Maybe the most successful Wales positional switch of all came after Clive Rowlands buckled up his seat-belt and sat next to Gerald Davies on a flight from Wellington to Auckland more than 50 years ago.
“Fancy a salted peanut, Ger?” the Wales head coach at the time may or may not have said. The trip lasted barely an hour, but in that time Rowlands managed to persuade his moustachioed travelling companion to make the move from centre, from where he had already won 12 Wales caps, to wing.
The words he used were in fact not altogether super-sweet to a man who evidently wasn’t entirely convinced about the merits of what was being proposed. “He might just as well have wielded a knuckle duster as talk as he did with honey on his tongue,” Davies later recalled, tongue no doubt in cheek. “There was hardly any point in carrying on with my protests.” So the deal was done.
