Morgan fears for game that has lost its sense of fun

Welsh rugby legend remembers innocence of past that will never be recaptured in today's professional era

'Kirkpatrick... to Bryan Williams... This is great stuff... Phil Bennett covering... chased by Alistair Scown... Brilliant... Oh, that's brilliant... John Williams... Pullin... John Dawes, great dummy... David, Tom David, the half-way line... Brilliant, by Quinnell... This is Gareth Edwards... A dramatic start... WHAT A SCORE!'

When you read those words, they don't really add up to much. When you hear them, however, they still make the spine stiffen and the mind swim with unforgettable images. They were uttered 30 years ago on Monday, at his beloved Cardiff Arms Park, by Cliff Morgan. But when I phone the great man to ask whether I can use the forthcoming anniversary of that epic Barbarians v All Blacks match as an excuse to interview him, he is quick to disassociate himself. "It was nothing to do with me," he says.

He adds that he is old (72) and crumbly and has nothing of interest to say any more. But after some gentle pleading, he agrees to meet me. And as it turns out, as I have anticipated, he has nothing to say that is not enthralling.

We meet in the lobby of the Landmark Hotel in London. One legacy of his glittering career as one of rugby union's finest fly-halves is a pair of dodgy knees. He walks slowly, in apparent discomfort, downstairs to the bar, sinks into an armchair, fixes me with sympathetic brown eyes that have plainly seen it all, and tells me to fire away. "That match, in 1973..." I begin.

"I have always regarded that match as one of the great privileges of my life," he says, the wonderful Rhondda voice, unlike the Rhondda knees, undiminished by age. "The commentary should have been done by Bill McClaren, the greatest, but he couldn't do it. And the game had everything. It had all the qualities of an exhibition game, yet great toughness, and both sides wanted to win. I was thrilled to be able to convey something of the atmosphere to a live audience in New Zealand as well as Great Britain."

I apologise for asking a trite question, but it really has to be asked. Where does the Edwards try figure in the pantheon of great tries he has seen, and indeed scored? "Well, I suppose it has been watched more than any other try in history," he muses. "I have seen other fabulous tries, but this was a great team try, Bennett starting it off in his own 25, with adventure. A famous Welsh writer, Alun Richards, once said that there were two sorts of fly-half in Wales, the chapel fly-half and the church fly-half. Barry John was a church fly-half, laid-back, plenty of time, melodic movement. Bennett, I think like me, was a chapel fly-half, a bit more wild, non-conformist...

"Willie John McBride, one of the most unbelievable men you'll ever meet in your life, says Bennett for him was the best. When something wanted to be done, he could do it."

And what of Edwards, the scorer? "The greatest rugby player ever born, in any position, anywhere in the world. Gareth for me represents it all. He was built like a middleweight boxer, he was a great gymnast, and Bill Samuel, who got him into Millfield School from the tiny village of Gwaen-cae-Gurwen, told me that he could have won the pole vault in the Olympic Games. He still holds the record today in the schools 100 metres hurdles, you know. He beat Alan Pascoe, who went on to run for Great Britain. He had all the gifts, including the one thing I always thought about Pele, the most extraordinary vision. He could look forward yet see over both shoulders. And he played with a sense of fun, as they all did in the great Welsh side of that era, JPR Williams, Gerald Davies, John Dawes, Barry John, names that still hit you."

That sense of fun, I venture, has been greatly diluted by professionalism. I don't expect Morgan to disagree, and he does not.

"I never believed that rugby union was meant to be professional. Rugby league was professional, and I love rugby league, but rugby union was about relaxation after the day's work, an opportunity to meet fellows, have a beer.

"And it's a sadness for me, now that it is professional, that they don't seem to know how to make it work. It's not an important game like soccer is. How can they have paid players when there isn't the money coming through the gates? Welsh rugby seems to have no idea. The National Stadium still owes millions and millions, and they hire a New Zealand coach for 250 grand a year, a nice enough fellow I'm sure, but the Welsh mentality is very different from the New Zealand. In New Zealand every boy wanted to be a back-row forward like Ian Kirkpatrick, but every Welsh boy wanted to be an outside-half.

"Not to have appointed a Welsh coach, I think was a disservice to the nation. And I'm not being nationalistic, I'm being sensible. We play rugby instinctively. You couldn't coach Gareth Edwards, Barry John, Gerald Davies, you could only make them feel part of a system. So I have no great optimism until such time as they get rid of all these masses of committees, and have someone who stands there and says 'shut up, listen to me'. The game needs a big, big person in charge."

Would he fancy the job. "Not me," he says, brown eyes twinkling, "I'm a Welsh dwarf."

I wonder, do Morgan's anxieties about rugby's evolution extend to the field of play? Does Jonny Wilkinson, for example, thrill him like Phil Bennett once did, and as he himself thrilled crowds? "Oh God, yes. I watch Wilkinson, like when he chipped ahead against New Zealand, and just breathe in and say 'God, that was class'. The players now must be better than ever. Their training schedule, their dedication, the sacrifices they have to make. We didn't have to make any sacrifices. We'd turn up, play, go home and have a cup of tea and a bun."

