"It’s red, it’s round and it weighs about five ounces, in case you were wondering," the Welsh fast bowler Greg Thomas is said to have reminded Viv Richards as the legendary West Indian endured a rare struggle to put bat on ball.
Thomas’ Glamorgan team-mates were said to have sighed.
Playing for Somerset, Richards promptly smashed the next delivery clean out of the ground.
"You know what it looks like, Greg. Go and find it," the great man retorted.
Sledging doesn’t always end well for those who start it.
If cricket is renowned for the art, rugby has its fair share of verbals and trash-talking as well.
We've racked our minds to come up with some of the most memorable Five/ Six Nations sledges involving Welsh players.
O’Driscoll and Henson clash in Cardiff, 2005
It was 2005 and Brian O’Driscoll evidently wasn’t overly fond of Welsh rugby’s then new superstar, Gavin Henson.
Matters came to a head on the final weekend of the Six Nations when Wales played Ireland in Cardiff needing a win to complete their first Grand Slam in 27 years.
Ireland centre Kevin Maggs had hit Henson with a heavy tackle early on and O’Driscoll came in to try to effect a possession steal.
Henson alleged in his book, My Grand Slam Year: “Instead of just trying to rip the ball clear, he also decided to pull my hair and tried to gouge my eye for good measure.
“‘How do you like that, you cocky little f****r?’ There was a real flash of anger in his eyes.
“It may have been something I’d said in the build-up. I’d probably been asked the question: ‘Do you think you’ll beat Ireland?’ To which I’d probably said: ‘Yes.’
“Whatever it was, Brian seemed to lose it.”
Late in the game, according to Henson, after an incident that might have looked as if he’d tripped Geordan Murphy as the Ireland full-back was scoring, O’Driscoll ran over and shouted at him: “You’re a f*****g w****r!”
O’Driscoll wasted no time vehemently denying he gouged Henson.
But it’s not clear if the pair could ever be classed as good mates.
The scrum-half and the singer
Here’s an unlikely one, pitching one of Welsh rugby’s most fierce competitors of the past 20 years against a singer in a boy band.
The unlikely joust between Wales scrum-half Mike Phillips and One Direction’s Irish singer Niall Horan occurred in 2014.
Phillips had become involved in an angry confrontation with countless Irish players after Paddy Jackson scored a late try in a 26-3 Irish win. While watching the climax of the game, Horan posted on Twitter: "Mike Philips is like a child throwing his toys out of the pram!
"His attitude is terrible, looks like a right arrogant idiot."
It didn’t take long for Phillips to return serve, sending out a tweet that read: “Come down to training in the week big boy.
"Bring the rest of The Beatles with you."
Touche.
A year or so later Phillips and Horan met up in New York and sparks didn’t fly. In fact, the pair had a night on the town and got on famously.
"There were hundreds of girls outside every pub we were going too," Phillips later reported. “We had to leave through the back doors of these places.
"He was massive there. He was like me in St Clears!"
Thomas goes full Trevor, 1969
Time-travel back to 1969 and the annual rugby joust between Wales and England, with the Welsh pack leader that day having been passed some useful intelligence on a key member of the opposition team.
Brian Thomas had heard that the visitors’ scrum-half Trevor Wintle could be less than steel-nerved under pressure. So at the first line-out the call was to go up — “Trevor!” The whole Welsh pack was then to descend on this diminutive figure.
Everything went to plan and Wintle was duly buried beneath a mound of Welsh forwards. Nor did it go well for him thereafter. “He had a nightmare,” one Wales international later reported, “and we won 30-9, with Maurice Richards scoring four tries”.
Maybe it would have been a difficult afternoon for Wintle, anyway, with the Welsh class of the 1970s starting to assemble.But Thomas’ call doubtless planted a seed of uncertainty in his mind. “Brian was good at that,” the international quoted above added.
Meek gives Morris the three feathers
The build-up to the 1993 Wales-England match had been marked by the England set-up parading Crickhowell-born Dewi Morris in his white jersey.
An intensely passionate occasion in Cardiff saw Wales survive a forward pounding before emerging 10-9 victors courtesy of a Ieuan Evans try and a huge defensive effort.
With Wales hanging on to their single-point advantage late in the game, Morris made a comment to Nigel Meek, with the hooker responding by clutching the three feathers on his jersey and showing them to his opponent while delivering a few well-chosen words.
“We were fired up,” he later recalled. "That’s why I grabbed the badge on my jersey and pointed at it after Dewi growled something at me following a ruck or a maul.
"It got the crowd going. Dewi had been called a turncoat for playing for England but the truth of the matter is he had never played adult rugby in Wales and was an unknown.
"He was as Welsh as I was and came from the other side of the mountain from where I live.
"It was just circumstances. He had gone to college in England, which resulted in him playing for them. I never had any animosity towards him."
