The £1,000 Welsh rugby punch that paid for a Wales captain's new curtains

Tony Copsey isn’t quite Moose Malloy, the Raymond Chandler character whom the great author styled as being as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.

“He was a big man,” wote Chandler of his creation, “but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck. His skin was pale and he needed a shave. He would always need a shave.”

Copsey? He actually stood 6ft 7in tall and weighed 17st 8lb in his Llanelli and Wales prime. He looked a formidable specimen on the pitch, then, but off it he was as amiable as they come.

Still is, probably.

When this writer had cause to ring him a couple of years ago, he could not have been more helpful, taking 20 minutes out of his day to chat.

But on the pitch back then, he definitely wasn’t a man to rile. Opponents who started arguments with Copsey more often than not found that the Essex-born giant finished them.

Neil Francis, former Ireland lock and now controversial newspaper columnist, couldn’t even be said to have begun an argument with Copsey when he was decked in an international in Dublin in 1992. How the Wales lock escaped sanction over that one remains a puzzle to this day. You can read all about that incident here.

Whatever, a different day and a different dust-up came in October 1995 when Llanelli hosted Cardiff in an eagerly awaited east-west league match. It proved to be a fractious, disappointing affair, unworthy of its billing as Welsh rugby’s game of the weekend.

The match was eight minutes from home when Mike Hall became involved in a significant difference of opinion with Ieuan Evans, his off-pitch business partner at the time in the Just Players company the pair had helped set up.

Enter Copsey stage left, not altogether in classic