The Wales World Cup star who quietly slipped away to do something completely different

There was no mention on Sky’s yellow-and-black breaking news ticker of Ryan Bevington packing in as a rugby player, nor did the item make it onto Huw Edwards’ desk at the BBC.

No drama.

It was just as 13-cap Wales rugby international Bevington would have wanted, to slip away quietly, without much ado.

“I didn’t want a fuss,” he says of his call to exit on-pitch proceedings last summer.

“I’d had my time as a player and decided I just wanted to try something else.

“I am who I am. I like to be known as Ryan Bevington, not as Ryan Bevington the rugby player. I was just fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time over my career. I had to work hard, but most players would say that. I have very fond memories and now that I’ve finished I can enjoy them, but at the same time I didn’t want to shout from the rooftops that I had decided to call it a day.”

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He continued: “I didn’t want rugby to define me. It’s just part of your life, a chapter when you’ve learned certain skills and developed certain relationships. That is the way I look at things generally. Each stage is like a chapter in a book. You finish one and move on to the next. There is life beyond rugby.”

Turn the clock back a decade and it probably didn’t seem that way.

Then, Bevington was viewed as having huge potential.

Explosive in the loose and able to move from 0 to 60 quicker than the car he drove when he emerged on the scene — the loosehead prop could cover 40 metres in 4.1 seconds — he was reckoned by the then Ospreys forwards coach Jonathan Humphreys to have the potential to be world-class.

There was even talk that he could turn out to be the long-term Wales successor to Gethin Jenkins.

But