If Wales coach Wayne Pivac has some tough selection calls to make for the game with Ireland this week, he should spare a thought for a number of his predecessors who have had to arbitrate in some of Welsh rugby's most fierce rugby rivalries.
The competition between players occasionally involved individuals who were mates off the pitch.
At other times it featured those who would never have contemplated sharing Best Friends bracelets under any circumstances.
Here are some of the most intense Wales rivalries over the years.
Neil Jenkins v Arwel Thomas
When the South Wales Evening Post ran a telephone poll in the 1990s over whether Neil Jenkins or Arwel Thomas should play for Wales at fly-half, the result was conclusive.
Thousands voted with almost 90 percent backing Thomas.
Of course, we must qualify matters and say the Post’s circulation area largely covers south-west Wales and west Wales, the areas where Thomas played most of his club rugby.
But large swathes of the public did enjoy his unpredictability and invention.
Jenkins was a genius goal-kicker and a master distributor who could also run a game as well as anyone.
The pair were different types of players and theirs was a genuine rivalry.
It was ended in 2000 when Graham Henry sent on Thomas for Jenkins in an attempt to beat South Africa in Cardiff. It didn’t go well as scoring opportunities went awry with Thomas seemingly under pressure to prove himself in the small time-frame allotted to him.
The then Swansea RFC player didn’t play for Wales again.
But the Jenkins v Thomas battle for the Wales No. 10 shirt was never bitter.
Years later, Thomas told WalesOnline : “Neil’s a nice guy. And what a servant he’s been to Welsh rugby. I have nothing but positives to say about him.”
Mike Watkins v Alan Phillips
Players who had different plus points, again.
‘Spikey’ Watkins was a hard-case hooker and a leader who might have fancied his chances if the whole Russian army were lined up against him.
Phillips was mobile and dynamic, with a golden throwing arm. Each fine players then, but Watkins didn’t exactly warm to his fellow No. 2, telling WalesOnline in an interview in 2020: “I sat 17 times on the bench for Wales without getting on.
“Bobby (Windsor) would never come off, the b*****d! “The only person I was ever on the bench to was Bobby.
“I wouldn’t sit on the bench for that Alan Phillips. Never. Honest, I wouldn’t.”
There was more where that came from, albeit expressed with tongue in cheek.
“I have no regrets,” said Watkins. “Well, perhaps there’s one. When I played for Newport against Cardiff in the 1986 cup final, I booted Alan Phillips in the head and he went off to have stitches. I should have kicked him harder!”
Happy days.
Spikey occasionally ended up on the wrong side of authority and won just four Wales caps, every one as captain, while Phillips played 18 times for his country.
Garin Jenkins v Jonathan Humphreys
Two No. 2s, again, battling for the right to be Wales number one in their position.
If Jenkins felt fear on a rugby pitch, he did a fine job of masking it. He was also a top-line scrummager.
“Anyone who knows anything about Welsh rugby will know that Garin Jenkins is the best scrummaging hooker in Wales,” a rival club’s head coach said in the 1990s.
The problem for him was that Humphreys had usurped him in the Wales team and was national team captain.
The current Wales forwards coach was a player as gutsy as could be, a man who would think nothing of throwing himself beneath the studs of opposing packs if it could advance the cause of his side by a millimetre.
The competition for the jersey raged over years — the Swansea-based South Evening Post ran a ‘Dump the Humph’ headline at one point — with Jenkins eventually winning back first-choice status under Graham Henry and finishing with 58 caps against his rival’s 35.
Phil Bennett v John Bevan (and David Richards)
No acrimony with this one — it’s unlikely Benny said a bad word about anyone in his entire career.
But, wow, was it controversial.
Bevan was seen as a game controller with acute rugby intelligence, Bennett as a razor-sharp attacker who could destroy opposition defences.
Of course, there was more: Bevan could also cause problems with his running, while Bennett was himself a deep thinker on the game who knew when to rein in his more exuberant tendencies and play a percentage game if the occasion demanded it.
Matters came to a head in January 1976 when Bennett was left out of Wales’ squad to face England at Twickenham with Bevan and Richards picked ahead of him.
