My First Cap: Jonathan Thomas

Only a day prior to Wales flying out for their 2003 summer tour of Australia and New Zealand, the young Swansea duo had received an unexpected phone call. Thomas remembers his well: “There was this dour Kiwi voice on the other end of the line: ‘Listen, old son, I’ve been watching your games this year. You’ve been going pretty well, and we’d like you to come on tour and see what you’ve got to offer. We’re leaving tomorrow.’”

Now he and Henson, both twenty, feared they were the victims of an elaborate prank. Temporary relief came when clubmate Ben Evans rang to say the Wales players were in a hotel just up the M4. “It transpired there was a financial dispute going on at the time between the players and the WRU, but me and Gavin didn’t know any of this,” says Thomas. “There was no players’ union at the time so Scott Quinnell, who had retired from international rugby, was acting on the players’ behalf. It came down to a vote: whether or not we were going to strike and not go on tour.

“The senior players were saying we need to stand our ground, and I’m thinking: ‘I would pay money to go on this tour!’ But of course I was young and naïve at that point. I didn’t understand the politics of it all – I was just praying the tour went ahead.”

Fortunately, the dispute was resolved at the eleventh hour. As they boarded the team bus, Hansen barked at the driver to put his foot down. For Thomas, the sense that this whole episode was a vivid anxiety dream only increased when the party missed the flight.

Still somewhat exasperated at the memory, Thomas says: “We had to stay overnight in a hotel near the airport. The next morning [fitness coach] Andrew Hore said, ‘We’re a day behind now so we need to do some fitness before we fly.’”

Finding enough room for an entire rugby squad to train on at Heathrow Airport proved surprisingly straightforward: there was a mile-long stretch of pavement running adjacent to one of the runways. “You couldn’t write it! We were doing interval runs up and down this road while planes were taking off next to us. On the one hand it shows how much the game has moved on, but it also highlights how much Hansen and Hore were excellent in trying to change our mindset.”

The narrative around the team then was that they weren’t professional or fit enough. In 2003, things were starting to change.  “They were instilling good habits in us. For me, all of this was happening within 24 hours. On the plane, I remember sitting down and reflecting on everything that had just gone on – from being selected to then thinking I’m not going, then missing the plane, then doing fitness with all my heroes next to a runway. I thought, ‘Thank God we’re finally going.’”

Level-headed and laidback, Thomas has always carried with him the values cultivated from a childhood spent in rural Pembrokeshire, just three miles from the famous Freshwater West beach.

“I grew up in a little village called Hundleton. My grandfather and my father were both farmers, but my mum was a primary school teacher. That meant there was a balance between me having the freedom of the farm, with very few rules, and my mum instilling some structure in my life.”

As with most youngsters in the county, Thomas was sports mad. If he wasn’t playing in goal for the village team, or in the pack for Pembroke RFC, he could be found at the crease. He even toured Zimbabwe with the Dyfed U15s cricket team in 1997.

“Up until the age of about nine, my summers were spent on the tractor with my father, uncle and grandfather, but all my memories from then onwards are sport,” he says. “It was a lot of commitment for mum and dad driving me all over the country. Growing up in Pembrokeshire back then, if you ever went to a trial or a training centre, it was a minimum of an hour or two hours away.”

Moving to Swansea at eighteen to study sports management was a big move for a boy from a village of fewer than one thousand people, but his horizons were further broadened when he was selected to represent Wales on the sevens circuit in 2001/02.

“From a personal and professional point of view, it was a superb learning experience for me,” says Thomas. “I was travelling the world, learning lot about myself and other cultures, and for a back-rower sevens really forces you to increase your defensive abilities and your skills.”

Just months out from his surprise call from Steve Hansen, Thomas tasted his first success in the national jersey: winning Wales’ first ever Six Nations Grand Slam with the U21 side. “I loved being part of the U21s,” he says cheerfully. “We had a fantastic side with guys like Henson, Nicky Robinson, Huw Bennett, Paul James and Richie Pugh. Up until that age group you were treated a bit like boys but our coaches, Chris Davey and Kevin Hopkins, and team manager Wayne Hall, treated us as men.”

Henson, who in 2001 had been named IRB Young Player of the Year, kicked all of Wales’ points to beat France 16-21 in Nimes to seal the deal. Thomas describes his long-time teammate as “absolutely phenomenal” at that age group: “We’d first met a couple of years earlier playing for Welsh Youth, and he was the ultimate professional even then. I’m actually not surprised how many from that team in general came through and had senior honours.”

Indeed, that Wales U21 side of 2003 was full of aspiring young Swansea players who would soon get the chance to step up at club – and international – level.

