Return of the magical son

Jonathan Davies is welcomed back to the game of his fathers and discovers how he can realise an elusive dream Peter Corrigan weighs the impact as a free spirit comes to the aid of Wales

SMALL sacrifices are sometimes required at moments of rare historical value. When Warrington telephoned Jonathan Davies on Monday night to inform him that they had agreed to repatriate him to the game of his fathers, he was on the edge of his seat engrossed in the last 10 minutes of Cracker. In the frenzy that has followed he has yet to find out what happened.

We can be assured that the rugby world is in no danger of missing the end of the Jonathan Davies story. Predicting when and where it is likely to occur, however, is an impossibility even at this late stage in his career. He has been destined to boldly go where no man has gone before and there are signs that the more extravagant excursions of his illustrious past may yet be matched in the future.

He would be the last to pretend to know. To listen to him when he presented himself for examination in Cardiff on Thursday - first by the media and then by his new and suitably thunderstruck team-mates - his ambitions extend only to not making a fool of himself against Aberavon at 4.0 this afternoon. He dismissed talk of playing for Wales in the Five Nations' Championship at the beginning of next year as presumptuous.

Yet, when chatting aimlessly about what the future held for him, he was suddenly nonplussed by a question relating to the British Lions tour of South Africa in 1997. He had no idea such a tour was planned, even less that the South Africans have already taken pounds 7m in advance bookings. His face lit up like a beacon but he hurriedly made a joke about wanting to go so that he could give a Lions shirt to his village club Trimsaran, thereby completing a full set of his union and league shirts hanging in their clubhouse.

Much later that night, when he was making the three-hour drive back up the M6 to Warrington after his first training session with Cardiff, he was ruminating a touch more seriously on the subject. Despite still having reservations about endeavouring to rush back into the Welsh team, the thought that the vague horizon of his future playing career contained a remote chance of becoming a British Lion after all was persistently infiltrating the mind he had focused on today's encounter against Aberavon.

In the complicated plot which describes his life thus far, this is where he came in; or, rather, this is where he went out. There were several factors that contributed to his decision to forsake rugby union in early January 1989 and one of them was the gnawing suspicion that he would fail to be selected for the Lions tour to Australia that summer. He had set his heart on becoming a Lion and this was the reason he turned down a lucrative offer from St Helens in July 1988.

Within five months that dream seemed about to dissolve. He had captained Wales to an embarrassing home defeat against Romania in December. Doug Laughton, the Widnes coach, was so gleefully astonished at the amount of criticism directed solely against Davies that he made an immediate offer, hoping to catch the player at a vulnerable moment. Despite the low ebb of his morale, Davies resisted. Indeed, I was helping him to write his autobiography at the time and he telephoned to relate the reasons he was staying while they were still fresh in his mind. The Lions were still high on his list.

Then he attended the fateful Welsh squad session at which no one spoke to him and he felt the weight of the entire can on his shoulders. Newspaper reports that he would lose the captaincy and even his place in the team seemed to be confirmed. And if he wasn't in the Welsh team how could he be in the Lions? Laughton's persistent voice took on a freshly persuasive edge. "Don't let the amateurs mess you about, son, come and join the professionals."

Had Davies known that even as his hand reached for the Widnes money his name was already the centrepiece of the team being formed in the mind of the Lions coach Ian McGeechan I am sure he would not have left Wales. He might have later, but not then.

The events of last week were not dissimilar in their capacity to overwhelm Davies as those that greeted him up north nearly seven years ago, and when the word Lions was casually dropped into the conversation the effect was immediate. He can be just as spontaneous off the field as on it and to have a Lions shirt suddenly waving in the distance had a galvanising effect. Strangely, it was as if that which we confidently expected - that he will return in triumph to Cardiff and then to the Welsh team - brought doubts cascading upon him while the far less achievable prospect of his breaking into the Lions squad in 18 months' time, when he will be 34 and a half years old, made him bristle with intent.

There you may have the secret of one of the most inspirational sporting performers of his era. Throughout his difficult life, he has thrived on being underestimated. It must be said that he has been easy to underestimate. As a boy he was so puny that only a few, the great Carwyn James among them, were able to recognise talents that would more than compensate for his size. He was overlooked for schoolboy honours and when, at 18, he finally got a trial with his beloved Llanelli his slight figure did not merit a second glance. He was playing for Trimsaran in the rugged West Wales league as a 19-year-old when Neath offered him a game under permit.

You may think that this was an act of genius by the sharp-eyed Neath scouts. You would be wrong. The club were struggling and when he was invited to play for them against Pontypridd in February 1982 he was the 13th outside- half they had tried that season. He proceeded to shock everyone by winning the man of the match award on his first-class debut and although a knee injury delayed him for 18 months he went on to be the cornerstone of Brian Thomas's Neath team that laid convincing claim to being the best in Britain.

For all his accomplishments at club and international level in Wales, Davies did not carry the confidence of everyone when he ventured into league for a world-record fee. A survey of the top 14 rugby league clubs at the time revealed that the coaches of 12 would not have bought him. Once more his size was regarded as too big a handicap. After his first few days in Widnes he was inclined to believe it himself, especially when the club's physiotherapist burst into laughter as Davies presented himself for a medical inspection.

Once more the impact of his success was magnified by surprise that he is capable of matching a unique instinctive skill with such an irrepressible physical accompaniment. No doubt there will be wing forwards in the weeks ahead anxious to convince him that, compared with league, union is not as easy as he recalls. "I hope they feel that way," says Davies. "It will be good to get some nastiness back into Welsh rugby. It is a hard, physical game and these sort of challenges make you into a better player."

The danger he faces, however, may come more from our expectations. There is no trace of his being underestimated. Indeed, he appears to have been awarded the task of single-handedly restoring the fortunes of Welsh rugby. It is ridiculous but there is no way he can avoid it, and we may well look on today as the moment the game in Wales began to restore itself.

He hopes at least to prove what can be achieved if players are allowed to express themselves. His game is based on obeying an intuition that sometimes surprises even him and he fears that our team games are threatened by negative patterns and strategies. If he can inspire a break-out of free spirit among younger players he will have contributed enough. Whatever he brings home we have the Cardiff club to thank for that. As in England, the professional initiative is coming from the clubs and the talk and the movement, refreshingly, is not about administrators but about players. Cardiff are not the only club to realise how easy, and how fatal, it will be to be left behind in the race to build strong club squads.

It is odd that during Jonathan Davies's long absence from the game I have never heard a top union official, and I don't mean the Welsh particularly, express a desire to see Davies play union again. Alas, they have been too busy preserving the barriers that hitherto prevented it. Even now those barriers are down, I have still not heard the slightest yearning.

Significantly, when Cardiff's chief executive, Gareth Davies, went to Warrington to clinch the deal on Monday, he did so with backing that has not come from the game. The businessman Peter Thomas, whose pounds 500,000 gift to the club a year ago was their salvation, put together a package that includes eager sponsorship from the builders' merchants Jewsons, and a last-minute donation from the millionaire rugby fan Dr Chris Evans.

It is to them that Davies owes his moment of truth this afternoon. We are not so blessed with genuinely instinctive players in our ball games that we can afford not to cherish the moment with him; Jonathan Davies with the ball in his hands and no one knowing what is going to happen next.