www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/f ... es-3859568 Showing on BBC 1 Wales next Thursday at 9pm

www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/f ... es-3859568 Showing on BBC 1 Wales next Thursday at 9pm

Always been a big fan of JD. I was amazed that the Chemics paid £225 for him all that time ago. Where did they get the money.

ICI shares were very strong at the time .

Tonight at 9pm

it was very good..enjoyed it.

We will never see his like in the game again...he would be cast aside as too small, too lightly built.

Heart of a lion though and his ability was on the edge of genius.

Still the most exciting player I have seen. Makes STomkins look like a donkey.

It was a very good documentary and I didn't even mind the Rugby Union parts, well done to BBC Wales. One of the players who really got me hooked on Rugby League when I started watching in 93, his points scoring record was amazing and of course he created so much for others.

You've just got to have massive respect for the bloke for what he overcome with his size as you say Mark, also lost his Dad at 14 and then his wife to cancer. Then he makes you respect him even more with all the charity work he does.

Superb programme

I thought the Welsh production team would "glaze over" his RL connection, but, fair play to them, they showed some great clips
Halifax (h) 93 (the night the lights went out), with that sidestep/ kick-on try
Halifax (a) cup, a few months later. I remember going beserk at that try
The GB try v Aus (won me a few quid at Done's on Bridge St)
Some good Wids clips
and that try when he ghosted past a young Johns v Newcastle

and a belter for RahRah Wales against NZ in 88

Sunday afternoons in 93-95 were just a complete joy
Sunday dinner, then a few pints in The Causeway watching the previous week's Davies exploits, then into Wilderspool, and (occasionally) into the Touchdown for a pint or two of Guinness and listening to close Welsh harmony singing from his followers from the valleys, and then (after my tea) a session in town to see the players make exhibitions of themselves in the Time Square. BLISS.

Good spot by Mrs Goldblatt in the programme. When they were flicking that elastic band around Davies' head, Rowland Phillips was next to him.

I watched it and agree with all the above, has a similar skill set to Ratchford. Imagine if he was playing today, 40/20's would be very easy to come by for him.

You missed out "having pie and peas in the ground and scraping the polystyrene off the food tray with your fork, whilst trying to remove the pie"

If Davies was playing today, they would have scrapped the 40/20 after the first season.

You could not help but admire him.. Struggled at first, got his upper body strength sorted quickly, and was a top class player. Always liked to watch him, he was a delight.

Some great memories, I used to enjoy the game far more then.

The programme also showed how low the media profile of the game has fallen....His signing was the lead story on the six o'clock news!

Jiffy will always remain the most exciting player ever to play for this club. Unique.

Wonderful player, and a jolly nice chap to boot.

As many have pointed out, they'd probably have him on weights for two years before he got near SL these days (as they would with Allan Bateman, another fantastic player) but JD was class personified.

Not just a great rugby player of both codes, but also a wonderfully skillful athlete with abilities that come along once every hundred years.

We were very, very lucky to see him play and even luckier to see him in the P&B.

sunday afternoons were brilliant followed by a belly full at night..time square always packed then stagger round to the feathers then last bus home..just wish we could have sunday nights back like the good old days..back on topic..totally agree with the poster who said tomkins is a donkey compared to jiffy..jiffy was class on and off the rugby field..his 2 trys at halifax in the cup were of the highest quality...great bloke

my grandad used to be a big widnes fan... when i stayed at his on a friday night he used to take us to watch widnes reserves... Davies pretty much learnt the ropes for a good 3/4 months and put on a few stone playing friday night reserve rugby... he was tiny when Widnes first signed him, but boy could he play.... i remember seeing him kick a bomb up once on a rainy friday night at naughton park, ive still never seen a rugby ball go that high.

