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A way along the Great Western mainline, a way up the Swansea Valley, a way off Heol Gleien Road, is Cwmtwrch RFC, where Jac Morgan first learned his rugby. They have turned out a handful of Wales internationals in the 135 years since they were founded, but Morgan is their first British & Irish Lion.
He is also the one and only Welshman left on the tour and when he comes on to the field, 54 minutes into Saturday’s second Test at the MCG, the atmosphere quickens inside the clubhouse. There is a swell of quiet pride and a little anxiety, too, as he latches on to the pack for his first scrum.
The scrum wheels, the Lions break downfield and all of sudden Morgan’s carrying the ball forward. Someone cries out in all the excitement: “Great scrum, Jac.” And someone else: “See. He’s changed the game already” – and everyone breaks out laughing.
There are about 30 people in here watching and there are about 30 out there watching. “Some people were saving up two years for this trip,” says the club’s chair, Tom Addey. They started putting money aside when Morgan was made Wales’s co-captain in 2023 and the prospect of his being picked for this began to feel like a real possibility.
Addey points out the spot they saved on the wall where they are planning to hang his Lions jersey, next to the TV screen, and shows off the little Grogg figurine of Morgan in his Lions kit, which came in when Morgan was named in the team on Thursday morning, “a gift for the Cwmtwrch clubhouse”.
It is a new building, Addey’s pride and joy, two storeys with a gym and a physio room. The club moved up from the bottom of the hill five years ago. They’re strictly amateur. “We don’t pay, we’re adamant about that,” says Addey, and they put out only two teams, one’s in the bottom division (“and by God are we trying to get out of it”) and the other’s an occasional XV.
“We’re not the wealthiest club, but we have massive heart,” Addey says. Most times, I guess, he would use the Welsh. Calon. The word was given to Cwmtwrch, and all of Welsh rugby, by Clive Rowlands, who captained, coached and managed Wales in the 60s, 70s and 80s. There never was a prouder Welshman.
“Clive would pace the room, fag in hand, ranting and raving,” wrote Phil Bennett, who played under him. “He would demand you performed not just for yourself, but for you father, your mother, your long-lost aunt, the miners, the schoolchildren – in effect the whole Welsh nation”.
Rowlands lived his life here. His son, daughter and wife still do. His grandson used to play in the junior team with Morgan. Rowlands’s own boy, Dewi, is here watching, on a stool at the back of the barroom. His dad managed the Lions team that beat Australia in 1989; Dewi, who was 22, went along with him.
“That was a proper amateur tour,” he says. “The guys were making their own T-shirts to sell to raise money for the beer kitty.” Not Dewi, he pinched his from the old man’s hotel minibar. There are a lot of good stories about his dad. I ask him which of them are true.
“All of them,” he says. His favourite is the time Princess Anne asked Clive which part of Wales he came from. “A little place called Cwmtwrch.” She replied, without missing a beat: “Upper or Lower?”
The village was split in two by the old railway line. “I always like to say we’re the first regional team,” says Addey. “The Lions meant everything to Dad,” Dewi says, before pausing for a moment. “Well, not as much as Wales. But everything else.”
Ian McGeechan will tell you it was Rowlands who taught him how to run a Lions tour. “He’d have the beers poured for us, ready and waiting at the end of the day.”
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Rowlands is keeping one eye on the game, the way old salts do, but down in the front the younger club members are glued to it. One of them is leaning forward on the edge of his seat, though he is so big it may be the only way he could fit into it. His name is Morgan Morse and if you don’t know him already you will soon.
Morse is on the books at the Ospreys, where he plays alongside Morgan. He has played 24 games for the national age grades and will break into the senior team any day. Like Morgan, he grew up here at Cwmtwrch and still comes back to carry the water bottles for the first team when he is not playing the region.
“My favourite memories of this place are all of the feeling of winning games with my mates,” he said. “We’d all be in school talking about the game on the Monday morning, which made the week a hell of a lot more enjoyable.”
A lot of the lads are decked out in Morse’s spare Ospreys kit. When the club switched ball manufacturers, he snaffled a bunch of the old ones to bring here, only to get a call, a few days later, from someone at the club saying that they all had tracking devices in and could he please bring them back.
These are hard times in Welsh rugby. Morse has a year to run on his contract, but given the WRU’s recent proposal to cut the number of regions, cannot be sure if he will have a team to play for this time next year. But wherever he ends up, he will always have a club.
It is the 80th minute and in the clubhouse they are waiting for the final whistle. The referee is just checking to see whether Morgan has committed a foul by going in for a clear-out in the run-up to the match-winning try and everyone is shouting at the ref through the TV. His voice comes back over the loudspeakers.
“No foul.” The camera closes in on Morgan, who flashes a big thumbs up, and the place erupts. “Fucking brilliant.”
