Wales coach lost his job a year after winning title and months before Rugby World Cup

“The job of Welsh coach is like a minor part in a Quentin Tarantino film: you stagger on, you hallucinate, nobody seems to understand a word you say, you throw up, you get shot. Poor old Kevin Bowring has come through the coaching structure so he knows what it takes… 15 more players than Wales have at present.”

So wrote the journalist Mark Reason as Wales struggled to make headway under Bowring during the mid-1990s. A lot of Wales coaches will understand the sentiment behind the words.

Bowring had succeeded Alan Davies as Wales head coach. It’s not known if Davies had Kipling drummed into him as a schoolboy, but the former Wales coach prided himself on dealing with success and failure in much the same way.

So it was that he didn’t despair the morning after Wales lost to Canada in 1993, even though countless of his fellow countrymen did. Nor did he turn cartwheels in the street after the Scott Quinnell-inspired victory over France three months later, even though countless others probably did.

“The difference between me on the Monday morning after France and me on the Monday morning after Canada wasn't phenomenal,” he once said. What a trait it is, to be able to treat triumph and adversity as just the same.

Yet even Davies had that ability tested. In 1994 Wales won the Five Nations title; a year later, beset by injuries, they were whitewashed and the head coach had jumped before he was pushed, taking his management team of Bob Norster and Gareth Davies with him.

"As far as coaching a rugby team again is concerned, or a club, I very much doubt I will put myself or my family through that agony again," Davies said after he departed. His exit happened 27 years ago this week. It was a time when Wales coaches came and went