Ask John Perkins about a rugby career which brought him 18 Wales caps in the mid-1980s and he is disarmingly frank.
“I was never a great player," he declares. "That’s not false modesty, it’s just realism. I was small for a second row, 6ft 2ins. I never had blistering pace, my ball skills were not great. I always say I had the eye-hand co-ordination of a chicken with its head cut off! But one thing I did have was a fair amount of determination and I was prepared to do what I was told to do.”
That steely resolve eventually took Perkins to the international stage at the age of 28, in 1983, and for the next three years he was a virtual ever present in the Wales team, forging a highly effective partnership of contrasting strengths with Bob Norster. While Norster was the supreme athlete in the middle of the lineout, Perkins was the man contesting ferociously at the front, bringing his physical presence to bear both there and at the coal-face of scrum, ruck and maul.
READ MORE: The rugby tales of Allan Martin, the goal-kicking Wales second row
Born, raised and schooled in Blaenavon, he started out with Newbridge Youth ahead of linking up with his home town club and then joining Pontypool in the mid-70s. That’s where he came under the tutelage of one Ray Prosser.
“Pross had total belief in the way he coached the game and his technical grasp of the game was a lot better than what a lot of people gave him credit for,” says Perkins.
“He knew that the most important thing in the game was possession. If you’ve got the ball, the opposition can’t score, no matter how bloody good they are. That’s something Welsh coaches of today would be well advised to take on board. The number of times we give away possession lightly in Wales is unbelievable. Pross knew how to win the ball and the importance of keeping it. We may not have been the world’s most exciting team using that ball, but we were bloody good at stopping teams that thought they could use it!”
In his early years at the club, Perkins found himself packing down behind the legendary Pontypool front row of Charlie Faulkner, Bobby Windsor and Graham Price. As with many players of his era, there are tales to tell of the larger-than-life Windsor.
“He is the greatest hooker I have ever seen, from any country. Bob was great fun to be around, he was a great character, but it was an even greater privilege to play with him.
“He was a bit of a charmer with the refs too. I’ll never forget this one game we were playing against Cardiff and their tighthead, John Dixon, was taking the scrum down and dropping Charlie, with the ref blowing up. After about three times, you could hear Bobby’s voice through the scrum. He says ‘Perky, if he does that again, kick the b*****d’s head off’.
“Now the referee was a bloke called Don Hughes from Newbridge, who was always a bit of a character himself. He said ‘Look here Windsor, there’s only one b*****d on this field and that’s me’. And Bobby, still pinned between Pricey and Charlie, goes ‘Well actually Don, I f***ing meant you!’”
Perkins formed something of a telepathic relationship with Windsor. “Bob was a good thrower-in, we got on well at the lineout.” But he didn’t have the height of a number of his rivals. “I would have had to have a pair of platform shoes on to make 6ft 3ins!”. So how exactly did he hold his own at the lineout?
“Well, you could get to grips with the opposition in those days. I definitely wouldn’t be able to do it today. You could compete in the lineouts, which you can’t now. The big guys win out now. But in my day, the smaller fellas could actually compete. There was more contact allowed in the lineout, but that cuts both ways.
“I remember playing against the England second row Maurice Colclough when he was with Swansea. He kept on putting his hand up in the lineout and I always thought this was disrespectful to me. It was like ‘Hang on, I’m here too.’ I used to get my hair off a little bit with this. He kept on doing it and in the end I took a swing at him. The swing missed, he grabbed hold of me and lifted me in a bear hug.
"I am desperately trying to clout him, but I couldn’t get any traction because my feet were about eight inches off the floor. What really hurt me was Maurice slung me out of the lineout and said ‘Leave me alone, little man’. If I could have grabbed hold of him, I think I could have throttled him.
“John Morgan, up at Maesteg, was always a tough opponent too. He was a little shorter than me, but bloody hell he could jump. He was a tough old boy. I knew if I raised a lump on him, I would be sure to be receiving a return one.”
It was pretty much the law of the jungle at times back then, but does Perkins view rugby in his time as having been violent?
“No, not really. You would come off with a few lumps and bumps and bruises. It was a bit rough and tough, but it was ok. You would get some real evil buggers about, of course you would. But I didn’t think the game was violent. That’s much too strong a word to use. I just thought you could have fairly rough, tough games. I enjoyed it.
“It’s very rare you would get kicked. It was more often than not you would get what we used to call a good tramping. They would use you as a doormat and try and ruck you out with the ball. I have been guilty of it a little bit myself I suppose, but the All Blacks were buggers for it. If you went down in the ruck situation, they would ruck everything out.”
Perkins speaks from first hand experience, having lined up for Monmouthshire against Graham Mourie’s touring All Blacks at Rodney Parade in 1978.
“I had played a bit of club rugby out in New Zealand, so I knew what the buggers could be like. It was a style of rugby I always greatly admired. I think it was Pross’ experience with the 1959 Lions out there that probably influenced his coaching style and his view on the game.”
Now if you do an internet search on John Perkins, you will often find the words “hard and uncompromising” used to describe him. So, looking back, does he view that as an accurate assessment?
“I think it was reflective of how I may have come over, but if people knew how terrified I was going on the field once or twice perhaps they wouldn’t have the same opinion of me! But the only thing I feared more than my personal safety was failure and not doing well. That’s what drove me on as a player. I didn’t want to fail.
