When they unlock the gates to Pontypool Park on Tuesday afternoon for Ray Prosser's final journey, the old gang from the glory days will be there in force.
If the players had their way, the hearse carrying their beloved coach on the last lap of his old stamping ground would leave to the booming noise of a 21-gun salute rocking all over town and rolling down the valley – a farewell as thunderous as the game Prosser's Pontypool used to play.
Instead it will be brought to a standstill by a softer, more celestial sound. The bell at St Cadoc's Church, close to his home up the hill in Trevethin, will toll 93 times, one for every year in the life of the town's best-loved son.
The triple champions of the mid-1980's are in their sixties and seventies now, still remembered by the fans of a similar vintage for the old noms de guerre which have acquired more than a degree of reverence down the decades, not least because they were anointed by Prosser himself.
To the uninitiated they sound like a bunch of cartoon characters out of a remake of The Flintstones. The cast, in no particular order, included ‘The Duke' and ‘The Doc', ‘Pimple Head', ‘Fat Arse' and ‘Madman', ‘Little Lyndie', ‘Bamber', ‘Shaft' and ‘Abe' but, most of all, out on the right wing, a schoolmaster called ‘Sheets'.
Goff Davies scored exactly 200 tries in 383 matches over a little more than ten seasons at Pontypool. He had two other qualities every bit as impressive as his career strike rate, a long-distance record second to none for chasing David Bishop's prodigious box-kicks and an ever-readiness to go where angels feared to tread.
To the outsider, his nickname could have been a nod to the speed of his finishing, as in sheets of lightning. Or an oblique reference to the relish with which he absorbed the physical punishment, as in sheets of metal. Eminently plausible and worthy but wrong, on both counts.
The nickname stemmed from what a room-mate stuffed into his overnight bag one Sunday morning just before the team left a hotel somewhere in the north of England. Davies hadn't a clue what a light-fingered colleague had been up to until they stopped for lunch in Worcester.
Prosser, for reasons too convoluted to go into, knew that a bit of bed linen was on its way to Pontypool. “Once it had been discovered, ‘Pross' labelled me ‘sheets' ,'' says Davies “And it's stuck ever since.”
A recent anecdote tells how it has stuck. “The last time I saw him was in Tesco's in Pontypool,'' says Davies. “I tapped him on the shoulder. His memory was going so I said: ‘It's me, Pross – Sheets.
“And when I said that, his face lit up. ‘Bloody hell,' he said. ‘How are you, son? You bald-headed old b******'.”
A local boy from a mile down the road in Griffithstown, Davies ended a distinguished career in education as headmaster of Hartridge High School in Newport. The nickname was never far away.
“Every so often, some kids would ask: ‘Sir, why do they call you ‘Sheets?' I'd say: ‘Never you mind, boys. Never you mind'. And that was that.
“Pross chose the nicknames to increase the sense of camaraderie at Pooler”
“Pross chose the nicknames and some of them you couldn't repeat these days. It was his way of increasing the sense of camaraderie but, like the great coach he was, he kept his distance.
“You knew he was constantly looking for ways to improve the team. There was no sentiment. He'd say: ‘You want to up your game, son'. Training was brutal and there were always complaints about his language from people walking their dogs in the park.
“I have nothing but the fondest of memories. I remember one night when Pross swallowed a fly. He was coughing and spluttering and you wanted to laugh but you knew he would go ballistic. It wasn't worth another hundred press-ups so you kept a straight face and he went on coughing.
“There was a fear factor that your time would be up but always great respect. We loved him. It's the end of a remarkable life.''
Goff Davies will form part of the socially-distanced guard of honour at the Gwent Crematorium along with many of those from one of Pooler's greatest occasions when they took the 1984 Grand Slam Wallabies all the way.
For the record the team then as ‘Pross' would have announced it:
Doc (Peter Lewis); Sheets (Goff Davies), Little Lyndie (Lyndon Faulkner), West Walian (Lee Jones); Ivor's Boy (Bleddyn Taylor); Abe (Mike Goldsworthy), Bish (David Bishop); Fat Arse (Staff Jones), Junna (the late Steve Jones), Pimple Head (Graham Price); Perky (John Perkins), Bamber, as in Gascoigne of University Challenge (Eddie Butler), Shaft (Mark Brown), Madman/Rambo (Chris Huish), Big Jeffrey (Jeff Squire).
Almost 20,000 were there that day. But for the wretched pandemic, there might have been almost as many there paying their last respects on Tuesday.
