Wales seem open to welcoming back their enigma

GAVIN HENSON PROFILE: Paul Reesreviews the chequered career of the talented and controversial back and looks at the possibility of a return to the game.

WHEN GAVIN Henson started his senior career with Swansea a decade ago, the club’s management gathered a group of young aspirants together and asked what they wanted from the game.

While some talked about becoming first-team regulars and others declared their ambition of playing for Wales, Henson’s response was, typically of someone who was to become known for refusing to say what others expected to hear: “I want a Golf GTI.”

It is nine months since Henson, who turns 29 next month, last played. He has taken an unpaid leave of absence from the Ospreys, spending much of his time with his partner, Charlotte Church, on their €1 million yacht, Sketchy, which is moored in Swansea Marina. The Penarth coastguards were last month called out after the yacht’s rigid inflatable, Little Sketchy, broke free and ran aground.

Sketchy is the word when it comes to Henson’s intentions. He has not been seen at the Ospreys this season, shunning the limelight and spending his time with Church and their two children. The Ospreys have not replaced him in their squad, but at one point replaced his picture on their website with a silhouette.

Team-mates who saw him last month said he had lost more than three stone from his weight as a player, 14st 7lb, as he had not maintained his “bulking up” programme.

Wales coach Warren Gatland plans to speak to Henson in the coming days. While it is too late to get himself into shape for the Six Nations, the autumn internationals showed how Wales missed Henson’s creative spark. With the World Cup less than two years away, Gatland needs to decode the enigma that is Henson.

Henson has never played in a World Cup. Overlooked in 2003, he was left out in 2007 after failing to prove his fitness in a summer camp. Nigel Davies was the Wales attack coach at the time and admitted he found Henson hard to read.

“Gavin is a really nice guy but you never really knew what he was thinking,” said Davies. “When it comes to natural rugby ability, there are few players in the world to compare with him, but it takes far more than that to reach the top of the game and stay there. It comes down to how much a player wants to succeed and be the best, and only Gavin knows what motivates him. We wanted to take him to the 2007 World Cup but he was just not fit enough.”

Henson has always been an introverted character with few close friends in the game. He sees two of his Wales and Ospreys’ team-mates, Lee Byrne and Mike Phillips, as well as Ospreys’ fullback Barry Davies, but they do not know when, or if, he will return to the game.

Phillips said on television earlier this month that Henson felt fulfilled in playing the family man and could not rule out the possibility that a player who had a pivotal role in Wales’s 2005 and 2008 Grand Slams would never return to rugby.

Henson asked the Ospreys for a leave of absence last August after four injury-plagued years. After returning from the 2005 Lions tour with a groin problem that required surgery, he struggled to put a run of games together and grew increasingly frustrated. He missed the whole of Wales’s autumn programme in 2008 after pulling out of the opening game against South Africa less than 24 hours before kick-off because of an Achilles’ problem, and he withdrew from the side to face Scotland at the start of last year’s Six Nations after suffering a calf injury in training.

And there were off-field incidents. He was questioned by police in December 2007 when train passengers made complaints about the rowdy behaviour of a group that included Henson after the Ospreys had beaten Harlequins in a cup group match at The Stoop. He was initially charged with a breach of the public order act, but the case was dropped before it came to court.

Henson was suspended by the Ospreys last season after failing to turn up to training following a row with the region’s management, and last February was reprimanded by Wales after celebrations in a Cardiff pub after Wales’s victory over England.

Henson’s relationship with Church was, of course, well established by then. Money was not an issue for a man who had long accumulated enough to buy a factory of Golf GTIs, and the celebrity lifestyle seemed to hold far more appeal than a game he appeared to have fallen out of love with.

Gatland hopes Henson will come to appreciate that he will be a long time retired, but there is no indication of when his sabbatical will end.

Ospreys’ managing director Mike Cuddy is convinced Henson will play again.

“Gavin’s injury problems got on top of him and he decided to have a break,” he said. “But I have been in regular contact with him. He is no different to any other player and that is how I have treated him.”