By Owen Morgan
“Ability without opportunity, is nothing,” Napoleon Bonaparte once said.
That has been adopted as the motto of the Aberavon Fighting Irish amateur rugby league club.
And there are few places where the statement is more poignant.
The communities of Aberavon and Port Talbot have long proved to have an abundance of talent.
The obvious example is the acting world. Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen – three of the finest actors the profession has seen – all raised in and around the locality.
While the talent is undoubtedly there, the opportunities have sometimes been harder to come by.
However, many in the community, like the Aberavon Fighting Irish, are determined to provide more chances.
This month, Sheen set up his own theatre company to help ensure an outlet for creative talents throughout Wales.
And the Aberavon Fighting Irish aim to offer similar opportunities through sport.
Last weekend, the club competed in the Betfred Challenge Cup – rugby league’s most prestigious cup competition.
The Challenge Cup is one of the jewels in Britain’s sporting crown – culminating in a summer showpiece final at Wembley Stadium.
On Sunday, the Fighting Irish entertained Blackbrook Amateur Rugby League Football Club in the first round of the prestigious competition.
With almost 3,000 jobs being lost at the Port Talbot Steelworks and the inevitable knock-on effects, these are hugely challenging times for the area.
The club saw the game as an opportunity to spread some positivity.
As the teams prepared to take the field, club chairman John ‘Dinny’ O’Callaghan, said: “With the situation around the steel works, the next few years are going to be very difficult for the community.
“We saw today as an occasion to bring everyone together and get behind us. We’re looking at the match to give an opportunity to breathe a bit of positivity into the community.”
That, they did. In bucketloads, with the help of a number of local sponsors and businesses.
Living up to their name, the home side put up an almighty scrap against favourites Blackbrook before going down 16-32 in a hugely close fought match watched by around 500 spectators.
The tie may have ended in defeat, but this is a community which is more than used to bouncing back from body blows.
The occasion felt more like the beginning of something rather than the end of a Challenge Cup campaign.
Aberavon has long been known as a rugby union stronghold, but it also has a proud history in the 13-a-side code.
Having resurrected the community’s rugby league club in 2021 in the wake of the pandemic, the Fighting Irish plan to take advantage of that history for the benefit of the community as a whole.
The club takes its name from the indomitable fighting spirit of the Irish emigrants who settled in Port Talbot in the mid-19th Century.
They used sport to engender a community identity and foster integration into community life.
O’Callaghan, himself a former Pontypridd RFC captain and Wales Students Rugby League international, says Port Talbot and Aberavon are made for rugby league.
“The people here are resilient and they are tough,” he says. “You never have to go too far or do too much digging to unearth tough players here.
“You’ll see a bit of that today. This is a tough game and it’s made, I would argue, for towns like Port Talbot.
“We are absolutely delighted with the progress we’ve made over the last couple of years. We’re confident that we’ve got an opportunity to throw up some real talent in the future.”
The club already has form for producing top level talent in the shape of Wales league and union stars Regan Grace and Richard Hibbard.
Grace is a two-time Challenge Cup finalist, who lifted the famous trophy with St Helen’s in 2021.
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The flying wing also represented Wales rugby league before switching to rugby union. He currently plays for Cardiff and scored a try for Wales in an uncapped match against Queensland Reds in Australia last summer.
Former Ospreys rugby union star Hibbard earned 38 caps for Wales and represented the British Lions three times.
O’Callaghan said: “Regan Grace played for Port Talbot Steelers, which was a previous iteration of our club. We’ve had a few different names over the years.
“This club was formed originally in 2001 and for various reasons, there was a hiatus, between 2004 and 2021 when we reformed the club as the Aberavon Fighting Irish.
“We’ve also had the Port Talbot Steelers, the Aberavon Rugby League Club and the Aberavon Seasiders. Regan Grace came through the Port Talbot Steelers, so he’s part of all this.”
Hibbard, now chief executive officer of the Welsh Rugby League, used to play the sport under an assumed name during the summer, while he was also developing his rugby union career.
His rugby career could have been very different.
“Richard played for us when he was starting on the first steps of his professional career,” said O’Callaghan. “He was involved at the time with Swansea and the Ospreys’ Academy.
