Welsh rugby was at a low ebb when Clive Rowlands, a gritty 24-year-old scrum half, was awarded not just his first international cap but also, more surprisingly, the team captaincy for the first match of the 1963 Five Nations season against England at Cardiff Arms Park.
On a January day so cold that the players remained in the changing rooms for the national anthems, Wales went down to a 13-6 defeat. For Rowlands, who has died aged 85, it was a deceptively disappointing overture to a long and illustrious career that would see him become the only Welshman to play for, coach and manage the national team.
England’s victory was the last they would enjoy in Cardiff until 1991. So complete would Wales’s dominance become that when Rowlands was asked, during the 1987 Rugby World Cup, how the team he now managed would react to their defeat by the All Blacks in the semi-finals, his response was unhesitating: they simply would go, he said, “back to beating England every year”. It was a joke, and it wasn’t. Not everyone took it well.
Nor did Rowlands win friends among opponents and neutrals in his second match as Wales’s captain, against Scotland a month later. Seeking a first victory at Murrayfield in 10 years, he set out to nullify Scotland’s superiority in open play by kicking for touch incessantly, at every opportunity and from any position, a tactic legitimised by the laws of the game as they then stood.
It would be claimed that there were no fewer than 111 lineouts over the 80 minutes. On a pitch swept of snow that morning, the visitors won 6-0 with a penalty kick by their full back, Grahame Hodgson, and a Rowlands drop goal. Spectators derived more entertainment from a snowball fight during the half-time interval.
The unsatisfactory nature of the match hastened a change in the laws to disallow kicking directly into touch from outside what was then the 25-yard (now 22-metre) line. The use of a double layer of forwards at the lineout was also outlawed.
There was far more to Rowlands, however, than cold-blooded exploitation of the rulebook. At a time when a group of selectors named the team and then expected them to get on with it, he became the leader in every respect, passionately invoking Welsh pride during his pre-match talks. In 14 internationals over three seasons, with David Watkins as his half-back partner on every occasion, and such fine players as the winger Dewi Bebb, the No 8 Alun Pask and the full-back prodigy Terry Price, he led Wales to a share of the Five Nations championship (with Scotland) in 1964 and to sole claim to the title and the Triple Crown the following year. Only in the heat of a tour to South Africa did the team wilt.
His nickname was “Top Cat”, borrowed from the popular TV cartoon character, and there was widespread surprise when he lost his place in the side before the 1966 Five Nations season. Rowlands would return as coach from 1968 until 1974, winning the Five Nations in 1969 and the Triple Crown in 1971. Paving the way for a decade of dominance, he created a platform for such future national legends as the halfbacks Gareth Edwards, Barry John and Phil Bennett, the winger Gerald Davies, the full-back JPR Williams, the flanker John Taylor and the No 8 Mervyn Davies.
He was born to Edna and Tom Rowlands, in the village of Upper Cwmtwrch, in the Swansea Valley. Two siblings, a brother and a sister, had already predeceased him when, at the age of eight, Clive was diagnosed with tuberculosis, his education at Maesydderwen school disrupted while he spent two years in a sanatorium at Craig-y-nos, in the mountains above Swansea. Another sister succumbed to the same disease, and his father, a coalminer, died of a lung disease when Clive was 11.
Restored to health, he flourished as a teenager and was chosen to tour South Africa with the Welsh schools rugby team. On completing his national service with the RAF, he taught PE at a school in Cwmbran before switching to become a rep for a pharmaceuticals company. He played club rugby mostly for Pontypool but also for Llanelli and Swansea.
Once his playing and coaching days were over, he accepted a place on the Welsh Rugby Union’s general committee. As manager of the international team in the 1980s, he helped guide Wales to third place in the Rugby World Cup. In 1989, during the year he served as president of the WRU, he took the British and Irish Lions to Australia, where they lost only one match and won the Test series. As a broadcaster in his later years, he retained strong opinions about the organisation and direction of Welsh rugby.
In 1962 he married Margaret Jeffreys. She and their children, Megan and Dewi, survive him.
• Daniel Clive Thomas Rowlands, rugby player, coach and team manager, born 14 May 1938; died 29 July 2023
