Treorchy RFC

“I had a dream the other night, The strangest dream of all, I dreamed I was in heaven, away from life’s hard call, It was just as I’d imagined with the silver stars beneath, Seven there from Treorchy, thousands from Glynneath.”

– Max Boyce: Live at Treorchy

November 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of when Max Boyce, the chart-topping Welsh troubadour and honorary president of Glynneath RFC, made his breakthrough album in the main function room of the Treorchy Zebras in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales.

Live at Treorchy would go on to sell over half a million copies around the world and was the record that brought Hymns & Arias to a wider audience; a song that Max wrote and got to perform at the Principality Stadium during the opening ceremony for the 1999 World Cup.

The reason why the album recording of Hymns & Arias sounds as good as it does is because members of the Treorchy Male Voice Choir were in attendance, and a piano borrowed from a nearby clothing factory, wheeled in by members of the rugby club.

‘It was a very special evening, a magical evening – and the audience were every bit as important as I was,’ Boyce later said. 

Although at one point they wondered if anyone would turn up, Boyce was still a relative unknown. ‘A friend of mine went round the pubs asking people to come and see this boy from Glynneath who needed an audience to make a record. They came because they almost felt sorry for me so it was remarkable really!’

Suddenly, Treorchy was on the map again having been one of the fastest growing towns in the UK during the mid-19th century, fuelled by the boom in the coal industry.

The album was released in 1974. Prior to that, the main, and for some the only reason why anyone outside of Wales would have heard of Treorchy was the choir.

It was unlikely to have been the rugby team. Although it is a club with a rich history and prides itself on being ‘the most successful in the Rhondda region’, Treorchy’s matches weren’t getting any coverage beyond the local press. 

Then, some twenty years after Max had come to town, Treorchy became consumed by a dream that became a reality that turned into a nightmare and saw the club go from the lower reaches of League Three to the European Cup in the space of three years.

Welsh rugby had never seen anything like it and probably never will again.

The Dream, as it became known, was devised by Phil Davies, who had a terrible reputation for on-field thuggery during the 1980s. By the early 90s, however, he had converted to Christianity. At the time that Live at Treorchy was being recorded, Phil was a pupil at Porth County, along with Chris Jones, Adrian Owen and John Geraint Roberts. Phil, Chris and Adrian would become teammates at Treorchy while John would later be an important figure in bringing the club to a wider audience.

As teenagers, Chris and Phil were obsessed with the All Blacks. Phil would buy cinefilms of their matches. They were drawn to players like Colin Meads, and the way he could intimidate his opponents. But there was one match that would leave a mark on both Chris and Phil, that would ultimately change their outlook on rugby and life. They were selected to represent Rhondda Schools against Cardiff Schools in the Dewar Shield. The opposition included Terry Holmes, who went on replace Gareth Edwards at scrum-half for Wales. “We lost 66-0 when it was three points for a try,” recalls Phil. “I vividly remember us talking and saying that was never going to happen again. It caused us to cross lines we shouldn’t have crossed.”

After leaving school, Phil studied law and briefly had a spell at Bath before returning to the Rhondda and spent his Saturdays literally scrapping it out with Chris and Adrian for Treorchy against the likes of Treherbert and Tylorstown.

Back then the only time a small-town club could take on one of the big boys was in the Schweppes Cup and in 1983 Treorchy were drawn against Cardiff and Phil was captain. “We had a chip on our shoulder because people talked about the Rhondda as if it was some backwater,” he explains. “Even so, I clearly wound up the team too much.”

Treorchy had three players sent off that day, including Chris, who remains the only player to receive two life bans from the WRU – and if you’re wondering how that works, ‘life’ in this context means ‘indefinite’.

His defence was flimsy. ‘They obviously knew my weakness was my temper and decided to exploit it by challenging me,’ he said at the time, and was subsequently also banned by Treorchy.

He also acquired the sort of notoriety that the media absolutely loves by carrying a small axe in his kit bag, ‘just in case things got out of hand’.

The Cardiff match was the point where Phil started to fall out of love with the game, and he walked away from rugby in 1985, after a spell at Bridgend. He emigrated to Australia but returned to the Rhondda in 1992.

