Two of the quiet men of rugby hit the half-century on Thursday. Dan Lydiate and Taulupe Faletau win their 50th caps for Wales against Fiji and will no doubt be as forceful on the field as they will be shy at the milestone ceremony later in the night. They are similar in many regards, very different in others.
They are six and eight, two-thirds of a back-row unit governed by its balance and collective worth. They must be tight and yet there is no escaping what tells them apart. Lydiate was born in Salford, the son of John, a docker there. When John suffered an injury at work – Dan was four – the family moved to Abbey-cwm-hir, the 500-acre farm near Llandrindod Wells run by the family of Dan’s mother, Lynne. Dan was brought up on the farm; he is defined by his life on the land.
Faletau was born in Tofoa in Tonga, the son of Kuli Faletau, who played at the 1999 World Cup in Wales. The Faletaus had been in Wales for a year because Kuli was playing for the old steel town of Ebbw Vale. The family lived lower down the Eastern Valley in Pontypool and young Taulupe became Toby to his schoolmates in Trevethin and among the juniors of nearby New Panteg rugby club.
He spent his later school years over the Severn Bridge at what was then called Filton College but came home to play for the Dragons, the Welsh region based in Newport. There he met Lydiate, who had left the farm in mid-Wales for the old southern steel city and port two years earlier.
Not that Lydiate had racked up many regional games, having broken a bone in his neck during the Dragons’ Heineken Cup pool match in Perpignan in November 2007.
Faletau made his debut for the Dragons in the same season of 2009 in which Lydiate was picked for Wales by Warren Gatland. For the first time Lydiate’s trademark chop tackle was put before a wider audience. Faletau was called up at the age of 19 in November 2010. He won his first cap the following June and went to the 2011 World Cup as the first-choice No8. He was 20.
He became the tournament’s leading tackler, with 74, and the leading ball-carrier, with the same number of carries. Faletau is fast and durable – he did miss two Tests in Australia in 2012 because of a broken bone in his hand but that is about it.
He did go through a phase of dropping high balls and he did not have a good game in the World Cup warm-up game against Italy.
Sometimes he has been on the receiving end of a grumble from his regional coach, Lyn Jones, about consistency and work-rate.
When it really counts, however, Faletau is the workhorse of Wales. The scrum, since the departure of Adam Jones, has not been a model of solidity and yet Faletau sorts out the mess time after time. As he did in the closing seconds of Saturday’s game against England; as he did in the first half of last season’s Six Nations game against the same opponents, reaching deep into a fracturing scrum and securing the ball, breaking a tackle and feeding Rhys Webb for a try.
As for Lydiate, he keeps on chopping them down. Onlookers now study with great care his use – or perceived lack of use – of his arms in the tackle, but as Jérôme Garcès had to explain to the slightly overheated Mike Brown last Saturday, Lydiate’s arms lead the way. It’s just that he hits so hard and low that legs can be swept away too fast for the arms to grasp. In the age of concussion and high, ball-dislodging contact the chop tackle is manna.
Faletau has stayed – not without a discussion or two – with the Dragons. Lydiate had a spell at Racing 92 in Paris, a long way from Powys. It was not a particularly happy stint. When you are defined by work on and in the field, Paris can be an alien place.
He returned and joined the Ospreys, back in Wales and playing alongside Justin Tipuric, safely reinstalled as a No6 to Tipuric’s 7, rather than trying to get his head around the system of left and right, as favoured by the French.
Did he learn nothing flash in France? The way he flipped a pass to Webb for Wales’s try in Paris in the last Six Nations suggested there is more to his repertoire than the chop. Not that he, or Faletau, would ever say as much. There they will be, late this afternoon, two quiet men going about their business in a world-class way.
