Phil Davies
In 1987, England hadn’t beaten Wales in Cardiff since 1963. The Welsh No.8 Phil Davies was determined that wasn’t going to change. At only the second lineout of the game, as he tussled with Jon Hall, a single punch from Wade Dooley took him down, shattering his cheekbone. His game lasted less than two minutes, but the Battle of Cardiff had begun.
Thirty-eight penalties were awarded on the day Wales beat England 19-12 in the 1987 Five Nations, 23 against the visitors. A game took place, not so much peppered with incidents, but more one long incident peppered with rugby. Fights and tackles both high and late were commonplace. For England, there would be repercussions, and not just defeat. Four England players were suspended: Graham Dawe, Wade Dooley, Gareth Chilcott and Richard Hill. Reputations were dented, some virtually written-off. Some say Dawe was never forgiven by England, while Hill didn’t captain his country again. “Hilly [Richard] and me were talking about this the other day,” Phil Davies tells Rugby as we sit in his office at his home in south Wales. “We work together now at Rouen in France.
“It was a horrible build-up to that game,” he continues, “there was a lot of press niggle – ‘we hate you, you hate us’ type of thing. It was a horrible day too; wet, foggy, misty – that sort of day, not very good basically. The warm-up felt really eerie because everybody was so hyped up. Not that warm-ups were much in those days, they were optional – putting the heater on in the coach was almost the extent of it. We used to have a sandpit underneath the stadium that we scrummaged on before the games, but even that seemed a bit different than usual because of all the hype.”
The game kicked off, and after only the second line-out in quick succession, it all went wrong. “Bob Norster [Welsh lock] sort of flapped it back and, as I was running back, Jon Hall [England No.8] was trying to get past me and it looked from the side like I was punching him, but I wasn’t. In hindsight I wish I was – at least I’d have deserved a whack, but then Wade just clocked me, I wish I’d have seen it coming. It gave me three fractures around the orbital area of my eye.
“I thought it was okay, and just got up thinking, ‘that was a pretty good one’, and went to the next lineout but then I blew my nose and it was like blowing up a balloon – my eye just came up like a peach. The physio came on and said, ‘you’re coming off’, and I said, ‘no, I’m fucking not’, but I did. I went back in the dressing room and there was a bit of wrestling match with me and Derek Quinnell [Wales team manager] because I wanted to go back on. I’d only been on for a minute and a bit.”
With the game still in its infancy, Phil was in the infirmary. “I was in the hospital and there was only about ten minutes gone,” he says. “I watched the rest of the game with the nurses in the mess room with a can of Heineken, by the time I got back to the dressing room after the game I’d had quite a few.
“Wade rang me the next day and my dad gave him a bit of stick, but to be fair he apologised. There were people talking about suing him but that was crazy, we were never going to do that. Admittedly, it was a tough part of the game, but it was part of the game.
“We’ve spoken a few times since and played against each other, he’s a big tough guy Wade. I saw him a few years ago when I was coaching Wales under-20s and he was a citing officer – that was quite ironic, but if anyone knew what to look for, it was him.”
Phil Davies’ office tells a story in itself. A bottled beer on the shelf, Windhoek, is a nod to his current job, as coach of the Namibian national team. A signed photo on the wall of the 2004-05 Leeds Tykes team that beat Bath 20-12 in the Powergen Cup final is testament to his ten-year stint at Headingley. And there’s a memento from one of his more recent successes, when he took north Wales side RGC1404 to the Welsh Championship in 2016. But these are seriously edited career highlights. There’s also a ten-year, 46-cap international playing record; a trophy-laden club career with Llanelli; and 22 years (and counting) of coaching in England, Wales, France and Africa to talk about.
Even before his story gets to that 1987 game – his 11th cap – Phil had seen plenty of action, plenty of twists and turns, on the field and off, both good and bad.
Growing up in Seven Sisters, a mining village 10 miles north east of Neath, Phil’s rugby potential was spotted when he was a 15-year-old in the traditional manner – playing another sport. “I was always on a soccer field kicking about,” explains Phil, “and one day, Maurice Davies, who was chairman of the local club, came up and spoke to me, asking if I’d play rugby – I was a big kid. That was how it began.”