Brian Moore and Andy Allen agree to disagree
There is an iconic England v Wales rugby picture taken at Twickenham in 1990 which shows Brian Moore roaring at Welsh lock Andy Allen after another home try on a day when it positively rained touchdowns for the men in white.
The assumption is Moore isn’t saying anything along the lines of “unlucky, kind sir — your team really didn’t deserve that. Good luck for the rest of the championship.”
And so it goes that Allen is captured flicking a V-sign at the then England hooker.
Sometimes sledging can be funny — Allen might not agree, but Moore has his moments as a semi-humorous sort, with the thinking being that when he dished out a bit of on-pitch flak it occasionally came laced with a dash of wit.
Or not.
Whatever, on this occasion Allen felt moved to respond.
The last word went to England, who ran out 34-6 victors on the day.
Welcome to Test rugby
Shane Williams came up against Austin Healey just three games into his Wales career. It was always going to be a learning experience.
“He didn't shut up for 80 minutes,” Williams later reported."I remember thinking 'no wonder my family don't like the English if this guy is anything to go by'.
"He completely put me off my game. He absolutely mentally broke me. He really did.
"He was telling me: ‘Come on Williams, I thought you had gas. You're much slower than I thought you'd be.’
"By the end, I was looking at the touchline thinking: 'I've had enough now, he's absolutely broken me.’
"He's like that — he's still chopsy. But it's banter and that's how it goes."
Dallaglio taunts Wales
It was the England-Wales game at Twickenham that ended with Lawrence Dallaglio walking past the visitors’ dressing room and blow-torching those inside with a blast of industrial language. “You’ve been di**ed!” Dallaglio is said to have shouted. What could be said in reply? Wales had been well and truly trounced, losing 60-26 to their arch rivals.
England had scored more tries in one afternoon than Wales had conceded against them throughout the entire 1970s. The visitors to Twickenham that day had no option other than to take it on the chin.
In his autobiography, Number Nine Dream, Rob Howley wrote: “As anyone who has ever played in an England-Wales game will tell you, the rivalry and intensity is unparalleled. It certainly doesn’t need the players or the pressmen to throw fuel on the fire. Unfortunately, that is what happened in the two weeks leading up to the game. “It was also the reason why Lawrence Dallaglio walked past our dressing room after the match shouting ‘You’ve been d****d!’ as loud as he could.” Howley went on to chronicle how a Wales player had offered the opposition ammunition by referring to an England player as a “big mouth” before the game.“The consequences were inevitable,” said Howley.
Mike Brown v Scott Williams
Mike Brown enraged Wales supporters by laughing in Scott Williams’ face after the centre had been stopped by a try-saving Sam Underhill tackle in the 2018 encounter at Twickenham.
Brown, a chap for whom the word ‘spikey’ might have been invented, later claimed Williams had engaged in some winding up on his own against English players.
“I wasn't going to say, 'Ah, sorry mate, unlucky you didn't score there',” said a player who, it’s fair to say, Welsh fans never fully took to their hearts.
"Do you think that during the course of the game, myself and other England players weren't getting the same? Of course we were.
"Do you think Scott Williams hasn't been giving it big to one of our players? I know for a fact he was.
"Do you not think they would have been straight in my face if I had dropped a high ball? Of course they would. That's rugby. I love it.
"You're naive if you think other players aren't doing this. People just pick up on certain people."I don't hold that against Scott Williams. Do I respect him? Yes.”
Just in that single moment, such respect wasn’t wildly obvious.
One more from over the garden fence...
The 2012 England v Wales game proved feistier than usual, coming just months after Warren Gatland’s team had reached the World Cup semi-finals while their neighbours had been panned in the press after a campaign blighted by off-pitch controversies, from a group of players attending a club that was hosting a dwarf-throwing contest — “not one player threw a dwarf,” said Mike Tindall later, putting the case for the defence — to Manu Tuilagi jumping off a ferry in Auckland, prompting “Manu overboard” headlines.
With the hosts more than a bit keen to impose themselves, perhaps determined to take their neighbours down a peg or three. “After you, Claude” wasn't heard once that afternoon.
“They were getting into us verbally from the off,” recalled Sam Warburton in Ross Harries’ epic book Behind the Dragon, Playing Rugby for Wales. “I remember one breakdown when we gave away a penalty a penalty for not releasing, and I stood up to a chorus of ‘have some of that, you Welsh c***s’. “I realised then that they did not like us, and they wanted to beat us badly.
“It’s all handshakes at the end of the game, but it was serious business out there.That kind of sledging just fuels the fire. I love it.” Nor did it end there.
As Rhys Priestland headed for the sin-bin at one point, English lock Mouritz Botha sent him on his way with a comment that suggested the Welshman had just lost his side the game.
The fly-half laughed last, however, with Wales winning the Triple Crown encounter. “What did you say again?” Priestland is said to have asked Botha afterwards.
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