When he joined Cardiff in 1949, he trained only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. "And I went mainly because I knew I'd get a free pint of beer and a kipper." A kipper? "Yes, there was a big box of kippers in the dressing-room. We had a fork and would hold them in front of the electric fire."

He would have different memories to share, kipper-less memories perhaps, had his mother not persuaded his father, a miner with a talent for football, to turn down an offer to join Tottenham Hotspur in 1929. Clifford Isaac was born the following year, and had a richer childhood in the Rhondda, one can't help feeling, than if he had grown up in north London.

His voice drops an octave, and his eyes take on a dreamy look, as he recalls the annual trip to the seaside from his village of Trebanog.

"The Sunday School trip to the sea. One day a year, one magic glimpse of the sea. We went to Barry Island." A chuckle. "Gwyn Thomas used to say it was Baptists to Barry, Congregationalists to Porthcawl, Methodists to Penarth... and Buddhists to Aberavon Sands."

In March 1951 Morgan was selected to play for Wales against Ireland, in Cardiff. The news reached Trebanog before he did, but as his bus drew into the village one evening, he saw hundreds of people milling around, and bunting hastily strung between the houses.

"It was unbelievable, like the Coronation. For the next few days people kept coming to the house with eggs, and sherry, saying 'Cliff's all right for Saturday'."

Those same villagers might have had something to say had he taken rugby league's shilling, that same year. Two men in overcoats came to see him, one Sunday morning, and dumped £5,000 in white fivers on the kitchen table. "I had played the day before, and I was up in my room. My mother always brought me a tray with a boiled egg, some bread and butter and a cup of tea, to get me up to go to chapel. And that day she said: 'There are some gentlemen from Wigan to see you.' I said: 'Mam, I can't see them, if I even talk to them I'll be professionalised.' She said: 'Well you can't leave them on the doorstep.' She invited them in and gave them bacon, eggs and black pudding."

They left with full stomachs but also with the fivers. Surprisingly, though, Morgan regrets turning down rugby league's overtures. "I have only two regrets about my rugby career. One, that I didn't beat New Zealand in New Zealand, and two, that I didn't play rugby league just to prove that I could have done it." He smiles. "The arrogance of the half-back, you see."

League's loss, if what it never had can be described as a loss, was union's immeasurable gain. Morgan excelled for Cardiff and Wales, and in 1955 embarked on a Lions tour of South Africa, a tour famous even in the minds of those of us who in 1955 were still some years from scrumming down in the womb. A tour, moreover, so electrified by one player in particular that it is remembered by older South Africans even today as 'the Cliff Morgan tour'.

In the first, epic Test, in Johannesburg, the Lions pipped the Springboks 23-22. And Morgan's close friend and team-mate, Tony O'Reilly, later related to Morgan what Nelson Mandela had told him, that he, Mandela, had been in the 105,000 crowd at Ellis Park that day, cheering on the Lions against the Afrikaaners.

A desire not to receive Private Eye's Order of the Brown Nose keeps me from quoting the extravagant praise Morgan lavishes on O'Reilly (chairman of Independent News and Media, which owns The Independent). But one thing I will quote is this: "I don't think Tony, like me, could have played today. We couldn't have settled into the routine of daily practice, living in a tracksuit, it would have driven us bonkers."

What also drives him bonkers is rugby's genuflection to television, which is ironic, because he had a career at the BBC, both at the microphone and behind it, as brimful with achievement as his career in rugby.

Nevertheless, he is withering on the subject of television needs dictating kick-off times.

"Rugby says 'oh yes, three bags full', not caring about the most important people, the players and the spectators." Even when he worked in television, as the BBC's Head of Outside Broadcasts, he kept his cameras on a leash.

"I wouldn't allow anybody to go into the dressing room, because that is a sanctuary, a haven, cosy as toast."

Inside the sanctuary and out, he has made not only firm but also famous friends, among them the late Richard Burton, who knew how to treat women. And we're not just talking enormous diamonds. When Burton was making Cleopatra, and falling madly in love with his co-star Elizabeth Taylor, he cabled Morgan at the Berners Hotel in London. "Need two tickets for match on Saturday," went the message.

"Richard, like Dave Allen and Richard Harris, knew all about the game," Morgan says. "There are people famous now, who say they support Manchester United, yet haven't a clue about football. Those fellows were real devotees. Harris used to get all the schools rugby results from Ireland faxed to him at the Savoy, and sit there in his bloody suite, poring over them for hours."

"And Richard [Burton] wrote the best piece on rugby that anyone will ever write, in a book Geoff Nicholson and I compiled, called Touchdown. You could hear Dylan [Thomas, I think, rather than Bob] in the way Richard expressed himself. He wrote about a formidable woman called Annie Mort, back in Aberavon, who 'entertained the crowd before the kick-off by dropping goals from the half-way line in shoes that I would describe as sensible'."

Morgan's singularly expressive features shine with delight as he vocally caresses these words. He will never forget them, just as I and countless others will never forget "Brilliant by Quinnell... This is Gareth Edwards... A dramatic start...WHAT A SCORE!"