Meanwhile, Chris and his brother Clive, who had enjoyed some success together as coaches at Pontypridd, had returned to Treorchy but both were very different men to the ones that Phil had last seen seven years earlier. “So, I came back home, and out of the blue I get a knock on the door. It was Chris and Clive. Now, I’d heard a story that Chris had ‘found God’ in a police cell after he’d been arrested for fighting at the Brecon Jazz Festival.”

Indeed, Chris had had a ‘damascene moment’. He had been accused, wrongly, of stabbing an undercover drugs officer and violent disorder. During that time in the cell, he assessed what his life had become, the people he had let down; he hadn’t been the husband or father that he aspired to be. And so, he turned to God for help. He was given conditional bail and immediately got in touch with his local church. Then he went to see the All Blacks in Cardiff, and briefly spoke to Inga Tuigamala outside the ground after the game and was invited back to Inga’s hotel room to talk about faith.

“It struck me that Chris’s demeanour was different,” Phil says, picking up the story. “We weren’t talking about the old days, and the trouble we got in.”

The brothers came back into Phil’s life at a point when he was trying to give up his destructive old life of fighting, drinking and womanising. “Both Chris and Clive had become Christians,” says Phil. “They are both very smart guys. When Chris talked to me about Christianity on an intellectual level, it made sense to me.”

Eventually, the conversation came round to rugby. Chris and Clive were ambitious but they needed a plan to take Treorchy forward.

The three-tiered Heineken League was launched in 1990. Promotion and relegation meant smaller clubs had a shot of making the big time to mix it with the likes of Cardiff, Swansea, Neath, and Llanelli. “I went to the newsagent and bought every rugby publication. I went through back issues of the Western Mail, I devoured Stephen Jones’s column in The Sunday Times. Because I’d been out of the game for seven years, I was able to take a more objective view and it was clear that the game would turn professional, it was on this irreversible path. It didn’t take a genius to work out that the catalyst would be the World Cup in 1995.

“It was easy to convince Clive on those two bits. But as soon as the game became professional, there had to be new competition, because to sustain professionalism TV had to pay for the rights. So, I said that there will be a European competition. He went along with that, albeit with a bit of persuading.

“And then he fell off his chair when I said Treorchy will be in Europe. And it all came true although not quite in the way that I hoped or envisaged.”

The Dream was backed by club chairman Neil Hutchings and Phil soon got to work.

In the amateur era, the idea of having a marketing strategy was anathema to virtually every other club. “I became a commercial manager and I was the only person employed off the field in club rugby in Wales at the time,” says Phil. “Other clubs were just selling advertising, but I was selling a vision, a dream, where working-class boys from the valleys would roll up their sleeves when backed into a corner, would take on the rich and famous and would win.

“Some people thought I was mad, but they loved the passion behind what I was selling. Treorchy couldn’t do it the Cardiff way, with all that history, the support base, the catchment area, so they had to do it in a way that was unique to Treorchy. In the old days, to equalise the odds you would use violence and intimidation. We weren’t doing that anymore because Chris and Clive had become Christians and there was a line they wouldn’t cross.”

Treorchy set about recruiting good players who were misfits at other clubs, and in Chris they also had one of the best coaches in the country. They won League Three in 1993 by a distance. “The next thing was to get the media interested,” says Phil. “To get Terry Godwin, John Taylor or Stephen Jones to write about us.

“The other clubs hated it. They hated that we were getting all this coverage, but I loved it! My job was to create a sort of mythology around Treorchy.”

Phil also decided to rebrand the club as Treorchy Rhondda Zebras. He didn’t want to limit the scope of the club to a population of 7,000. He wanted people across the Rhondda to embrace the Zebras. Having got the club into print, the next step was to get on television. Phil wrote letter after letter to Gareth Davies, head of sport at BBC Wales. Eventually, he called Phil and said the cameras would be coming to The Oval to do a piece for Rugby Special. Two days later he received another call from Gareth saying they wanted to do a six-part series about the Zebras.

