The Wales standby player for each position as squad leave in days and uncapped man deserves to be in the picture

You could only sympathise with poor John Rawlins after his experience as a tour call-up for the first Rugby World Cup.

Whisked to Australia at short notice — “just find your passport, grab a toothbrush and head for the airport, Mr Rawlins: there’s a taxi waiting for you outside” — the prop barely had time to take on board his first ‘G’day’ when disaster struck.

“Never in the history of modern sport can anyone have flown so far for so little,” wrote Ieuan Evans in his autobiography, Bread of Heaven. “After a 32-hour flight from London, John stepped off the plane in Brisbane where we were preparing to play England in the quarter-final. He went straight to the training ground, changed, and, after two minutes, he had torn a hamstring.”

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Then there was Jonathan Mason receiving a summons from the ill-fated Wales tourists in New Zealand in 1988. If memory serves correctly, the talented Pontypridd full-back was pulled off a beach holiday and turned up with his hair a shade bleached. Evidently, the All Blacks were unimpressed.

Mason's brand-new red jersey never survived the first ruck after he came on as a replacement in the second Test at Eden Park. He had the misfortune to find himself at the bottom of a ruck. “When he reappeared, it was as if he had been put through a shredder,” noted Evans in his book.

The Wales shirt in question looked more like a string vest. Mason, like Rawlins before him, had become the latest to discover that tour call-ups are not always what they are cracked up to be.

But it’s a pretty safe bet every rugby adventure to foreign climes sees at least one such summons, possibly more. On that 1988 trip it seemed at times as if they might be forced