His parents owned the village store, but the main business was fruit and vegetables wholesale [a job his dad would only retire from two years ago, aged 78], with his mother also working as a seamstress. “My grandad was the big rugby influence, I used to watch the Wales games with him and say, ‘I’m going to do that one day’, and he’d always respond, ‘why not? Go for it!’”
Arguably an even bigger influence – certainly in his club career – came from his next door neighbour. “I had a neighbour called Howard Hill who was a big Llanelli fan, and he took me to watch Llanelli play New Zealand in 1980,” says Phil. “When I went to Stradey Park for the first time I just fell in love with the place, the atmosphere, the history, the jersey, everything.”
Turning down an offer to play for the Neath of Brian Thomas and Ron Waldron wasn’t generally the done thing for local boys, but Phil did just that, such was his determination to play for Llanelli. Aged 17, he made his debut. First against Penarth in a straight-forward win at Stradey Park, but then Ebbw Vale away. “It was a murky, rainy, misty night and I played against Clive Burgess and David Fryer, they were quite prominent in those days and Clive was part of that legendary Welsh team of the 70s. Flippin’ heck he was a strong fella, he made me understand what playing at that level was going to be about.
“I started the game being very competitive, jumping in and out of everything, and Clive put me in my place. I remember him picking me out of a ruck and just throwing me across the grass and I aquaplaned into the Tesco hoardings and this old lady peered out over the top of them and said, ‘Welcome to Ebbw Vale me boy’.”
Starting at Llanelli as part of a new crop of players that included the likes of Nigel Davies and Ieuan Evans, Phil felt immediately at home. “They were just a great bunch of people, and Ray Gravell was captain at the time and introduced me to everyone – he was an icon.
“There were legends all over the place, Phil Bennett had only just retired, Derek Quinnell too – I missed playing with some of these names by just a year. We still had brilliant guys though, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. It was a very special place, when you went there, I don’t know, for me it was magical, it was a dream really.”
Without earning any money from rugby, he studied bricklaying and carpentry to initially keep his parents’ fears at bay, but when talk eventually returned to future security, job prospects, pensions, he had to find something. And, ironically, it was a Llanelli man, David East, who was also chief constable of South Wales Police, that twisted his arm to leave their favourite rugby team and join the force.
It wasn’t a bad gig. Five days’ work, then turn out for the police side at the weekend. In some ways, says Phil, they were the first professional rugby side in Wales. The year he started though, wasn’t a good year to be a police officer in Wales.
I984, a concrete block thrown from a bridge kills a taxi driver and father-of-two, impaling him in his car. It hits every newspaper in Britain. The two men accused of throwing it were striking miners, the man who was in the taxi’s passenger seat was a miner on his way to work. Described as one of the nation’s ‘most bitter strikes’ of all time, more than 187,000 miners went on strike against the Government-run National Coal Board, who were cutting 20,000 jobs with the closure of 20 pits. There would be 11,000 arrests, and thousands of miners charged.
The death sent shockwaves across the nation. With East the chief constable in charge of the investigation Phil was one of the first officers to attend, to help cordon off the scene. It would leave its mark, years later, as would the whole strike with families and communities split.
“It was a horrendous time looking back,” he admits, “the strike was very difficult for our village because we had two collieries in the valley. My uncle was a miner, my grandfather was a miner too. It was tough to see how people were struggling.
“In the police, we often had to start at 4am and you’d have to go to Port Talbot where the miners would be picketing the steelworks.
“You’d have 50 articulated lorries coming off the M4 into Port Talbot and we’d have to try and part the miners like the Red Sea to let them come through. Your heart was in your mouth at times because these lorries are coming in at 30mph and they’re not stopping.
“Some people wanted to continue working and it was our job to help them do that. There were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of police and miners in one place.