“But he’s known in our club as Hubert Richards rather than Richard Hibbard. That was the nom de plume he played under for us in the summer during that time!
“We sent him up to St Helen’s where he stayed for a week or two but he got a bit homesick and came back.
“Seeing how his rugby union career went, God only knows what might have happened in terms of a rugby league career. He was a very good athlete, a ball carrier with a lot of pace.”
O’Callaghan is confident the club will produce more top level talent like Grace and Hibbard.
“We believe, and you’ll see it today, we’ve got some players who could play at a much higher level.
“More importantly, we now have over 300 young people registered who will play rugby league throughout the summer. And some of the skills you see in those kids, you’d like to think that one or two will definitely come through.
“The adage of our club is ‘ability without opportunity is nothing’. You’ve got to give these kids an opportunity, otherwise we’ll never know if we’ve got another Regan Grace in our midst.
“Working class communities like this are always going to throw up talent. It’s how you tap into that talent, how you nurture it and give it the opportunities to prosper.”
Any youngsters watching Sunday’s match couldn’t fail to have been inspired by the performance of the Fighting Irish. This, despite the odds being stacked against them from before the first whistle.
The club had booked their place in the Challenge Cup first round by winning the Welsh Grand Final against Cardiff Jets last August – emulating the feat the club achieved back in 2004.
However, head coach Dean Scully wasn’t able to make his final team selection for Sunday’s 1.45pm kick off until he’d checked on the fitness of the majority of his squad, who had played in local rugby union matches the day before.
O’Callaghan said: “Most of our players are rugby union players, league converts, but they still play rugby union.
“The coaching staff have been waiting with bated breath overnight to see if everybody’s come through. And unfortunately, two of our players didn’t.
“So, two likely starters for today got injured yesterday, and obviously we’ve had to re-jig things.
“But that’s a fact of life and we fully appreciate that’s the way of things for us at the moment.
“Twelve of our 17 for today played rugby union yesterday. It would have been four more, but their games were cancelled.”
Despite most of their squad having played less than 24 hours earlier, the Irish were ready to come out fighting against their northern visitors.
Blackbrook, based in the rugby league hotbed of St Helen’s, describe themselves as one of the biggest and most successful rugby league clubs of their kind in the UK, running 13 junior and youth sides as well as their senior team.
Despite their underdog status, the home team would have been buoyed by the rousing Irish songs blasting out over the PA ahead of the match hosted by the Aberavon Green Stars rugby union club at their Little Warren ground.
There was also a poignant pre-match moment at the picturesque ground situated near the seafront and in the shadow of the steelworks. Both sides lined up in silence as an uilleann piper played a haunting lament.
If the Fighting Irish were feeling any fatigue following their union exertions the previous day, they didn’t show it when the referee’s whistle started the match.
Indeed, they went closest to opening the scoring in the early exchanges having a try disallowed following a forward pass.
The visitors took the lead half-way through the first half with a converted try. But the Irish immediately hit back when Morgan Hinds caught a long cross kick to score an unconverted try in the right corner.
Blackbrook took advantage of an Aberavon yellow card to score a second try, which went unconverted before the homesters hit back with a Ryan Pugh penalty to make the interval score 6-10.
Their first attack of the second half saw Blackbrook score a try to extend their lead to 6-14.
But the Fighting Irish hit back immediately with a Kieron John try converted by Pugh, who then added a penalty to level the scores at 14-14.
Pugh added another penalty to put the hosts ahead for the first time and an upset looked as if it may be on the cards as the match entered the final stages.
However, Blackbrook had other ideas as the Fighting Irish players perhaps started to feel the previous day’s exertions.
Three tries in the final 15 minutes saw the visitors eventually run out 16-32 victors, booking their place in the second round of the famous old competition.
In Aberavon’s post-match huddle, coach Scully, who played for the Bridgend-based Celtic Crusaders rugby league club in 2006, could be heard telling his players “that wasn’t a 32-16 match”. He added that they should be proud of their performance.
Those filing away from the touchlines and into the clubhouse to enjoy the post-match entertainment from local musician Jackson Lucitt would have agreed.
Despite the defeat, Aberavon Fighting Irish had enjoyed the opportunity to show their ability.
They also achieved the goal of breathing some positivity into the community during difficult times.