Interview with Adam in Times
There are a couple of things about Adam Jones that you do not expect to hear from someone who has played 80 times for Wales as a tight-head prop, the most unforgiving of positions. This is a player, lest we forget, who has also won two caps for the Lions and, after the victory over France last Saturday, has become one of the select few to play his part in three grand-slam triumphs.
For a start, although he is one of the finest tight-heads in the game, capable of absorbing a frightening amount of force as the cornerstone of the scrum, he says he is not actually that strong.
“I’m quite strong maybe, but not much more than that,” he says. “Some of the backs are stronger than me.”
Quite an admission, perhaps one you can make only when you have three grand slams under your belt. And Jones also feels that he would have been better equipped to take on the world’s finest front rows if he had inherited more of his mother’s confrontational character.
“I’m not particularly aggressive,” he says. “If I’d got my mother’s aggression, I might not have been a bad player.”
The importance of a top-class tight-head prop was illustrated vividly last weekend during England’s victory over Ireland, when Tom Court, normally a loose-head, was pressed into service as a replacement tight-head when Mike Ross was injured. The Ireland set-piece splintered as a result.
Earlier that afternoon, Jones had been savouring the adulation of a euphoric home crowd and looking up to find his mother, June — “she’s mad as a hatter, I’d never watch a rugby match with her” — and his father, Alwyn, in the stands. Over the past ten months, since the birth of his daughter, Isla, Jones has paused to consider how his parents must have felt in the early stages of his career, when derision rather than delight rained down from the stands in his direction.
In those days, Jones invariably was seen as unfit, overweight and, on occasions, he was humiliatingly replaced before half-time by Steve Hansen, the former head coach.
“When I think how strongly I feel about my daughter now, and what I’d think if anybody said anything about her, I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my parents at the start of my career,” he said yesterday. “I know my mum is still a bit bitter about parts of it. But I’ve played for the Lions, I’ve won three grand slams, so thankfully it’s gone full circle now.”
The battle against gaining weight is one that Jones, 31, continues to fight. An internet search for his vital statistics reveals several different weights, ranging from 18st 12lb to 20st. He is happy to provide the correct figure, a perfectly acceptable 19st 4lb, even after a night of suitably substantial celebration in Cardiff on Saturday night. While some of the other Wales players kept the party going on Sunday, Jones returned home to his wife, Nicole, for her first Mother’s Day with their daughter. Tomorrow, he plays for the Ospreys in their RaboDirect Pro12 game away to Leinster.
But when he made his international debut, in 2003, rugby shirts were getting tighter and Jones did not suit the look. The criticism stung, but did not spur him on to improve his fitness. “It had the opposite effect,” he said. “I must have put a stone on, eating and drinking. I’m pretty sensitive and sometimes take things to heart too much. Ask my wife, she’s always telling me to man up.”
The turning point, he says, came with the arrival in 2008 of Warren Gatland, as head coach, and Craig White, his conditioning coach.
“I’d been plodding along, I was a big lump, but Warren told me that if I wasn’t a certain weight, I wouldn’t get picked,” Jones said. “Craig realised I was an emotional person. If I weighed myself and was a bit heavy, he wouldn’t speak to me. Because I classed him as a mate, that would annoy me. I wanted him to talk to me again.”
Nowadays, Jones finds that he can keep the weight down when he is in camp with Wales, but not when he is left to his own devices. He has a sweet tooth and there has also been the beer, which was rather more integral to the development of a rugby player in Jones’s youth than it is to Sam Warburton and George North today.
“When I was in the youth teams, you’d easily have ten or 15 beers after a game,” he said. Jones has witnessed the arrival in the Wales squad of “some freakishly talented athletes” produced by the regions’ academies, but remains thankful that, in his own formative years with Abercrave, in the upper Swansea valley, he benefited from a broader rugby education.
“I remember my first game, we played Cwmafan, I’d turned 18 the day before,” he said. “I was scrumming against this old fella. First scrum, I got the hit and thought, ‘this isn’t too bad’.
At the next scrum, as I hit him, he just let me go down and kneed me flat-out in the face. Back in the changing room after the game, I was putting my face back together and this guy walks through the door. He pulls out two cans of beer from behind his back, shakes my hand, we sat down and had a chat. He said, ‘I thought you’d bust my neck that first scrum’. I’m not sure the younger boys get to play these types of guys any more.”
With a third grand slam to his credit, two goals remain for Jones — to reach 100 caps for Wales and to tour Australia with the Lions next summer. His competition at tight-head will include Dan Cole, of England.
“I don’t think there’s been a tight-head as dominant as he’s been at the age of 24,” Jones said. “You learn a lot as you get older. I was speaking to Brendan Rodgers [the Swansea City manager] and he said that if they came across a wall, the younger boys in his squad would run through it, the older boys would look for a way around it.”
Jones has been around the block a few times himself and, for a while yet, he looks likely to remain as the foundation stone of the Wales scrum.Reply With Quote
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