‘I WAS THERE’ – Glanmor Grififths on Wales v South Africa 1999

The men in green had been coming to Wales since the great Paul Roos led them on their first tour of Europe in 1906. Wales had never beaten them. The first battle was at St Helen’s, Swansea, on 1 December, 1906, two weeks short of a year since the 1905 All Blacks had been toppled in Cardiff. Wales had won their previous 11 home games, but South Africa arrived having won 18 of their previous 20 games on tour. Their only defeat to that point had come against Scotland.

The Springboks triumphed 11-0 with their skipper, Roos, admitting after the game “we had never hoped for such a win.” Those words might have been echoed by the Welsh captain, Rob Howley, some 93 years later!

The first meeting had been as part of a tour, but in 1999 the game against Gary Teichmann’s world champions was a one off match that turned into one of the greatest days in the history of Welsh sport. It wasn’t just about what happened on the pitch, it was the whole story of how they actually got a pitch into a half-built stadium to get the game played.

The Welsh Rugby Union was in the throes of building a new home for its heroes. The game against the Springboks took place on 26 June and the clock was ticking with the opening game of the 1999 Rugby World Cup, hosted by Wales, rapidly approaching on 1 October.

Graham Henry may have masterminded a wonderful Welsh victory on the pitch, but off it the whole occasion was orchestrated by one of the stand-out figures of rugby administration in Wales, Glanmor Griffiths.

Now in his eighties, and living with Parkinson’s Disease, the man who was Treasurer, Chairman and President of the WRU, as well as being known as ‘Baron von Hard Hat’ of the Millennium Stadium by the on-site work force, still recalls the day Wales finally beat South Africa, 29-19.

GLANMOR’S GREATEST DAY

Where do I begin in telling a story about a vision and building that has transformed Welsh rugby and delivered a financial return of almost £3 billion to the Welsh capital since it was built 21 years ago? And don’t forget it came in on an overall budget of £130m.

You had to go back to 1994 for the first discussions about what we were going to do with the old National Ground, Cardiff Arms Park. Famous it might have been, but it was getting tired and out of date. The capacity was only 49,000 – 42,000 seated and 7,000 standing – and the hospitality and toilet facilities were simply not good enough.

Some wanted to tinker around with the existing stadium, but the bigger plan was to create something that would be the envy of the sporting world. To get to Plan B we needed the full support of the WRU clubs.

Their vote in backing our brave new world should never be underestimated. They knew money would be tight until the stadium began to deliver, but just look at what the returns are these days the game against New Zealand last week netting £4m.

Many thought we would never get to the stage of being able to host the World Cup at our new home, never mind play a game in June. I often felt there were some who wanted to see the project fail, but the team I had working around me simply wouldn’t contemplate failure. Dick Larsen, Vernon Pugh, Pat Thompson and Russell Goodway were key characters in helping to deliver what was at the time the biggest engineering project in Europe.

With the World Cup being hosted for the first time by Wales we knew we had to test the capacity of the stadium as we built it in order to get the required safety certificate. We invited South Africa, France, Canada and the USA to come to Cardiff to play at the new Millennium Stadium. Well, in the case of the Springboks, a half-built stadium!

The impact Graham Henry was having on the Welsh team at this time was transformational. There was that epic win over England at Wembley in the final Five Nations tournament and then a winning tour of Argentina. But when I told him we would be playing South Africa and France he said joking ‘are you trying to kill off this Welsh team?’ They were two of the best teams in the world at the time. Graham was another fantastic ally and under him things were beginning to look brighter on the pitch. The only problem was we didn’t have a home pitch for them to play on as yet!

The project team and our wonderful construction work force from the John Laing Group knew we had to pull a rabbit out of the hat to stage a game in June. We’d turned the pitch through 90 degrees, taken down four buildings surrounding the old Arms Park footprint and flooded the centre of Cardiff with more than 1,000 workers. To play the game we had to de-rig all the cranes and somehow get a pitch into the middle of the biggest building site in Wales.

As far as the pitch was concerned, we settled on a palletised system that was being used successfully in America. It had to be something of this kind in order to get a pitch in and out for those early games. My big concern was where to grow the grass. Might it be sabotaged in the build up to the World Cup if it was public knowledge where it was being grown and stored? In a bid to go for maximum security we approached RAF St Athan and got them to store the pallets and grow the grass between their runways. They had a perimeter fence and armed guards – perfect!

It took dozens of low loaders to bring the pallets into the stadium. Once the biggest jig-saw in the world had been pieced together, they had to unlock it and take it back to St Athan only hours after the game had finished. To say I was nervous would be an understatement.

We had to play four games with increased capacities in order to get to the full 74,500 safety certificate for the opening game of the World Cup. We only had space for 28,000 against South Africa, but none of them, me included, will ever forget what they saw that day.

The pitch came during the week of the game and on the Thursday I learned that the workmen were taking bets on who was going to kick the first points through the new posts. I wanted to ensure the first person to put the ball between the uprights was a Welshman and so I got Neil Jenkins to come down and do the honours with all the workers watching him. They gave him a huge roar, but nothing like the roar he received a few days later when he actually became the first points scorer at the Millennium Stadium when he kicked a penalty to put Wales ahead in only the second minute of the match.

Before the kick-off the Webb Ellis Cup was brought onto the field by the man who had received it from Nelson Mandela in 1995, Francois Pienaar, and our own Gareth Edwards. That moment sent a shiver down my spine and I realised that the confidence with which I had told the world we would have a stadium ready in time was not misplaced. It was a taste of what was to come a few months later when the trophy was presented by HRH Queen Elizabeth to Australia’s winning captain, John Eales.

The game was the icing on the cake of a day that took incredible planning behind the scenes and proved, as we approached the end of the millennium, that Wales could be a forward thinking, progressive nation by taking on what many people thought was impossible. The game against South Africa was the first step to securing our safety certificate, yet still many people were predicting we would never be ready for the opening game of the World Cup. How wrong they were!

The air of excitement and expectation that filled the stadium on that great day was palpable. The whole of Wales was on display and Rob Howley’s team made sure we were all able to puff out our chests and feel proud of what we were achieving. The club’s had signed off on the WRU’s vision and now it was becoming a reality.

The Millennium Stadium was up and running and the rest, as they say, is history!

But there was no time to relax. We were all back in the stadium the next day ensuring the pitch was out, the cranes went back up and work continued. There were further deadlines to be met  . . . or else!

21 August: Wales v Canada – 50,000
28 August : Wales v France – 62,500
30 August: Wales XV v USA – 35,000
1 October: Wales v Argentina – World Cup opener – 74,500

Where would Welsh rugby be now without the Millennium Stadium? Who knows. What you can point to is increased confidence, finance, visibility and ambition because we built the greatest rugby stadium in the world. And all at a tenth of the cost of the new Wembley . . . and with a fully retractable roof!

Yet, it was under the bright, sunny sky of that great day in the summer of 1999 that everything and anything seemed possible. Just like that pallets, the pieces of the project began to fall perfectly into place. I slept well that night!