LockerRoom/Tom HumphriesBefore I tell you a strange thing happened to me before Christmas, I should present my credentials. When it comes to ignorance of rugby matters my reputation is unimpeachable. When I was a hungry freelance journalist I once lost two months' work with this newspaper as I rehabilitated myself from the solecism of having mistaken somebody else for Moss Keane during a golden oldies rugby game which I was sent to cover. That's how little I know.

All the more odd, then, to be at a reception in London before Christmas and to meet Cliff Morgan and suddenly to be all weak at the knees. Not just because Mr Morgan has the loveliest pair of brown eyes you'll find outside a Shane McGowan poem, or because his voice could soothe the woe out of the world or because his every pore seems to ooze decency and charm. Nope. I was all a tremble because in my mind I could see him playing, jinking and running, and could place him in a childhood past full of personal heroes like Ali, Sniffer Clarke, Brian Mullins and more.

So, Cliff Morgan stood there chatting to me about Ireland, about the time he spent working here, about his first wife, Nuala, who he'd met here and had lived with for 45 years before her death a few years back, and all the while the strangest thing was happening. I could see him in a red jersey dodging thunder-faced props, darting like a fish between centres too surprised to tackle him, faking full backs right out of their shirts. And my mind was filling up with little Cliff Morgan nuggets.

I knew he played for Cardiff. I knew he came from the Rhonnda Valley. I knew he made his debut against Ireland. I knew the Lions once played a tour which is known as the Cliff Morgan Tour. I knew I'd heard a hundred times that gloriously happy commentary of his which accompanies Gareth Edwards's try for the Barbarians against the All Blacks in 1973. But how did I know? Who put all that stuff there? It was like going to bed an atheist and waking up a Mormon.

I was so unsure as to how I could know all this when I know so little else about rugby that I kept my mouth shut and went home and checked the books and the files to make sure I was thinking of the same man. Sure enough. The facts all fitted, but Cliff stopped playing for Wales 15 years before I was born.

Being possessed of a lively and inquiring journalistic mind, I completely forgot about it all until last weekend when the newspapers were filled with news of that never-ending story, "the crisis in Welsh rugby". And it hit me then in the wash of sentiment: the iconography of Welsh rugby, the lore of it, was among the most powerful influences available when I was a kid.

In my memory those vivid red jerseys illuminated days that were so cold every breath made fog, the pitches they waltzed on were mud-brown fringed with hoar frost and flat-capped leek lovers with the faces of coalminers. So much so that when I imagine Welsh rugby I picture the players with coal dust on their faces, looking like miners emerging from a shaft in the Appalachians. The names were indelible. Barry John. Gareth Edwards. Phil Bennet. JPR Williams. And the images. Cardiff Arms Park, grey and daunting.

Men of Harlech. Bread of Heaven. Those voices. Those place names. Neath. Llanelli. Ebbw Vale. Pontypridd.

We often speak about the GAA as being something unique and native, but in those days it had company. Welsh rugby. When you talk about sport meaning something in the community, when you talk about pride and passion and how it's all local in the end, well it all fits with what Welsh rugby once was.

There's a story of Cliff Morgan in 1951 when he was first picked to play for Wales (against Ireland). News reached his village of Trebanog before the bus carrying Cliff home reached it. When he got there the entire place was out on the streets, people were putting up bunting and until the eve of the game people called to the Morgan house bringing eggs and sherry to ensure the well-being of their boy. It's a lovely story but not an unusual one.

If Cliff had seen a sight like Anthony Daly and the Clarecastle boys being carried into their village the night after the 1995 All-Ireland final he would have smiled and matched it with a hundred memories just like it.

In Wales that's dead now. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Last week Welsh rugby opted to place its top clubs into mergers to form a phoney sort of provincial system for non-national competitions. Llanelli are to go with Swansea, Cardiff with Pontypridd and so on.

There will be four "provinces". There are objections, mainly from Llanelli and Cardiff, but at the bottom of the heap are around 230 clubs who have been brought to the edge of extinction by professionalism. They are waving goodbye to the top tier, cutting them off and setting them free in the professional world and looking to pick up the pieces of their game in a homogenised country where the ratio of kids who list soccer as their number one sport to those who list rugby union is three to one.

A country where the rugby authorities went £60 million under for their part in rebuilding Cardiff Arms Park and must watch a successful Wales soccer team and English FA Cup finals filling and thrilling the arena.

There's a sharp lesson there for anyone who loves the GAA and what it means. Walk slowly. Look around. In Wales, when the game was a thing of the people, it insulated them from the cold, drafty world. The 1920s and 1930s were bad times: there were a quarter of a million coalminers in the country in 1920 and just 100,000 left in the pits before the war. Forty-eight full internationals left to play rugby league in the north of England. The game survived because it was a means of expression, not a business. It couldn't be made bankrupt.

By the early 1950s, when Cardiff (and Morgan) beat the All Blacks, the game looked as if it would thrive forever. It was a means of defining Welshness, a distinctive national passion. It spun so much pride for a nation which otherwise might be seen as England's first franchise outlet. The sportswriter, Vivian Jenkins, once offered to secure Cliff Morgan a place at Oxford. Cliff told his mother Edna May. She asked sharply what was wrong with Cardiff University. Answer: nothing. He went to Cardiff.

Another time, two gentlemen from Wigan rugby league club called to the Morgan house early one morning with £5,000 to secure the signature of the wonderboy. He wouldn't come downstairs to meet them. Edna May sent them away with a full breakfast in their stomachs and an improved knowledge of what rugby meant in Trebanog.

That story reminds me of a friend in school who was wooed heavily by Arsenal and Oxford but stayed because he yearned to play for Dublin.

For the Welsh, that world is gone now. In its absence, what is the flavour of Wales? What do we think about when we think of those valleys and their people? What is the essence of those places? Just the past and the painful How Green was My Valley sentimentality.

For a GAA person it causes a shudder.

I came home from London before Christmas hungry to read a little more about Morgan. He doesn't know how to get Welsh rugby out of the mess it is in, but I found two quotes of his from the mid 1990s which told anyone who would listen that he knew things would come to this pretty pass. Anyone with a feel and a love for the game would have known.

"I've never believed," he said when the subject was first raised, "that rugby union was meant to be professional."

Later, expanding a little on the malaise gripping his game, he said that "rugby doesn't need to nurture the fungoid growth of corporate hospitality. It doesn't need to accommodate men with dollar accents who don't love the game but are there because it's the thing at which to be seen."

And so the Welsh are left with an antiseptic pro-game which sucks in money and gives nothing back to an ailing business which tries to extract cash from ordinary people on the basis of the past which meant something to them. SuddenlyI miss Welsh rugby.

Forget Bread of Heaven. Cardiff Arms Park needs Joni Mitchell keening about how they chopped down all the trees and put them in a tree museum, how they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em.

And in a week when the Munster Council lost big on share dealing and the Carphone Warehouse-sponsored Gaelic Players Association reached out to the allegedly downtrodden hurlers of the weaker counties (is there no joy in it anywhere anymore?), we need to remember that in Wales they didn't know what they'd had till it was gone.