due to old age my memory sometimes plays tricks but im certain when jiffy played in the widnes a team(reserves for some on here)didnt they have more turning up than the 1st team...as regards to kicking up a bomb graham steadman of cas will vouch to that..i remember cas down here and jiffy put up a bomb steadman was all over the place and cullen had the easy task of putting the ball over the line for his easiest ever try..imagine jiffy in this wire team

no... they were still getting a few thousand to watch the reserves.. but there was often 12,000 + in naughton park on a match day back then... when Davies made his debut it was against Salford, i remember going, they won 59-8, Offiah and Brimah kebbie scored 5 tries each....Davies came on and played 10 mins at the end. Attendance was 13,500 or something like that.. there must have been another 2000 that climbed in for free as well... the place was rammed solid with people sat on roof tops as well around the ground.

a few thousand watching reserve grade rugby compared to a couple of hundred watching our lot..i knew there was a lot watching jiffy in the reserves just find it hard to believe 12,000 watching the 1st team,,amounts to 3 games nowadays

Oh s a m

I remember that game, as if it were yesterday
Rob Myler went length of the field after about 10 mins.
Then, John Smith went and gave THE most biased reffing performance I've ever seen, and gave Cas EVERY decision after that. We pummelled them, but couldn't break their try line. Five minutes to go, and we're trailing by a handful of points, and then, THAT happened................PANDEMONIUM breaks out in the Fletch.

Hard luck "Mr" Smith, you tried, but failed.

That bomb Davies put up, had Martians worried.

As mark m pointed out earlier, 90's rugby was superb

First half of the 90s was, it declined rapidly in the latter half of the 90s as the game lost a lot of great players, Davies, Hanley, Schofield, Bateman, Edwards etc.

On Davies, his kicking alone would have made him a top player. If he'd have had no real pace or agility you could have put him at stand off and he would have been a threat kicking 40/20s, putting precision bombs up, and of course his goalkicking was outstanding. On kicking alone I would have put him right up with Briers and he was a better goalkicker too. Probably only Andrew Johns, maybe Ricky Stuart ahead of him.

But then you add that kicking, to his ability to evade and outpace defenders and he was the ultimate attacking player. He could accelerate very quickly and had a definite extra gear that he could slip in to when he had just got the edge of a defender, it was hard to tell he was running any faster but defenders who appeared to have him covered seemed to slide backwards. When he got in to full speed he could maintain it without slowing up till he was over the line, so once he was past the line there was no contest, if the fullback was coming across from the middle of the field he just used to arc out to the corner and realistically nobody was going to close him down.

Undoubtedly the best Warrington player since I've been watching. If we had him in the Tony Smith era we would have dominated RL like Wigan used to.

Talking of Widnes, I remember them playing Halifax once and Colin Whitfield took too long at a penalty and got sin binned. The old BBC 101 top tries has some great 80's rugby league on

There's no way they could've done this programme without his RL career getting a fat mention, since it's such a big part of his life. You could even argue that it 'made' him.

It was interesting to note that the changes he put to the WRU, which were rejected, were then taken on board some 15 years later, suggested again by the then foreign coach. Still, it's typical of the WRU not to take any notice, to generally be dumb and to protect their own little ways.

Nobody could blame Jiffy for feeling let down and taking the money on offer. Nobody. And I include the most rabid RU fans in that too. Ignored and pilloried by his own sport, for daring to want to improve it.
And guess what? Even today, the WRU are a bunch of anuses.

As a fan of both codes, I still rate his best try as the GB one against Oz at Wembley, where he skinned Brett Mullins at the end.

I first saw him in RL at a wet Vetch Field in November in the early 90s, Wales v New Zealand. From memory, the Wales team contained him, Phil Ford, Rob Ackerman, Alan Bateman, Jonathan Griffiths, Anthony Sullivan, Ian Marlow, Barry Williams, Rowland Phillips, and Adrian Hadley. There might've been Kevin Ellis and David Bishop too.

The elastic band scene with Rowland Phillips was probably done for his S4C rugby chat show Jonathan. A mainly daft, cliched show, but it's good fun, even if I do have to watch it with subtitles!