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Selected quotes

After an All Blacks surprise loss to the French in the 1999 Rugby World Cup: "The French are predictably unpredictable."

Look what these bastards have done to Wales. They've taken our coal, our water, our steel. They buy our houses and they only live in them for a fortnight every 12 months. What have they given us? Absolutely nothing. We've been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English - and that's who you are playing this afternoon.

Playing rugby at school I once fell on a loose ball and, through ignorance and fear, held on despite a fierce pummelling. After that it took me months to convince my team-mates I was a coward.

The relationship between the Welsh and the English is based on trust and understanding. They don't trust us and we don't understand them.

Rugby is great. The players don't wear helmets or padding; they just beat the living daylights out of each other and then go for a beer. I love that.

In 1823, William Webb Ellis first picked up the ball in his arms and ran with it. And for the next 156 years forwards have been trying to work out why.

The whole point of rugby is that it is, first and foremost, a state of mind, a spirit.

The tactical difference between Association Football and Rugby with its varieties seems to be that in the former, the ball is the missile, in the latter, men are the missles.

Rugby football is a game I can't claim absolutely to understand in all its niceties, if you know what I mean. I can follow the broad, general principles, of course. I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end and that, in order to squalch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench.

What happens when a game of football is proposed at Christmas among a party of your men assembled from different schools? Alas! ... The Eton man is enamoured of his own rules, and turns up his nose at Rugby as not sufficiently aristocratic, while the Rugbeian retorts that 'bullying' and 'sneaking' are not to his taste, and he is not afraid of his shins, or of a 'maul' or 'scrimmage'. On hearing this the Harrovian pricks up his ears, and though he might previously have sided with Rugby, the insinuation against the courage of those who do not allow 'shinning' arouses his ire, and causes him to refuse to lay with one who has offered it. Thus it is found impossible to get up a game.

I wanted a play that would paint the full face of sensualtiy, rebellion and revivalism. In South Wales these three phenomena have played second fiddle only to the Rugby Union which is a distillation of all three.

When I see Gareth Edwards, I can still see the try he got against Scotland in the mud and rain. I look at Colin Meads and see a great big sheep farmer who carried the ball in his hands as though it was an orange pip.