Olly Cracknell will never forget 2025, the year when he finally realised his ambition of playing international rugby, having feared it had passed him by.

At the age of 31, not only was time not on the back rower’s side, but when he was leading the Ospreys’ charge towards the end of the 2010s, he made the Wales squad without getting a cap and then disappeared into the shadows when he moved to England.
So when he was told in November that he had been selected in the 23 to face Argentina, he was so overwhelmed by emotion that he caused Wales’s head coach Steve Tandy, the man who had given him hi...