Peter Jackson: Italy arrive in Wales on a wing and a blessing

Italy come to Cardiff for the opening match in the Six Nations next month armed with something different, a Papal blessing. Judged on their biennial fate at the Millennium Stadium, Fratelli d'Italia (the Brothers of Italy) could certainly do with a little something from the inspiration department.    They have lost six of their seven matches by an average of 29 points and drawn the other, eight years ago when Ramiro Pez ought to have put the demoralised hosts out of their misery.
The home dressing-room back then generated enough steam to make it look like a thermal spring, bubbling away like a geyser at a time when the Welsh rugby public, outraged at Mike Ruddock's resignation the previous month, wondered which geezers on the field had been responsible for the coach's fate.
Italy, having missed that glaring opportunity through missed penalties, return with hope renewed after finishing above Ireland and France last year. They also had an audience with Pope Francis before their last match, against Argentina in Rome six weeks ago.
What the Pontiff had to say about one aspect of the game in particular will have resonated with fans the world over. “There are the famous scrums which are sometimes hard to watch,” the Pope was reported as saying. “And then there are the individual manoeuvres.
“It makes us think of life because in our whole life we are heading for a goal. We need to run together to pass the ball from hand to hand, until we get to it. Playing rugby is hard. It is no walk in the park and I think that makes it useful to tighten the spirit.”
For a so-called soccer nut from Argentina, the Pope sounded as though he knew a bit about rugby, too, maybe more so than one of his predecessors who certainly knew as much, if not more, about the round-ball game – Pope John Paul II who had been a goalkeeper in his youth.
“They tell me rugby is a very rough game,” he is reported to have said to Carwyn James during an audience granted to the most intellectual of all British rugby coaches to mark the Welshman's guidance of Rovigo to the Italian title in the early Seventies.
“Not if it's played properly, your Holiness,” James is said to have replied.
Not every Papal blessing, of course, has the necessary effect when the mucky stuff hits the whirligig on the football field, as Jack Charlton's Republic of Ireland discovered during the 1990 World Cup. Shortly after their Vatican visit, the Republic were sent packing by Italy when goalkeeper Packie Bonner failed to hold a shot and Salvatore Schillaci scored on the rebound.
The connection between John Paul and goalkeeping proved too much for Charlton to resist. “By the way, Packie”, he told Bonner on their way out of the Olympic stadium. “The Pope would have saved that…”
There have been occasions when teams have come up trumps from a collective belief that God was on their side.     Only once did Ireland's rugby selectors manage the ecumenical trick of picking a Roman Catholic priest and a Presbyterian minister in the same back division.
It happened against England at Lansdowne Road in 1949 – Father Tom Gavin of Coventry in the centre, the Reverend Ernest Strathdee of Queen's University, Belfast at scrum-half. A home win by as wide a margin as 14-5, unusually so for a low-scoring era, reinforced the view that Somebody Up There must have liked them.
Although the priest and the pastor never played together again, Fr Tom having lost his place to a future Lion in Noel Henderson, Ireland finished the season with the Triple Crown.
Winning it sometimes takes more than divine intervention. The last clergyman to captain Wales, the Reverend Jenkin Alban Davies of Llanelli, won six of his seven matches in charge just before the First World War but failed, for all his prayers, to prevent successive England Grand Slams.