The producer of The Dream was another Porth County alumni, the aforementioned John Geraint Roberts, who along with Gareth wanted to tell a story that went beyond winning and losing, what happened on the pitch, or the dressing room. The last of the Rhondda’s 66 mines had closed down two years earlier, and the UK was still feeling the effects of a recession caused by rising inflation followed by a slump in house prices. The Treorchy story was about injecting hope and aspiration into a community that had been written off. “I got sick of hearing people say that you had to leave the Rhondda if you wanted to make anything of yourself. I wanted people to say they were from the Rhondda and say it with a bit of swagger,” says Phil emphatically.

So, John and Gareth hired Eric Styles, a young director who had made a cult fly-on-the-wall series called The Last Days Fforchwen about a rather cantankerous farmer who was due to retire. “I turned up at the farm and told him I was vegetarian. He looked at me like I was mad,” recalls Eric laughing at the memory.

“I trained as a drama director; I’d gone to film school because I wanted to make feature films and then got sidetracked into documentaries. With The Dream, I kind of worked in reverse. I looked at lots and lots of TV sports coverage. I wasn’t a sporting nut, I didn’t like football or rugby. But I knew I didn’t want our series to look anything like that coverage, which tended to be shot multi-camera. I didn’t want it to be slick and professional. I wanted to see the blood, sweat and tears.”

Styles and his crew arrived just as Treorchy were about to win back-to-back promotions, taking the League Two title in 1994. For their first season in League One, the Zebras racked up victories against Llanelli, Swansea, Bridgend, and Pontypridd along with beating Newport home and away to eventually finish third behind Pontypridd and champions Cardiff. It took about a month for the players, coaches and committee members to get used to the cameras being omnipresent during that League One campaign. “What helped is that we were genuinely interested in what they were working towards,” says Styles. “We would sit in the committee room filming while people were talking very candidly about their plans for Treorchy in an age of professional rugby.”

But inevitably the dynamics between Phil, Chris and Clive, their personalities and their faith would be one of the key storylines. “The transformation from their rugby playing days to the personalities they became when I met them was quite extreme. Chris was this incredibly serene, peaceful character. And when he told me about his past, you just couldn’t reconcile it, you couldn’t imagine the person who he said he was. They would openly say that Treorchy Zebras was just a platform for them to connect to the community. It was fascinating.

“Clive and Chris, as coaches were also absolutely irresistible characters. Chris would give the most impassioned and inspiring pep talks in the dressing room. And they were just so heartfelt but also with absolute clarity about what he needed them to do. It was riveting watching him do that. He was at odds with the obsessiveness that an awful lot of people had in that club at the time. They were desperate to win, while he had this perspective that everything happens for a reason, everything was being guided by God.

“I was really interested in the psychological effect that this whole experience would have on the coaches and the committee because they were putting themselves on the line.”

 The series was a huge success, pulling in around 450,000 viewers each week in a country that had a population of 2.8 million. If one extrapolates and applies some rather crude mathematics, then it is roughly equivalent to how many viewers in England watched the Rugby World Cup Final in 2019.

While every major broadcaster has since screened ‘fly on the wall’ sports documentaries, The Dream was one of the first of its kind.

While this underdog story was embraced by the media, Treorchy’s success became the talk of lower-league rugby because of how they had bent the rules. Although it was the fag-end of the amateur era, and the laws still stated that nobody should be paid to play, plenty of clubs rewarded their senior XV, albeit with cash in a brown envelope. Treorchy put certain players on the books as development officers to run coaching sessions with local schools.

Each season the team would be completely overhauled to ensure it could compete at the next level. Not only were the Zebras good enough to hold their own in League One, but they exceeded Phil’s ambitions by finishing third.

This ensured not only European rugby – the Zebras took on Castres, Bristol, Dinamo Bucharest and Narbonne, albeit losing all four games – but also that The Oval was one the venues when Fiji toured Wales in 1996. Canterbury and Transvaal also took on Treorchy during this period.

The problem was by that stage rugby had turned professional. For three years Treorchy were ahead of the game but everyone else caught up. Again, Phil had a plan that would have changed the history of rugby in the Rhondda. The only way forward as he saw it was to create a provincial club, potentially merging with another team, such as Pontypridd, and drawing in support from across the region.

In hindsight, it may have resulted in Rhondda being represented when regional teams were introduced in 2003, but nobody was interested in 1996. 

