“Everybody who wasn’t Welsh became Welsh by the end of that night”
When the 2015 Rugby World Cup pool fixtures were announced, Emyr James and Danielle Kavanagh had some serious soul-searching to do.
The young London-based couple, who got engaged Christmas Eve 2013, were due to be married in Pencoed House on the outskirts of Cardiff on Saturday 26th September. The hours and hours of smooth planning and minute attention to detail were about to encounter a significant challenge.
Sat in their flat in Hampstead in late spring, Emyr received a notification on his mobile that he’d been anticipating with equal parts dread and excitement.
“Danielle, the World Cup fixtures are out,” he said, scanning across the list of Pool A games.
His heart dropped. “Oh b******s, Wales are playing the day we’re getting married.”
“Who are we playing?” asked Danielle, though she felt she already knew the answer from Emyr’s reaction.
“I don’t want to say…”
Any hopes that it may have been Fiji or Uruguay were dashed. It would be England. At Twickenham. On their wedding day.
“When he said England my first response was ‘well, we’ll have to change the date or nobody’s going to come to our wedding!’” recalls Danielle, who hails from Burry Port, a short drive from Llanelli.
Anybody with even a passing knowledge of wedding planning knows that it’s easier to move a mountain than to move a date. If there was a crumb of comfort, it was that the game would be kicking off seven hours after they had said their vows.
“We knew we’d have to embrace it and make it part of the evening. We ran with it and booked a big screen,” says Emyr, who played Varsity rugby at Cardiff University and later for Rumney. “On the invites we stated clearly, ‘Yes, we know Wales are playing on this day. Yes, the game will be shown’.”
“I’m not embracing anything!” was, understandably, Danielle’s first reaction. She would come around to Emyr’s way of thinking, though. “The late kick-off was a bit of luck because it meant we had enough time to share our wedding day. We had the first half, then Wales had the second.”
Any other forms of evening entertainment would ultimately take a back seat to the drama that was to unfold at Twickenham. “Danielle was worried that the two per cent of guests who didn’t like rugby would be bored because they wouldn’t have anything to do,” Emyr says. “So we had an ice cream cart pitched up outside. In the end, the guy had to come inside to hand ice creams out to people because nobody was outside! Literally everybody was inside watching the rugby. Most people didn’t realise he was there.”
Even those guests who weren’t fans of the sport were swept up in the nerve-shredding events unfolding in the match. Danielle says: “My boss came down from London, and she was only ever into football – she couldn’t believe how incredible the atmosphere was. She’d never sat and watched a rugby game. They just lapped it up.
“The poor DJ must have only entertained five people for the first two-and-a-half hours. And those five people were my cousin’s children!”
For her part, she couldn’t bring herself to watch the match – which seemed for the best when the hosts led an injury-struck Wales by 10 points with half an hour left. “I love rugby, but I didn’t want to be stressed on my wedding day, hoping that Wales beat England of all teams! I knew I’d get far too into it.”
Her friend, a doctor from Birmingham, later told her he was so terrified he’d be rumbled as an Englishman in a tent surround by impassioned Welsh rugby fans that “he started to put on a Welsh accent”.
Danielle was on a near-empty dancefloor when scrum-half-turned-wing Lloyd Williams put in a genius cross-field kick for fellow nine Gareth Davies to score the famous try. “I heard the tent erupt as if it would fall off its hinges,” she remembers. “I walked in with my friend Christy, who was six months pregnant, and everybody was going wild. We had to leave for the sake of our own safety!”
Emyr is quick to clarify that the success of his wedding day wasn’t riding on what happened during 80 minutes of a World Cup match at Twickenham. “For us, it was the happiest day ever anyway, but most of our guests would have been gutted if Wales had lost – especially against England,” he reasons. “One of my best men, who is English, came up to me afterwards and said, ‘For the sake of the wedding, it was the right result. I’ll pretend I’m Welsh for the rest of the evening’.
“It was as if everybody who wasn’t Welsh became Welsh by the end of that night. Rugby in Wales can have that effect on people. It brings everyone together.”
Five years later, and the couple are the proud new parents to Efa James, who was born in May at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Despite her birthplace, there will be no question of who little Efa will support come the next Wales v England fixture, they say with great confidence. “The biggest split loyalty will be Scarlets or Blues,” adds Emyr.
This weekend, they’re expecting the usual messages from friends. “We get so many people messaging us half-jokingly saying ‘Happy Wales Beating England Day’ instead of ‘Happy Anniversary’,” says Danielle. “Our anniversary is forever tied in with that result, but I don’t suppose that’s a bad thing at all.”