“It was really difficult because you felt for them, they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. Our rugby club at Seven Sisters was actually a bit of a safe haven because it had police officers and miners in it – rugby provided a bit of solace and a bit of an escape from it all at weekends.”
When the strike came to an end, Phil struggled to get back in sync with the day-to-day of police life. “I remember watching Llanelli play Australia on a Tuesday night from the mess room in Port Talbot and they beat them. I just thought, ‘I want to go back and play for Llanelli, I want to play for Wales’.”
He told his less-than-impressed parents that night, and handed in his resignation the next day. “They let me go at the end of the week and I was playing against Cardiff on the Saturday,” he says.
After the force, work came from the family business. “I’d be driving with him, going back and forth to Cardiff, buying fruit and veg,” he explains. “It was a great job to keep me fit, I was delivering a tonne of spuds – which is what, 40 bags? Either way, to carry those back and forth into all the restaurants took some doing!”
Four months after leaving the force, in a Five Nations game delayed by an outbreak of Foot and Mouth, Phil made his debut against England. “I had just the best two weeks: I won the 1985 cup final against Cardiff for Llanelli; played for Wales against England; and then played for the Barbarians in Rome against Italy – I was only 21, I thought Christmas had come early.”
Talk of his debut against England (in Cardiff, so a win, 24-15), brings back memories of a non-playing legend of Cardiff Arms Park. “The groundsman at the time was called Bill Hardiman, he was quite legendary,” says Phil. “He’d always make sure that our dressing room was always opened slowly, bit-by-bit, as the crowd started to come, so that we could hear the atmosphere building. The opposition door though, he always kept firmly closed, so they never knew what to expect.”
Playing for his country in two Rugby World Cups and winning the Five Nations twice (jointly with France in 1988 and outright in 1994), Phil had enjoyed a good stint with Wales, but…
“It could’ve been better,” he admits. “I had a couple of injuries and once I did let emotions get the better of me. I didn’t get picked for the side and so didn’t turn up for training – Phil Bennett and Derek Quinnell both rang me to give me stick, which they were right to do. But I think that cost me a Lions place in 1989.
“I’ve always been a big team player, but during that period I was injured, frustrated, not playing as well as I could’ve. I think that maybe I gave the impression that if I didn’t get picked for the Test side with the Lions then maybe I wouldn’t have conformed. Which isn’t the case, but it’s disappointing still. You learn from these things though.”
His frustrations boiled over again in 1990, culminating in a decision made on the back of another injury. “I played for the Barbarians, scored a try, and then made a ridiculous decision to retire from international rugby at 26. I injured something again, my ribs I think, Ron Waldron was coaching Tony Gray and Derek Quinnell had been sacked a while back, and I decided I didn’t want to play. It was an impulsive decision.”
Because of a change in coaches? “Yeah, I think so, but I don’t know what I was thinking really, because I then had to go to Ron Waldron’s house to apologise – and his wife Eunice, God bless her, gave me a right earful, telling me off. It was stupid, but you live and learn don’t you? I played pretty regularly after that until I retired in 1995.
“I’ve always worn my heart on my sleeve, and I’d say 80 per cent of the time it’s helped me, the other 20 per cent it hasn’t. I learnt that both as a player and a coach.”
Leeds had only ever meant rugby league to Phil. He’d travelled up north in 1989 when three clubs were after his signature, with Warrington the most keen. “They offered £50-60,000 I think, which wasn’t bad money for a forward in them days,” remembers Phil. “I spoke to St Helens and Widnes as well, with Dougie Laughton. I spoke to Dougie in his bedroom and I remember how bizarre it was, he had his Embassy No.1 cigarettes out on the bed showing me all the rugby playing positions.”
In fairness, Leeds RUFC had only formed in the early-90s as a club (following the merging of Headingley and Roundhay) when Phil was approached to join them as coach in 1996 – a job accepted but that immediately caused problems at home. “My wife had only ever lived in Wales and our daughters were eight and six at the time, so there was a bit of a panic on.
“It was also a difficult time because my sister-in-law Karen [who was married to Phil’s wife’s brother Jonathan Davies] had cancer at the time and whereas he was coming from the north of England to Wales, we were coming from Wales and going to the north of England. So it was very tough, family-wise.”