The Dream became unsustainable when Hutchings was presented with a tax bill which meant gutting the playing staff and Treorchy were relegated back into Heineken League Two in 1997. 

Phil left Treorchy in 1996, taking up commercial roles with Cardiff, Llanelli and eventually Newport. He arrived at Rodney Parade in 1999, when Newport owner Tony Brown was willing to back his strategy off the pitch, while also attracting stars like Gary Teichmann and Percy Montgomery from South Africa. By 2001, Newport had been transformed and were the best-supported club in Wales, which Phil regards as his greatest achievement. “I was the second highest paid off-field person off in Welsh rugby behind Graham Henry,” he says. “And I loved my job.”

And then, two years later, he walked away from rugby again. John Bullock, the local pastor in the Rhondda, who had also found religion after a chequered past in the Navy, said to Phil, ‘What would you try for God if you knew you couldn’t fail?’.

“In that moment I knew, I absolutely knew my life wouldn’t be the same again,” Phil says. “Within 48 hours I’d drawn up a project document and I knew my time in rugby was over.”

That project would become Sporting Marvels, a mentoring programme that has been running for almost twenty years in schools across the Rhondda. The broad objective is to put a positive Christian role model in front of every school pupil aged 10-18. In an area that remains among the poorest in the UK, Phil wants to help kids make the right choices. “I walked away from a good six-figure salary. But there has never been a moment when I regretted that decision.” 

Life would go full circle for Chris, as having played for Rhondda Schools, he became coach. Before taking the role in 1999, Rhondda had never won the Dewar Shield. Since then, they’ve won it nine times.

Eric went on to make TV dramas and films working with some of our greatest actors including John Hurt, Julie Andrews, Colin Firth and Samantha Morton, but he still looks back on The Dream with a great deal of satisfaction. “We did make something that was perhaps a little bit different from anything at that time, but it’s many miles from Welcome to Wrexham (about the takeover of Wrexham AFC by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney) in terms of trying to get under the skin of community.

“We spent week after week, month after month in the pouring rain, trying to figure out what the hell we were doing and find a story that was going to work, but I had such a wonderful time making The Dream.”

Eric met Chris last year when his son represented Cardiff against Rhondda and they had a chance to reminisce.

But what of Treorchy? When Rugby Journal visits The Oval, one of the most picturesque grounds in grassroots rugby, with the Bwlch Mountain for its backdrop, it is on the eve of the club’s debut in Championship East and a return to the second tier in Wales – the newly-restructured league has the Premiership at the top, followed by Championship East and West. This follows years of gradual and pragmatic rebuilding in the wake of The Dream.

Andrew Jones became chairman in 2004 at a point when the club was facing an increasingly uncertain future. In 2005, the Zebras reached their lowest, relegated into Division Three South East (the fourth tier of Welsh club rugby). “From a financial perspective, there had been certain debts, bank loans and brewery loans, that had been longstanding,” he says. “But a lot of local players were also displaced during The Dream. We were losing by 80-90 points at one point. One of the phrases I used at the time was that ‘our ambitions must match our resources.’”

There are more than a few clubs who probably wish they’d have adopted that mantra. “It would have been easier for half a dozen people to say, ‘I don’t want to be part of this’,” continues Andrew. “I shudder to think where the club may have ended up, because it wasn’t an attractive proposition taking on what we did.

“But thanks to hard work we’ve got ourselves into a position where we’ve got around 170 kids in the junior section. We’ve got one of the few youth sides in the Rhondda, and we’ve got more than 30 players registered to that side.”

That emphasis on youth meant that unlike other clubs, they didn’t struggle to put out a XV post-Covid, and there is enough money in the coffers to get the painters and decorators in and spruce up the room that Max Boyce performed in 50 years ago.

“I met Max a couple of weeks ago,” says Andrew. “They’re making a documentary that will be on BBC Wales to mark the 50th anniversary. You could see he was quite emotional, looking around and saying ‘the stage was here, this was over there …’ and this is what put him on the map.”

Moreover, Treorchy Zebras, a team that became lost in a dream, are back on the map again. 

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by  Richard Johnson

This extract was taken from issue 23 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.