Page 59 - All Shapes & Zebras From Treorchy

Players will have some of their own memories. Gwernyfed players of a certain era will recall that after a hard-fought home win against Wattstown, some of their squad took offence to some of the refereeing decisions and chaos ensued after the final whistle. What took place wouldn’t have been out of place as an action sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. That incident was enough to help forge a rivalry between the two clubs – building on a legacy from a trio of attritional games some 20 years earlier, where the two sides met in highly charged encounters in the WRU’s Brewers Cup.
Every time we visited Wattstown afterwards, the games were brutal, ill-tempered affairs. On arrival there, the changing rooms were always freshly hosed down too – pegs, benches, floor and ceiling literally dripping wet as we filed into the room. Saying that, this watery welcome may have been par for the course for any away team when visiting Wattstown. Their nickname? Of course, it could only be ‘The Ducks’...
Each generation will have their own stories and tales to tell too. Some years earlier, the club visited another Rhondda outfit, on a weekend that fell in that ‘no man’s land’ between Christmas and New Year. Upon entering the away changing room, our team was greeted by a dozen or so rotting turkey carcasses piled up in the corner of the room, an interesting and pungent way of spreading some festive cheer and keeping a welcome in the hillside. Teams and clubs, with their collective conscious, don’t forget such things and although teams may be distanced by evolving fortunes and league reshuffles, these rivalries rear their heads every so often after lying dormant for a time, as if the sins of the elders live on and fester amongst the heirs...
ALL SHAPES & ZEBRAS FROM TREORCHY 57