Haydn Tanner

When I was a young man I remember going to see a rugby match between an Australian team called Kiwis - I believe they were an army team - and a Barbarian team comprising big names from the four British and Irish countries. It was one of those games you never forget. You felt priveleged to be there to see it; it was considered by the experts to be the best rugby match that ever was played. It's still talked about: if you see a great game you compare it with the memory of that game.
It was a clean, fast game in which the two teams seemed intent not on grinding the other team into the Cardiff Arms Park dirt but, on the contrary, on playing a sort of wholesome game of rugby.
Bleddwyn Williams, the great Welsh centre , was playing that day and, probably, his Welsh centre partner too in the rather rotund shape of Jack Matthews.
But there was, that day, the outstanding player of the game at scrum half, someone who went down in legend as the greatest until Gareth Edwards came along about whom valid comparisions could be made. I am talking, of course, about Haydn Tanner who has recently died at the age of 92.
He played a terrific game that day. But he always was a terrific player, so I was told then - I didn't see him before the WW2" - and he is even now considered to be one of the finest players of all time.
Bleddwyn Williams talks now (he must be in his 80's) of Haydn Tanner's pass being better even than Gareth Edwards's; this I find hard to believe since Williams being a centre would have hardly ever received a pass from either - the pass centres would usually receive would be from the outside half, who was, apparently Willie Davies who was his cousin and is hardly ever talked about. Maybe it's because he "went North"!