It was another Antipodean coach, future Wallabies boss John ‘Knuckles’ Connolly, who helped set a precocious Thomas on his way to international honours. Fresh from success with Stade Francais, Connolly was a hot ticket appointment for Swansea, but more importantly the Queenslander had previously overseen the development of Australian legends such as Tim Horan and John Eales.

Thomas was in the youth set-up admiring senior players including Scott Gibbs, Mark Taylor and Colin Charvis as a powerhouse Swansea team cruised to a record fourth league title in 2001. When Connolly arrived the following year, the club was beset by injuries and a defiant but ageing squad.

“Connolly’s mindset was to give youth an opportunity, in particular three of us who’d come through the age groups together,” Thomas says, referring to himself, Bennett and Henson. “I must have played around twenty games that season, and halfway through he made me captain for a few of them. It was such an honour but also bizarre because I was only nineteen, playing in a team with the likes of Scott Gibbs. So I’d not only got a feel for first team rugby but also leadership.”

A self-confessed rugby romantic, he adored the club game and all that went with it. Running out for the Llanelli-Swansea derby at Stradey Park that season in front of 15,000 people, he didn’t think things could get any bigger for him.

Little did Thomas know that he would soon be running out in front of 64,000 fans in Sydney.

“JT’s been training the house down this week,” was how Steve Hansen responded to an Australian journalist enquiring about this late call-up from Pembrokeshire. It was Thomas’s first inkling that he might not be there just to make up the numbers.

An injury to Gareth Delve in a pre-tour fixture against the Barbarians in Cardiff had opened one door for him, but a knock to Dafydd Jones in training in Sydney was about to open another. “The stars aligned for me, but my mindset has never changed: always train as hard as you can. I realised I was in a privileged position as this youngster on tour, so I was going to do the best I could.”

Hansen called Thomas into his room on the Wednesday of game week and confirmed it: he would be making his Wales debut at blindside against the reigning world champions. He uses the phrase ‘beautifully naïve’ to sum up his response to reaching such a vertiginous height while barely out of his teens.

“There’s one thing that sticks in my memory which would never happen today because social media didn’t exist then,” he says, harking back to a time when mobile phones were still a novelty. “When I got back to the hotel room after captain’s run on the Friday, 150 envelopes had been pushed under my door. They were all faxes of good luck and congratulations from home, mostly people I’d grown up with in Pembrokeshire. To this day I don’t know how they knew where we were staying!”

These days, he notes, it would be 200 tweets conveying those sentiments. “It’s not the same thing, in my opinion. There’s something so powerful and personal about having a piece of paper in your hands. You lose that with social media.

“Reading through all those faxes was incredible. it made me realise how proud I’d made family and friends back in Wales, and made me all the more determined not to let anyone down.”

He certainly didn’t let anybody down that Saturday evening in the Olympic Stadium, with the BBC praising “rookie back-row Jon Thomas” on his debut. Despite cross-code sensation Wendell Sailor scoring two audacious early tries, Hansen’s prototype Wales gave a good account of themselves in the 30-10 loss.

“As most players say when talking about their first cap, the game was a complete blur,” says Thomas. “As a team, the overriding feeling was that we’d competed really well and the scoreline didn’t reflect the game. In the context of my experience, I was over the moon because I’d worked hard and played the whole game.”

Back at the hotel, the congratulations from teammates and coaches still ringing in Thomas’s ears, captain Colin Charvis presented him with his cap. The squad was gathered round a bucketful of beers. “As a bit of team bonding, Steve said everyone in the room had to either tell a joke, sing a song or do a dance. I was pretty quiet at the time, but not only that: I’m tone deaf, can’t dance and couldn’t think of any jokes.” Reverting to default Wales-on-tour mode, Thomas belted out Bread of Heaven.

“You can’t go wrong with that, can you?”

Today, as forwards coach of the high-flying Bristol Bears, Thomas views that early-Noughties transition period in Welsh rugby as a momentous one.

“A lot of good things have happened in Welsh rugby in the past two decades, and lots of people have contributed to that,” says Thomas, who will join Worcester Warriors next season. “The big thing that had happened before the 2003 tour was that Wales had endured a disastrous Six Nations and there was a lot of negative press around the team.

“That tour led into the World Cup and so it was really the start of a journey that put in place the foundations that led to the ’05 Grand Slam and then Gats coming in ’08 and taking us onto bigger and better things.

“To be part of that new beginning, with everything Steve Hansen created around leadership and team culture, was brilliant. I loved working with him. If you’re a player and a coach has believed in you, you’ll always look back and remember them fondly. It was the same with John Connolly at Swansea.

“All players really need is for their coach to believe in them.”

Jonathan Thomas won 67 caps for Wales, winning two Grand Slams. One of the Ospreys originals, he won four league titles and made 188 appearances for the region – also becoming its youngest captain at twenty-one. He finished his playing career with Worcester, whom he also captained.