“As I say, I wasn’t a great player, I realise that, but I managed to get on purely through sheer determination. I never had the spatial and tactical awareness of a Terry Cobner, nor the wonderful ball skills of Graham Price, who was a remarkable player. But I did have commitment and just as important as the technical aspect for me was the togetherness of our team, playing for Pontypool.
“We had some outstanding players, with Cobner, Windsor, Pricey and David Bishop. But our philosophy, and this came from Pross, was our whole was a lot better than the sum of the parts and I was very much a supporter of that view.
“The team spirit and camaraderie was very important. I loved the social side of it. I used to drink on a Saturday, I would have a drink on a Wednesday after a midweek game and maybe have a couple of pints on a Sunday to relax, but I wouldn’t drink apart from that and I trained six days a week for 14 years. I would go up on the mountain or do some circuits out on the pitch.”
So what about the most daunting destinations in Wales at the time? “Pontypool Park!” he replies, as sharp as a tack, before continuing: “The Gnoll was always a hard place to go, Maesteg, Abertillery, Cross Keys. You know what? Every away game was a hard game. It was all hard work. We had a domestic structure that was the envy of the northern hemisphere.”
Perkins’ efforts in the club game saw him selected for Wales B in 1977 and 1978, but he then “drifted off the radar”, before hitting a “little bit of a purple patch” around 1982, to use his own words.
“You read the papers for one thing and that’s to see if your own name is in it. I was receiving some good write-ups at the time and I thought I might just be in with a shout.”
In November 1982, he played for a Wales XV in an uncapped match against the New Zealand Maori at the National Ground in Cardiff, sharing in a 25-19 victory. But in the subsequent trial match at Neath's Gnoll - never his favourite venue - it just didn’t happen for him.
“I was pretty anaemic, pretty non-descript and I didn’t get picked for the first game of the Five Nations against England. I thought ‘Oh s**t, that’s my chance gone’. But Wales drew 13-13 and a draw at home against England was almost regarded as an absolute disaster for Wales back then. How times change?”
So it was that Perkins made his Test debut away to Scotland just a few days short of his 29th birthday, playing his part in a 19-15 victory.
“It was the greatest moment of my rugby life. I had this burning desire to want to play for Wales and that day, up in Murrayfield, things couldn’t have gone any better for me.”
Next came a home win over Ireland and then a first trip out to Paris to take on France, an experience he remembers vividly to this day.
“We were waiting in the tunnel and there was this incredible noise out on the pitch, the fireworks are going off, the cockerels are squealing, the Dax band is playing. The French team were lined up about five paces away from us.
“My nerves are playing me up at this point and I look across and see this guy about 6ft 6ins with a headband over his eyes. He’s looking straight at me and there’s murder in his eyes. I’m thinking ‘Oh s**t, I’m only a boy from Blaenavon, what the bloody hell am I doing here?’ I was terrified at that particular point, but then when you get out on the pitch, that’s all gone and you get into work mode. You go and do your stuff.”
Perkins did his stuff to such good effect that he established himself as a permanent fixture in the Wales side, forming a boilerhouse double act with Norster, who he packed down alongside for 13 of his first 14 caps. He was seen by some as the enforcer of the partnership, so what are his thoughts on that?
“Enforcer? There were times when I needed a bloody enforcer! It’s true to say Bob was a polished middle of the lineout jumper. He was a great player. Perhaps my role then was more of the rucking and mauling, the driving around the field sort of player. I certainly wouldn’t put it that I was the enforcer. I deny that!
“I come back to what I said before. If I overstepped the mark once or twice, it was more the fear of failure than a wish to be overly physical. Yeah, there were times when I did things that the ref thought I shouldn’t have done. But rugby was a physical challenge then and imposing your personality on somebody was a big part of the game.
"If you are not prepared to step up to the plate and impose your personality on the opposition, you are not going to get very far in the game. If you just stand in the lineout and let your opposite number jump and don’t compete, he will do that all day. So there was this element of imposing yourself physically on the opposition. That I can’t deny.”
Perkins feels his best game for Wales was against England in Cardiff in April 1985 when he played a prominent role in a 24-15 victory on a day when a certain Jonathan Davies made his debut. When you ask him for the best players he played alongside, he responds in typically colourful fashion, saying “Cor, you ask some hard questions! You are a bugger” before name-checking Jeff Squire, Terry Holmes, Graham Price and David Bishop.
His final game for his country came at home to France in March 1986, taking his haul of caps up to 18.
“I can’t believe I had 18, to be honest with you. I had a burning ambition to play for Wales, but I always knew deep down that I was up against it because, as I said, I was an ordinary player. I owe a fair bit to the fact I played with a good team.
“I feel so grateful that I was able to play those 18 games. When I started playing for Pontypool, my dreams of playing for Wales were misty and in the distance. There were disappointments. I would have loved to have been a British Lion and gone to New Zealand in 1983 because I felt it was a country I could have competed in as their players weren’t that big in those days. But that disappointment pales into insignificance with the gratitude I feel for having got where I did.”
After playing some 535 games for Pooler, Perkins finally hung up his boots in 1987, going on to coach the club for some five years ahead of a spell as Wales U21s team manager in the late 1990s, a role he really enjoyed. Away from rugby, he worked as a technical manager for Doncasters, in Blaenavon, a company which manufactures products for the aerospace industry. Retired now for six years, he lives near Usk. So, as he looks back on it all, aged 68, what's his abiding reflection?
“I have loved it. I would not have changed a thing.”
And you can’t ask for much more than that.