As the only full-time coach and with just two professional players, Phil took charge of a club with big ambitions, albeit not much in the way of facilities. “We were trying to get out umpteen sides from a single field in Roundhay because they’d sold the pitch in Headingley to Morrison’s to get funding,” explains Phil. He joined as a player-coach, but only played three or four games. “I realised I couldn’t do it all, be a player and director of rugby,” he admits. “My last game was against Exeter at their old dog track ground actually, Rob Baxter was my last second-row opponent.”
Without any floodlit pitches of their own, the Leeds first team trained at the local college, Leeds Met (later Beckett). “We had the players hauling up six portable diesel floodlights before training, always making sure we had enough fuel to get through a session,” he laughs. “We were in division four, but we had a bit of money compared to other sides and we also played at Headingley, the Leeds Rhinos ground. They then restructured the leagues and we went up to Division Three, then we got promoted twice more and we were in the Premiership.”
The leap from three to one, had taken three years, and they took their place in the Premiership in 2001. They struggled and finished bottom, but Rotherham’s financial troubles meant they didn’t get relegated. Proving their worth the season after, they finished fifth. Two more seasons of Premiership rugby later, they took that cup victory at Twickenham over Bath with 60,000 watching, 15,000 from Leeds.
He’d built the side using beliefs created around Llanelli. “Early on at Leeds, we’d been beating everyone around the north by 40, 50 or 60 points, so I took them down to Stradey and they got thrashed. It showed them what it was all about, and I think it was at that moment that the money dropped for a lot of the Leeds players.”
Supported by an academy built by recently retired player Stuart Lancaster, and conditioned by Steve ‘Scrapper’ Carter, who’d arrived almost straight from the army, Phil defied the odds despite always having the smaller budget at the highest level. “We always had a budget which was the 12th smallest from 12 in the Premiership, we stayed there for five years though,” he says. “The budget is what got us in the end, we didn’t have the money to get a deep enough squad to sustain it. I still believe, even now, that Leeds could be a big part of English rugby, there’s enough of a catchment area.
“I think it was a culmination of a number of things,” he says of his final season, which ultimately ended in relegation, albeit without Phil at the helm. “Finances is one, I think in my last season there we had 26 players in the senior squad, which wasn’t enough. We took our eye off the ball in some areas: we thought we’d replaced like for like, but we hadn’t; we recruited some players who were perhaps too big for the culture; we took the culture for granted a bit too much in the last year. We maybe didn’t look as forensically at it as we had done previous years, it just didn’t work.
“The last season was difficult,” he continues, “we’d won the cup the year before, we’d stayed up, there was euphoria over that and I think there was a sigh of relief, but we didn’t build on it.”
“Gary [Hetherington, chairman] was very good, very straight, we went for a cup of coffee, we used to have breakfast regularly. He knew I’d been there for a long time, perhaps too long, and I think he put that seed of doubt in my mind. I don’t believe that now, I think a coach can be anywhere as long as he wants as long as he’s managing the change, which is what Ferguson did at Man United. In hindsight I would’ve done a couple of things different.
“I got pretty upset with a few people at the time, I didn’t attend the last one or two games which is ridiculous really, but that comes back to a cycle of emotional development. When I look back it’s disappointing, that’s how it was. Stuart got on with it though, and he did brilliantly.”
Was leaving Leeds your biggest coaching disappointment? “It took me a while to get over that actually,” he admits, “because you put a lot of emotion into coaching, especially somewhere you’ve been for ten years.
“I’d had the opportunity to go to Saracens when Eddie [Jones] was there, and I spoke to Harlequins a couple of years before when Dean [Richards] went there. But I didn’t want to leave Leeds, and when you get beyond the smoke and mirrors and look at what we achieved, to go from playing fourth division rugby to Heineken Cup rugby and producing internationals with one of the best academies in England, there was a huge amount to be proud of”
Disappointment in Leeds led to a dream homecoming to Stradey Park. “In and among the last season I was at Leeds, the Welsh Rugby Union had come to speak to me about being the coach of Wales,” explains Phil. “I had about five interviews with them, and I was actually told by the chief executive at the time that I was going to be the coach of Wales – but then that didn’t work out and Gareth Jenkins went to be the coach of Wales and I went to Llanelli.”
