It was one of the biggest bombshells in Welsh rugby history.
And there’s a danger we’re doing it a disservice already.
Less than a year after helping Wales win their first Grand Slam in 27 years, head coach Mike Ruddock left his role, mid-Six Nations, in the most acrimonious of circumstances.
Suddenly all the hope and optimism that a Ruddock-led Wales had mustered dissipated and all that was left was carnage.
Wales had recovered from an opening round loss to England to beat Scotland in Cardiff, but 48 hours later, Ruddock was gone.
The Welsh rugby public were left in complete shock, blindsided by the news.
There were claims that senior players had forced Ruddock out. Welsh rugby went into meltdown.
Players who were involved at the time have recalled the events in Slammed, a documentary on BBC Wales, the final episode of which airs at 9:00pm tonight.
“I came into training one day and Nugget [Martyn Williams] was like: ‘Mike’s gone’,” said prop Adam Jones.
“It was bizarre. I said: ‘Ruddock?’ and he said: ‘Yeah, he’s gone’.”
Shane Williams added: “The reaction is how the Welsh react, isn’t it?
“It’s all over the top, it’s extreme: ‘How the hell can you win a Grand Slam and then the coach walks? What have you done? What has Alfie done to oust him?’
“We were like: ‘Hold on a minute, let’s not blame the players’.”
Claims of player power bringing the end for Ruddock began to take hold.
“Did some players think that Mike wasn’t the best coach in the world? Probably, yeah,” said Jones.
“There will be disagreements and sometimes you think it’s a s*** drill or a s*** move and you disagree.
“Wouldn’t it be like the Welsh players or public to blow something up if a coach disagrees.
“It’s a Welsh thing to do.
“But none of them were d***ish enough to go and stab Mike in the back and try to get him sacked.
“They wouldn’t have done that.”
In his book, Bomb, Jones adds: “Mike’s departure was a huge shock to the rugby public. It wasn’t to me. Throughout his entire tenure, there had been a continuous backdrop of sniping.
“Certain senior players who’d bonded with the previous regime constantly questioned Mike’s methods, undermined his authority and made things awkward.”
Jones went on to reveal that he was aware of ‘clandestine’ meetings taking place between senior players at the WRU hierarchy at a hotel just outside Cardiff.
“Among the chief detractors were Gareth Thomas, Martyn Williams, Stephen Jones and Brent Cockbain,” Jones wrote. “I’m not saying these guys were especially disruptive or manipulative, but it was clear they were still in thrall to Hansen and Johnson. I’m pretty sure they liked Mike as a bloke, but they didn’t rate him as a coach.
“The cracks grew wider, and those foundations eventually started to crumble."
In Slammed, Thomas suggests that those who received information, or saw things, from outside the environment would perhaps misinterpret the seriousness of it.
He insists that disagreement in that environment is healthy.
“The reality of the environment that we were in then, there is always confrontation,” said Thomas.
“Mike had come into an environment where everyone would respectfully question anybody else.
“People who hadn’t been in that environment before, or maybe journalists who had seen confrontation might think: ‘Oh my God, Alfie and Mike had a cross word, Alfie and Shane had a cross word – Oh, it’s not right in camp’.
“I think it’s not right in camp if you’re not having cross words.”
But in his book, Alfie, Thomas suggests that the players did not respect Ruddock the same way they respected his Kiwi predecessor, Steve Hansen.
He wrote: “It was credit to Mike that he did not come in and introduce change for change’s sake, but it was almost as if there was very little for him to do anyway.”
And Thomas went on to detail how players had developed bad habits off the field, standards were slipping.
“And, yes, the role of Mike was, in my opinion, becoming a problem that would eventually need to be addressed if nothing changed,” wrote Thomas.
The captain insisted that he'd raised the problems with Ruddock himself and wanted the head coach to be successful.
But he also detailed an instance when players were readying themselves to ignore an order, which was that they were not to go on a night out after losing at Twickenham at the start of the 2006 Six Nations.
