reason Gorseinon RFC became our shoot location with Talia was because Natalie was still packing up after the previous weekend’s MorgsFest, a festival held at the club as a now annual fundraiser for Morgan’s Army. In total, they’ve raised around £350,000. “This town has fundraised the majority of the money that goes through Morgan’s Army and is helping families all over South Wales,” says Natalie. “We’re not originally from Gorseinon, we’re kind of from Barry. Well, I’m from Barry, you were born in Pontypridd,” she says to Talia. “But we were children of South Wales because our parents moved around running pubs.”

The response of the town has made the entire family feel as if they could never leave. “When Morgan was diagnosed, the rugby club rallied,” says Natalie. “They did a whip-round to give us some money so that we didn’t have to worry about bills and things and they wanted to make sure we were really looked after.

“The community of Gorseinon, the way they came together when we announced he was on palliative care and the way they, I don’t really know how to describe it, they painted our road…”

“Someone had come out and painted the whole road and the front of her house,” says Talia, picking up the story, “it was like the whole town put their arms around us all.

“Even now with the charity, it’s like this community is taking ownership of it because it was founded here.”

At Tŷ Hafan, the hospice in Cardiff where Morgan passed away, there’s a spiral mosaic made of stones. Each time a child passes away, a stone is added with their name upon it. It was this mosaic that inspired Morgan’s Rocks, where people began painting rocks with a message on the back about the charity, and then taking them to all corners of the globe, leaving them behind to be found by someone else, forever increasing the circle of those who know Morgan’s story. “We’ve reached 27 per cent of the world now,” says Natalie. “Our aim is to reach 100 per cent of it, although there are some countries I think we’ll struggle to get into.”

“Maybe North Korea,” suggests Talia. “We could throw it over the border maybe?” responds Natalie.

While all this was going on, Talia’s rugby career stalled for a while, due firstly to a succession of injuries, starting with a PCL injury, then the shoulder in the England game, and finally a calf injury that saw her miss WXV in 2023. Then her beloved Worcester closed last October when the ten-year backing that had been promised proved to be anything but. “I’m just absolutely gutted that Worcester are gone,” she says. “And that Jo [Yapp] has gone to Australia to coach the Australia women. I just want to say, ‘you’re amazing, come back!’

“I miss it so much,” continues Talia, “because all of the girls were like a close-knit family. I loved it; look how close to tears I’ve got talking about Worcester…

“We weren’t like the most successful club,” she adds, “but the way the girls were, the people, the atmosphere, God I miss that club.

“Jo’s philosophy was like, good rugby players, good people. She bred this family ethos, and she had you eating out of the palm of her hand every time she spoke. Whenever she was angry, it was more that she was like disappointed and it felt like you’d let down your favourite teacher. It was like the worst feeling ever. 

“I was only with them a short time. But it felt like ten years.”

The timing of Worcester’s closure at the start of the 2023/24 campaign meant squads were full in the Premiership. “The only place I could go was further into England, to somewhere like Leicester,” says Talia. “And I didn’t want to leave my family, I wanted to be down the road because my niece has got the same genetic condition that Morgan had, so the same susceptibility to developing cancer.”

Instead, she’s taken a leading role at newly-formed Welsh region Brython Thunder, returning to the pitch in January, before being a star performer for Wales in the Six Nations, including a player of the match performance against England. “I couldn’t describe to you that feeling of putting on the Welsh jersey again,” she says. “My mum just cried whole first half, they’d been through it all with me, so to get back on the pitch was amazing.”

And the rugby club most proud of all, was Gorseinon RFC. “They’ve taken ownership of Talia as their international now,” says Natalie, “I think Bonymaen might disagree, but they’re going to put your picture up on the wall, they’ve taken ownership of you alongside the other boys, you’re part of their international squad and they won’t let anyone tell them different.

“Gorseinon is like any town,” concludes Natalie, “it’s got a few delinquent kids, a little bit of crime, but on the whole it’s a lovely place. I couldn’t live anywhere else now: Gorseinon, this is the only place I’ve properly felt at home in my whole life.”

“One hundred per cent,” agrees Talia, as we finish our conversation in the club’s Leigh Halfpenny Pavilion. “I think the way that they’ve looked after us and made us feel at home, is just incredible. It’s like the whole town has wrapped this huge, lush blanket around us.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by  Francesca Jones

This extract was taken from issue 26 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.
For more information, visit vodafone.co.uk/mobile/partnerships