My First Cap: Tom Shanklin

“I wasn’t worried about getting capped,” he admits, despite overtures from Clive Woodward to tour with England. “I wasn’t worried about anything at that age. You heard all these good stories from senior players about the antics they would get up to on tour in these far-flung countries. I wanted to experience that for myself.”

Being one of only two players in the party based outside of Wales – Bath’s Andy Lloyd being the other – the Saracens centre was a bit of an unknown quantity. It’s perhaps a sign of the times back then that Shanklin wanted to prove himself as a personality as much as a rugby player. “Nobody knew too much about me, so a big thing for me besides wanting to play for Wales was just to be liked, to get to know people. Knowing what someone is like off the field is important for the team environment.

“I hadn’t played regularly in the Wales age grades, so in that sense I wasn’t like a Gareth Cooper or a Rhys Williams who had been capped at every level. Because I was playing on the other side of the bridge, it was difficult for Welsh selectors to keep an eye on me, so being on that tour was the only real way they could gauge my ability.”

He’d overcome acute compartment syndrome in his calf in order to make himself available for the tour. “It was a really strange, freak injury during Saracens training,” he explains. “I landed on my calf and it felt like a bruise, but I couldn’t run it off. Fortunately the physio sent me for a fairly urgent dynamic ultrasound which revealed that a vein had burst and blood was just pumping out.”

A rush to the hospital for an operation and a few shinpad-clad games later, and Shanklin was ready to tour.

“When I look back on it now, it was a fairly relaxed tour,” says Shanklin. “Rugby wasn’t as professional as it is now. We knew nothing about things like jet lag, so there was no planning about when we should sleep on the flight over. We just got on the plane, had a laugh and watched some movies.”

The result? It took over a week for most players’ body clocks to adapt to the eight-hour time difference between Japan and home. “You’d be trying to sleep and then you look out of your window at 3am and all the boys are outside having a coffee and a chat. I’d never been to the Southern Hemisphere before so I didn’t know why I couldn’t sleep!”

If the science of sleep was a far-off concept in 2001, nutrition wasn’t much better. As Shanklin tells it: “We struggled with our diet. Nowadays teams bring their own chefs who plan menus in advance everywhere they go, but all we had to eat was traditional Japanese food, which didn’t sit well with a lot of guys. Our palates weren’t as sophisticated back then so lots of us were skipping dinner and just going to KFC or TGI Friday’s. Nobody batted an eyelid.”

Shanklin’s social integration to the squad was helped by its age profile. “There were a lot of young players around the same age as me,” he says. “It wasn’t like a stag do where we were going out drinking every night, but at the same time you couldn’t just stay in your room watching TV. We’d go to Universal Studios, watch baseball games and hit up the arcades. We took in everything Japan had to offer.

“It was a bit like a development tour. We weren’t really monitored: so long as you turned up to training and you performed, you were left to your own devices.”

While men like Dafydd James, Neil Jenkins and Martyn Williams were away in Australia, there was no dearth of talent in the Welsh ranks. “I remember thinking Shane Williams was unbelievable and wondering why he wasn’t getting picked for the main team,” Shanklin says. “We also had Gareth Thomas, and Adrian Durston was a really decent centre with a good step. Stephen Jones and Gareth Cooper were there, so we had plenty of quality.”

Curiously, the man who would be king alongside Shanklin in the midfield for some of Wales’ glory years didn’t register quite as much. Gavin Henson, at 19, was the youngest on tour. “I recall him being quite interested in doing his hair,” he says, half-jokingly. “He was a big, thick-set bloke with massive legs, but he was really quiet. I never thought ‘this is the guy I’m going to team up with for some of the biggest games of my career’. He was more a fly-half or fullback then, but I knew he was good.”

Regardless, coming from a club where he played alongside legends of the game such as Tim Horan, Francois Pienaar and Thomas Castaignede, Shanklin wasn’t overawed.

A loss to Japanese champions Suntory Sungoliath didn’t make for the best start to Wales’ tour, but they bounced back with a midweek victory against a Japan Select XV.

The first Test in Tokyo was the 500th in Wales’ history, and their first in Japan since 1975. But Shanklin, who had mostly featured on the wing, wasn’t selected for the tourists’ 64-10 win. His future Cardiff Blues teammate, centre Jamie Robinson, was instead named on the bench to cover the back three.

“After the first Test we had a midweek game against the Pacific Barbarians and I played quite well in the centre,” reflects Shanklin, despite the 36-16 loss to a side featuring former All Blacks like Graeme Bachop. “They were physical players who wanted to take our heads off. There was one instance where I was about to get split in two, so I did a quick pass to Mark Jones out on the wing and he got absolutely hammered.

“Mark was stretchered off the field and was out of the tour with one Test to go. Guess who took his place on the wing for the last Test?”

Shanklin made his debut that June day in 2001 at the Prince Chichibu Memorial Stadium in Tokyo along with scrum-half Dwayne Peel: cap numbers 993 and 994 respectively.

“It was surreal because the vast majority of people in the stadium were Japanese, and yet they were draped in Welsh flags,” Shanklin says. “I’m not sure if they were actually supporting Wales or if it’s just because they’re such a friendly, welcoming nation, but that was very nice.”

Two tries in two minutes just after the hour marked a very pleasing introduction to international rugby for Shanklin – made all the better by his father, ex-Wales international Jim, hopping on a last-minute flight to be there for the moment. “I think he had a better time out in Japan than I did, because lot of the management were around his age and he was probably the only travelling parent. It was a massive occasion for him because he’d been with me through all the ups and downs.”

Inconveniently, his memories of Wales’ 30-53 win aren’t the most vivid. Shanklin sustained a concussion late on in the game. “I couldn’t remember scoring. Stephen Jones was trying to tell me a move and he said I was just looking through him. Luckily it’s the only time I ever spaced out in game, but they took me off afterwards.” He pauses. “But it didn’t affect my night out.”

The realisation that he was now a Wales international only truly sank in when he sat down in the away changing room at Loftus Road at the start of the new season with Saracens. “I looked at my name in the match programme and there was an asterisk next to it denoting that I was an international,” Shanklin says. “That’s always a big thing when you’re young.”

He may have celebrated well in Tokyo after winning his first cap, but the good times continued after the tour was over. “The day after I got back to the UK from Japan, I flew to Australia with some mates so we could follow the Lions,” he recalls, adding that he didn’t do an Andy Nicol and take his boots just in case. “We were getting our match tickets from [Saracens teammates] Scott Murray and Richard Hill.

“I remember we went into a bar after the second Test in Brisbane and there was a Welsh male voice choir there. It just so happened that Rob Howley, who had been ruled out of the tour after injuring himself in the first Test, was there with Ieuan Evans. I’d never met them before so I said hello. All of a sudden they stitched me up: they gave me a microphone, got the choir to form a circle around me and announced that I was going to sing a song. Being young, I was in awe of Rob and Ieuan, so I had to do it.”

And the song of choice? “Sloop John B. The age demographic there suggested Vanilla Ice or Coolio wasn’t going to go down too well!”