“Discipline was crumbling because it had been permitted to crumble,” he added. “If Steve Hansen had made the call that we weren’t to go out, it would have been accepted without a single murmur.
“Mike’s authority was being challenged, leaving me to wonder whether he had properly exerted it in the first place.”
During a meeting between Thomas, Stephen Jones, Martyn Williams, Brent Cockbain and WRU chief Steve Lewis in the week before Ruddock's shock exit, concerns over Ruddock were raised by Thomas.
It wasn't the main reason for the meeting being held, Thomas maintains, but he told Lewis he didn't think Ruddock was taking enough responsibility in the running of the team, considering that he was head coach.
Lewis is said to have told the players any issues needed to be sorted between the players and Ruddock and that the coach would retain their full backing.
Days later, Ruddock was gone.
One of Ruddock's analysts at the time, Alun Carter, has previously said Ruddock did feel undermined. In his book, Seeing Red: 12 Tumultuous Years in Welsh Rugby, he talks of “visible signs of a power split” within the Welsh management, with assistant Scott Johnson maintaining a very close relationship with the players.
He claims players started to ignore instructions from Ruddock, with the coach eventually growing tired of the split in camp and lack of support from key figures. That, he says, is when he decided to quit. You can read more about his claims here.
With turmoil engulfing the campaign, Thomas then went on BBC’s Scrum V rugby programme.
It was the sort of move that would never be sanctioned in this day and age but times were different and the Welsh rugby captain, who was being accused of getting rid of his coach, wanted to front up.
“You tend not to watch Scrum V as a player just in case they say something you don’t want to hear but that was on record,” smiled Thomas’ team-mate Tom Shanklin.
“Everyone was tuning into that. It was massive. The captain of Wales, after the resignation of the head coach, going on [the show] on his own.”
Thomas added: “I represented a group of players. Someone else could have gone on there but I was captain.
“So if I’m going to lead the players out and I am going to lift the trophy up, if I am going to have all these great privileges that come with being captain, when the s*** hits the fan, you’ve got to be at the front as well.”
Powderkeg TV ensued. Thomas got into a blazing argument with Welsh international, turned journalist, turned commentator Eddie Butler as he profusely denied being the reason Ruddock went.
You can read the inside story of that Scrum V show here.
After filming, Thomas suffered a mini stroke and was admitted to hospital and watched on as Ruddock’s assistant, Scott Johnson, took over and defeats to Ireland and France sandwiched a draw against Italy.
In the BBC documentary, the man at the heart of it, Ruddock, maintains the reason he left was because he didn’t feel he had the support of the Welsh Rugby Union.
Despite winning the 2005 Grand Slam, a contract was still not agreed upon and he felt his position was untenable.
“I was desperately disappointed,” Ruddock maintains, speaking on Slammed.
““Obviously, I’m not the first rugby coach to go mid-season and I won’t be the last.
“When I took the Wales job, it all happened so quickly that I never got around to signing a contract.
“After the Six Nations, I shook hands with the Welsh Rugby Union on a deal to go forward. Seven or eight months later, we still hadn’t nailed down the details.
“The contract negotiations had fallen apart and I was going into my second Six Nations without a contract.
“Ask any coach in the world if that’s a particularly comfortable place to be. It’s not a comfortable place to be.
“It just made me think that my future lay elsewhere.”
Gareth Jenkins was hastily appointed as Ruddock’s permanent successor but his tenure spluttered and never really got off the ground.
He was then sacked 18 months into the job after a disastrous 2007 World Cup, making way for Warren Gatland.
“We were no longer talking about Grand Slams, we were talking about the politics in Welsh rugby again,” back-rower Ryan Jones said of the period.
“We’d gone from being united around rugby to being polarised. You were either in the players’ camp or the coach’s camp.
“That was a heartbreaking thing to be part of.”
* Episode three of Slammed airs on BBC One Wales at 9pm on Wednesday, January 5*
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