Cue a public outcry.
In Llanelli, a veritable state within a state when it comes to matters rugby, the selection sparked particular fury. Nor did it prompt universal approval beyond sospan territory, either.
But fate took a hand, with Bevan and the talented Richards — a gifted runner himself — ruled out by injury, meaning Bennett was drafted back into the set-up.
Bennett was never dropped by Wales again.
Sam Warburton v Justin Tipuric
Two authentic back-row greats, with Warbuton world-class over the ball and courageous and steel-clad in defence.
Tipuric offered Warren Gatland an uncommonly wide skill-set based on creativity, supreme fitness and unbreakable resolve. “I’d say he would probably make the All Blacks,” said Ma’fau Fia not long after coming over from New Zealand to join the Ospreys.
The excellence of the two number seven aces made for a huge debate over an extended period.
It didn’t always have Warren Gatland turning cartwheels, with the New Zealander one having a pop at the media for supposedly trying to create a rift between the players.
There was no rift.
Wales did try at times to accommodate the pair in the same back row, though there was little doubt that as Gatland’s skipper Warburton would have always been first name on the team-sheet.
Gareth Edwards v Ray ‘Chico’ Hopkins
OK, some would deny this was a rivalry.
Edwards, after all, can lay claim to being the greatest rugby player in history, winning all 53 of his Wales caps consecutively and being a key figure in each of his country’s three Grand Slams during the 1970s.
"His performances were superb on the days when it was hard to be good," wrote former England prop Mike Burton.
By contrast, Hopkins won just a solitary Wales cap.
It saw him appear off the bench against England in 1970 and inspire one of the great comeback wins.
He was energy and cockiness compressed into a compact frame and with cheerfulness and good humour off the pitch.
If pretty much everyone else on the planet felt Edwards to be out on in own in any company, Chico thought differently, saying in David Tossell’s book Nobody Does It Better, The Inside Story of the 1970s Wales Rugby Team: “Gareth had good days and he had bad days, but I never felt inferior to him.
“The man in my day who I would say was the difference was Barry John.
“Overall, Gareth probably had the edge on me because he was a 440 yards man, but he was a different player behind a beaten pack and he never played in many games when the pack was beaten.
“When I was out in New Zealand in 1969 and putting him under pressure, they couldn’t decide who they were going to play at half-back and everybody forgets that.
“I sound a right big-head here, but I played six times in his place at the top level, for the Lions and on the Welsh tour, and we didn’t lose a game because we were such a top side.”
It is impossible to dislike Chico and his belief in himself as a player all those years ago.
And you never know if Welsh rugby’s player of the year in 1970 is being totally genuine or not.
But one thing is for sure: he was never awed by Edwards, even if the Cardiff, Wales and Lions legend finished his career with plenty believing him to have been unrivalled as a rugby player - let alone just a scrum-half.
Robert Jones v David Bishop
A rivalry that prompted the Gwent-based South Wales Argus newspaper to hand in a petition to the Welsh Rugby Union calling for Bishop to be included in the national side.
Anyone imagining it would have swayed the Big Five selectors would not have been au fait with the way that group worked.
Jones was a wonderful scrum-half with soft hands and magic feet, while Bishop was a one-man army of a player, a winner who had been consistently inspirational for his club Pontypool.
When Pontypool hosted Swansea at the height of one of the great battles battle for Welsh scrum-half supremacy, Bishop won the game for the Gwent club with two late kicks, one of them a 50-yarder out of the mud on the final whistle.
Afterwards, the locals vented their fury over Bishop’s non-selection for Wales on Jones, who, by common consent, was and is one of the nicest blokes you could wish to meet.
“I was spat at by someone and had a swipe off a woman with an umbrella,” he later told WalesOnline.
“Later, I was chatting to Bish at the bar and some bloke came up and offered me outside.
“Bish actually stepped in and told the guy who wanted to fight me: ‘There’s no need for that.’”
Bishop was too hot for the Wales selectors to handle after figuring in a number of scrapes. Just one cap came his way, while 54 went the way of Jones.
No-one complained in Swansea, where Trebanos icon Jones was revered.
In Pontypool some are probably still baffled.
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