Wales internationals announced as coaches at amateur Welsh rugby team

Two former Wales internationals have joined the coaching set-up at a grassroots rugby team in the Rhondda Valley.

Tom James and Matthew Morgan are among the new faces at Porth Harlequins RFC with the club determined to “shake things up” ahead of another season in Division One East Central. The pair, who between them have 17 caps for Wales, join the experienced Lee Purnell in the new-look coaching lineup, as well as new assistant coach Carl Williams.

Cardiff’s all-time leading try scorer James, who also represented Exeter Chiefs and the Scarlets before hanging up his boots in 2020, has been brought on board as the team’s new Strength and Conditioning coach. The winger, who made 12 appearances for his country between 2009 and 2016, set up a gym after retiring and is qualified as a personal trainer.

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Cardiff full-back Morgan, who represented Wales at the 2015 Rugby World Cup, will take charge of the club’s backs, with former Aberavon and Birchgrove flanker Purnell appointed as the new forwards coach. Meanwhile, Williams, who made over 200 appearances for Ystrad Rhondda before joining the Quins last year, takes on a new venture as the club’s assistant coach.

Club chairman Christopher Rees explained that the impressive line-up came to be through a combination of the club’s desire to offer something different to those playing grassroots rugby and their new recruits’ coaching ambitions.

“A few of us already train with Tom,” he said. “He’s got a gym in Porth now and he does personal training and classes and stuff down there. It’s kind of stemmed from him really. The coaches we had last year have done a lot for us and one of them, Rob Downes, is a legend at the club having been here 10 years, but we just needed to shake it up a little bit.

“And when you’ve got someone like Tom James saying he’s interested, it’s not something you can turn down is it?”

Mr Rees added: “Matthew was keen to get into coaching and obviously Tom’s a friend of his, so they spoke together and it went from there. Lee’s coming in with the forwards, he’s got experience with Aberavon and he was with Birchgrove in Swansea last year. So he’s well traveled and a good player, so I assume he’s going to be a good coach as well.

“Our assistant coach Carl played for Ystrad Rhondda for a long time and he came down to us last year. His knowledge of the game is really, really good and we’re keen to turn him into a coach too.

“We’ve got a mixture of everything really. The guys have got a lot of experience of playing and the coaching side is a bit newer to them. We’ve got to see how it all turns out and hopefully it will be to the benefit of the club”.

The new hires will not just benefit the club’s senior team, however, with Mr Rees hoping that they will help to inspire the next generation of Quins and convince them to stay at the club at a time when doing so is proving increasingly difficult.

“We’ve got some good youngsters at the moment, particularly our U14 side, so we’re banking on them coming up and joining the seniors in a few years time. For them to see the coaching line up that we’ve got in place, you would hope they would want to stay at the club and play under coaches who have played at the highest level.

“Rugby in general is not as strong as it used to be, so we wanted to shake things up a little bit and give a Valley club something a bit different. It may even end up turning a few heads and attracting a few more players which can only be a good thing.”

As evidenced by their new coaches, the club has ambition but for now the priority is staying in Division 1 after a tough season saw them finish eighth in the table and some 42 points off a promotion spot. They will now go into a new-look league season which sees three Cynon Valley teams join the ranks, with Abercynon, Aberdare and Abercwmboi all being promoted from the division below.

“We’ve struggled through this season, to be honest. We’ve had a lot of injuries, we were in a good position at one point and then we had something like 17 injuries altogether, so that was tough.

“Next season it’s a smaller league and a very competitive one too. There’s three teams from the Cynon Valley coming in now so there’s more local derbies to look forward to. Hopefully we can gain a couple places and start to push towards the top, but it’s going to be all new to us next year. For now, we’ve just got to sustain our Division One status”.

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