Henson inpires Welsh renaissance

Gavin Henson: Welsh hero

14 April 2012

Gareth Thomas was warning his nation not to get too hysterical while the Welsh management reckoned that to emphasise the team triumph, their gilded match-winner Gavin Henson would be kept out of the media spotlight. You had to laugh, since the chances of either of these things actually happening seemed as likely as Tom Jones announcing he was the only gay in the village.

Yet you could understand the fretting which accompanied the exultation over an epic "I was there" evening when Henson booted himself into immortality, kicking England to their first defeat in Cardiff for 12 years. After all, Welsh rugby had been bitten too often these past two decades, acclaiming new dawns which, by lunchtime, turned out only to be harbingers of mediocrity and underachievement.

It was weird, reckoned their splendid flanker Martyn Williams. "One minute, out there on the pitch it's so mad it's like we've won the World Cup, then we're back in the dressing room, shattered and taking a reality check. All we'd won was one game."

Yet, somehow, this night really did tease you into the prospect of a genuine renaissance. When Wales last beat England in Cardiff a dozen years earlier, it was only due to what Gareth Edwards called "the greatest rearguard action since Stanley Baker and Ivor Emmanuel in Zulu".

This time, though, Wales eclipsed an outfit dispiritingly unrecognisable from their World Cup-winning heyday, even if the hosts did ultimately require their own silver screen ending from the marksman with the silver boots.

"The boot that went round the world" was how his impossibly pressured, immaculately executed penalty kick from the right touchline 44 metres out to seal the 11-9 triumph was greeted in the Principality. Not only will it become one of the most fabled kicks in the game's annals but it could be the launchpad for the game's next global superstar.

For just as Ireland have the brilliance of their centre Brian O'Driscoll, Henson now exudes a magisterial quality which demands that Wales build around him.

When 75,000 started chanting his name and captain Thomas and Stephen Jones, the No1 kicker, acknowledged the plea by offering him this hero-or-goat opportunity, it felt like the moment a nation decided its rugby future must be dictated by a man who had all afternoon run like O'Driscoll, kicked like Jonny Wilkinson and, as young Mathew Tait could ruefully testify, hit like Trevor Leota.

Thomas was right to talk of the team over the individual, everything from Martyn Williams's prodigous work in the loose to Gethin Jenkins's barnstorming performance in the tight, where the Welsh were supposed to get cleaned out.

Yet the striking thing in the lionising of Henson was how the team seemed to happily delight in playing support roles to a virtuoso.

Images were deceptive, they all reckoned. The boots, the hair, the peacock strut, the lazy elegance, even the super-confident post-match addresses; that was the flash public side of Henson. Yet, reckoned Williams, we didn't see the "real good guy" who worked so hard to make it look so easy.

The tournament organisers must have been celebrating this announcement of star quality too, because along with further evidence of English and French fragility, a rejuvenated, vibrant Welsh team, inspired by a figure whose talent recalls the JPRs and Barrys of a bygone era, can only make this most open of Six Nations championships even more alluring.

The first impressions are that there will be no Grand Slam for anyone this year, yet if one player is best equipped to make a nonsense of that prediction, how about Henson?

"Let's put it this way," said Stephen Jones. "I'm glad he's Welsh."

Henson inpires Welsh renaissance

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