He says the last sentence with a shrug, almost as if he’d become used to such things happening over his career, yet his first season with Scarlets appeared to be setting the scene for greater things. “We had an amazing first year when we got to the semi-final of the Heineken Cup, we did well in the league, finished third, playing some amazing rugby,” he says. “I think our group was Toulouse, London Irish and Ulster and we went undefeated. We beat Toulouse away, we beat Munster, who had won the cup the year before, in the quarter-final – it was an incredible journey for us.”
The year after was a different story, losing six from six in Europe. “We were changing the way we did things, the way we approached things,” he explains, “perhaps we changed things too quick.”
In the league, Scarlets dropped to sixth and Phil left in April. “I still don’t quite understand the reasons to be honest, the results weren’t that bad.
“It was a premature end, and on top of the Leeds thing, all within three years, that was really…,” he pauses, before finishing, “… well, I learnt about myself during those three years that’s for sure.”
Leaving Scarlets hit him hard. “It was difficult because I found out I was leaving in a national newspaper, I wasn’t told directly,” he explains.
“I went into work at six o’clock in the morning and the security guard said, ‘everything alright?’ and I said, ‘yeah, all good,’ to which replied, ‘you haven’t seen the paper then?’
And he showed me the paper saying, ‘Davies sacked by the Scarlets’. I remember Rupert Moon ringing me in the morning saying, ‘just look out’. I had no inkling because I’d just come back from Australia with the chief executive to sign David Lyons. We were moving into the new stadium and I’d had a lot of input into the playing side – so it was out of the blue.”
Phone calls were made to the chief executive and chairman, who effectively confirmed the news, saying they ‘needed to meet to discuss your future’, but the damage was done. “It was a bit of a blur really, it was quite publicly difficult, it was quite humiliating. As a proud rugby guy, it was tough. My wife was great, but nobody wants to talk to you, the phone stops ringing, nobody wants to say anything.
“When people talk about mental health now I can really appreciate that type of…,” he pauses again, “… because I didn’t really know about that type of thing. I went to the doctor once saying I was tired and he just said, ‘it’s because you’re depressed’. I didn’t really think too much about it until he told me.
“It took me a while to trust people again,” he admits, “I’d have rather be punched in the nose than flicked in the back of the head. It affected me for a while.
“I remember going for an interview with Roger Lewis for head of rugby at the WRU and I was awful, my mind was all over the place. I actually apologised to him after for being so awful – I shouldn’t have done the interview, it was too soon.”
The next role still took him to the WRU however, managing the Welsh academy. “The Leeds ending and Scarlets ending was still at niggling at me,” he admits. “Emotionally, it took a bit for me to work things out.
Two years at the union was followed by a successful stint with Worcester as assistant coach to ‘Hilly’. “We got them promoted and then kept our place in the Premiership, it was a great couple of years,” he says. “It was good just to be coaching back in the Premiership. I left a bit prematurely really.”
Although he’d only just signed a new contract with the Premiership club and they were eager for him to stay, the call of a Welsh region proved too strong to resist and he joined Cardiff Blues as director of rugby. “The Cardiff job was a big job, I’d been speaking to the chairman for a while about going there, but it was a real turnaround job, they’d lost 19 players, and budgets had been slashed,” he explains.
The first season saw mixed results. With highs including a win against Munster in Cork, they finished ninth. In the second campaign, a win against Toulon in Cardiff was an early highlight, together with doing the double over Glasgow. It gave them second place in a tough European group that included Exeter Chiefs, but it wasn’t enough to qualify, and in the domestic league they struggled. “In the second year we beat Toulon, which showed there was progress, but the budgets were low, it was £2.8m first year, then £3.1m the second year. “I realised we weren’t going to be able to implement the plans in the period of time they wanted, it needed time to develop and grow, so I decided to leave at the end of the season, similar to the Leeds situation.
