Brandon Cripps has never been a man to shirk a fight. As a teak-hard prop, he didn’t know the meaning of taking a backward step during a 25-year career that brought him more than 650 appearances for “every club in Gwent apart from Newport”.
He represented Wales B and the Barbarians, but a full cap never came his way, a perceived injustice that still rankles with him deeply. There were plenty of brutal battles on the field, while he also spent more than two decades in that toughest of worlds down the pits, living through the miner’s strike of the mid 1980s.
But, for the last 16 years, he has faced a battle of a very different nature. In 2006, he suffered a horrendous leg injury in an industrial accident, with his left tibia and fibula shattered into 27 pieces.
