Wales, 1968 - the forgotten strike

The year in question being a bit too soon for illicit payments in brown envelopes - even in Wales - the team were up in arms over a scandalous reduction in their free tickets.

The dispute which led to the team withdrawing their labour during a stretch of track somewhere between Swindon and Reading revolved around the treatment of the travelling reserve, a shy, uncapped teenager from Llanelli by the name of Phil Bennett.

Gerald Davies, the prince of Welsh wings, a Cambridge scholar and most definitely never a candidate for the Militant Tendency, remembers it well.

'We had taken the decision not to play by the time we got to Paddington,' he said in the book, Lions of Wales. 'Each player had one complimentary ticket plus one he paid for.

'But the reserve, for some strange reason, only had one ticket which he needed himself.

'Phil should have been treated the same as everyone else. We explained his predicament to the selectors on the train. They were adamant. They said it was impossible to get him another ticket.

'We felt very strongly about it and that was when we decided we would refuse to play. It sounds a bit farfetched but we were absolutely serious about it.

'We told the selectors what would happen and the penny dropped after we'd checked into our hotel just off Oxford Street.

'One of the WRU officials - and I'm not naming names - produced a bundle of tickets from his breast pocket.

'"Right, then", he said, "How many do you want?"

'End of strike.' Nobody remembers whether the argy-bargy had any disruptive effect but the result the following day was not quite what Wales expected - an 11-11 draw which interrupted a sequence of eight straight defeats of England in the fixture.

There are still some today, on both sides of Offa's Dyke, who find it hard to believe that Wales escaped on what was Barry John's Twickenham debut.

England, 11-3 ahead at a time when an eight-point advantage took some retrieving, had to settle for a dispiriting draw despite the marked superiority of their John Pullin-inspired pack. Wales got away with it thanks to a typical blind-side try from Gareth Edwards followed by an equalising drop goal from his equally celebrated partner, John.

What Wales would give to go one better at the start of the Six Nations in the new year is nobody's business.

The possibility of their opponents calling another wildcat strike to coincide with the first week of February might be hoping for too much.