“We’d done a good job, I felt, of restructuring the whole medical department, performance analysis, coaching, bringing young players through – a fair few of the players that won the cup last year came through in that period.
“Retrospectively, would I have gone there? No. The Blues was better [than Scarlets] though because I left under my own terms.”
“Everyone says it’s ‘results, results, results’,” he continues, “but if you look at the best teams there’s a period of growth and there’s a period of instability before the success comes, Saracens have managed it the best in England, Exeter too.”
“When you look at the two jobs in Wales, strip it back, balance the views of the reality and resource and then look at what’s happened since, you can see that it’s been intermittent in the way it’s moved forward. I think since I left in 2014, this is third coach the Blues have had.
“I think in Wales it’s a goldfish bowl and people tend to make it more personal than it is, or should be. It’s like football, it’s about the manager rather than the teams.”
Picking himself up after the Blues hasn’t been easy. “I was really trying to reflect on everything,” he says, “I spent a lot of time looking at what I did, I spoke to a lot of people to get feedback, some good, some challenging, but helpful, really helpful.”
While picking up work delivering leadership talks in business, he also reconnected with coaching.
After starting out as a technical advisor to Namibia, he became head coach seven weeks before the 2015 Rugby World Cup and also took on the head coach role with North Wales side RGC1404, helping them to reach the Welsh Premiership for the first time in 2016. “It was brilliant,” he says of his time with RGC1404. “It was just coaching, like with Namibia, it was getting back on a field and coaching.
“When I look in hindsight with the Blues, I did a lot of work restructuring and appointing staff, but I didn’t really coach and analyse like I could have, I left that to others, I should have coached more. Pure coaching is what I love really and doing it on a day-to-day basis too.”
He now spends roughly seven months of his year in Namibia, while also consulting with various Welsh sides (including Cardiff RFC and Llanelli RFC) and Rouen.
Namibia has been the biggest eye opener, as he’s helped a country so big ‘they have a game reserve that’s the size of Wales’, but has little more than 900 players, only 53 of which he can realistically select. In a seven-team premier league, there’s only three competitive sides, but he’s overseen them competing in the Currie Cup and becoming African champions four years on the trot. “We’re the flagship African rugby side under South Africa and that’s with heavy competition,” says Phil. “There’s Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe; Tunisia are growing; Morocco are getting better; Zambia are coming; Ghana are improving too.
“The talent on the continent is incredible, if we could just get the off the field governance model right, it could be amazing.”
He’s now in a good place, although even he had to question if a future in coaching was right for him.
“It was a bit like that,” he admits. “I remember somebody asking me, ‘why do you want to put yourself in this position?’, and I looked at him and thought, ‘it’s a good question that is.’
“I was trying to talk myself out of coaching after the Blues, I spoke to one of my good friends and my wife, and my gut-feel was telling me I still wanted to do it.”
He doesn’t just want to do it, he wants to do it at the highest level too, but he knows he has plenty of hurdles to overcome. “At the moment I’m invisible to a lot of people in the Premiership,” he admits. “Welsh coaches in Wales seem to have become unemployable in some way, people seem to have a view that Welsh coaches are no good. That’s the view that the press in Wales have painted and that’s not the case.
“I think the support for Welsh coaches needs to be looked at across the board, for the younger ones coming through and for the more experienced – you hear of so many that have had their chance and failed. People need to be allowed to learn from experience, and that’s an important factor being missed at the moment – a lot of people have learnt from their mistakes.
“I’ve coached since 1996, there’s not been a year that I’ve not coached since then, but I want to get back,” he continues, “I want to have one more Premiership job, a top job, a director of rugby.
“But I’d go in as a head coach in the first instance to develop the team, squad and culture and get things going and to win. I know how to win, and I’m more equipped to win now than ever before.”
Words by: Alex Mead
Pictures by: Richard Johnson
This article was taken from issue 5 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.