How Wales Won the Six Nations Championship

The Welsh Grand Slam 2012

The first and fastest published celebration of Wales' third grand slam in eight Six Nations tournaments

Paul Rees is the vastly respected rugby correspondent for The Guardian and the highly acclaimed author of Glam Slam: Year of the Dragon (2005) and The Resurrection Men: Wales' Grand Slam 2008.

In the glory years of the 1970s, Wales won three grand slams in eight seasons. But rarely since then had the men in red started a Six Nations campaign armed with expectation rather than hope. 2012 was different. 
 
 The previous year they had come within a kick of reaching the World Cup final, losing by a point to France despite playing for the last hour with 14 men after their captain, Sam Warburton, had been sent off for a dangerous tackle. 
 
 The question when they returned home was how they would cope with the heartache. The answer came in their first match in the 2012 Six Nations Championship. In Dublin against Ireland, the team they had knocked out in the World Cup quarter-final, revenge was on the menu. Wales went there without five of their leading forwards and lost Warburton to injury at half-time. They were trailing by six points with five minutes to go and had a player in the sin-bin. The old Wales would have folded but, as in Life on Mars, it was back to the spirit of the 1970s. 
 
This Wales team came back fighting to win not only the game but to sweep the board in the whole tournament, bringing home a Welsh grand slam for the third time in eight years and establishing a strong and exciting team for the future.

Wales' Grand Slam 2008

The Resurrection Men

With Rees the reader is given serious value for money: he has an authoritative grasp of the political threads with which Welsh rugby is laced and he has a sound knowledge and appreciation of the history of the game

Paul Rees writes on rugby for The Guardian. He has reported on Wales since 1986 and is the co-author of Allan Bateman: There and Back Again, Life At Number 10: Neil Jenkins - An Autobiography and Grand Slam! Year of the Dragon.

Wales were written off as no-hopers at the start of the 2008 Six Nations. They had failed to reach the World Cup quarter-finals the previous October and had reacted by appointing their 13th coach in 19 years, New Zealander Warren Gatland. 
 
On the opening weekend, success appeared unlikely when they trailed World Cup finalists England at Twickenham by ten points at half-time. Their second-half comeback, to earn their first victory at the ground for 20 years, set them on their way, and there was no looking back. In a blistering campaign, they set a new Six Nations record by conceding just two tries in their five matches. 
 
The Resurrection Men looks back over the glorious 2008 tournament but also examines the reasons why the foundations laid by Gatland look more secure than those established by Mike Ruddock before his controversial departure from the role less than a year after the side's last Grand Slam triumph in 2005. 
 
Wales imploded after Ruddock left, winning only one match in each of the 2006 and 2007 campaigns. His successor Gareth Jenkins asked to be judged on the team's performance in the World Cup. And he was, sacked hours after the defeat to Fiji which meant that, for the third time in five tournaments, Wales failed to make the knock-out stage. 
 
Little more than a week later, Welsh Rugby Union officials boarded a plane to New Zealand to meet Gatland and other candidates for head coach. Just two minutes into the meeting, they were ready to offer him the job. He promised them that if Wales won at Twickenham on the opening weekend, the slam would be on. They did and it was.

Neil Jenkins

Paul Rees

The rugby story of the year from one of the players of the decade

Jenkins's innate honesty and candour are given veracity, courtesy of Rees's undoubted skills . . . stunning

An Autobiography

Neil Jenkins is the most prolific goal-kicker in the history of British international rugby. A match-winner with Pontypridd and Wales, a veteran of the Lions Tours – including the 2001 Tour of Australia – his crowning moment came with the Lions in South Africa in 1997 when his unerring accuracy with the boot earned the tourists only their second series victory against the Springboks. 
 
Capped by Wales when he was just 19, Jenkins helped to turn Pontypridd from the Cinderellas of Welsh rugby into the league champions and one of the most feared teams in the country. After just 28 internationals he broke the Welsh points-scoring record. 
 
First published in 1998, Life at Numer 10 is a fascinating account of how Jenkins, a boy from the tip of the Rhondda Valley, started his working life as a scrap merchant – only to become one of the most sought-after players in Britain and the most-capped player for Wales. He tells how the pressure of being the Wales outside-half, following in the footsteps of legends such as Cliff Morgan, David Watkins, Barry John, Phil Bennett and Jonathon Davies, took its toll; and his frustration at being moved by Wales to centre full-back. He reveals the secrets behind Pontypridd's rise to prominence, the reasons why he left them in 1999 to join Cardiff, and his fears for the future of the Welsh game.

Paul Rees

Praise for Life At Number 10

The rugby story of the year from one of the players of the decade

Jenkins's innate honesty and candour are given veracity, courtesy of Rees's undoubted skills . . . stunning

Books by Paul Rees

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