Lewis Jones

Lewis Jones was a legendary Welsh dual-international who played for both Wales and Great Britain. The iconic outside back also played 385 games for Leeds. He then headed to Australia and took a contract as captain-coach with Wentworthville in Second Division.

From therhinos.co.uk:

"By the end of the 1964 season, after twelve hugely enjoyable years at Leeds, I took up an option to go over to Australia to player/coach in the Metropolitan League with Wentworthville. They decided to develop the club a couple of years before they got me over and applied for a license to play in the senior competition. They’d always been a junior club and didn’t even have a proper clubhouse at that time. When I got there they had built a single storey, comfortable facility catering for sport-minded members. It was overlooking the rugby ground but there was also a bowling club, table tennis, snooker and basketball. Eventually they applied to the New South Wales Rugby League for promotion into the second tier of competition. The governing body’s intention was eventually to have two clubs from there go into the ARL first grade premiership. In the time I was there, it just so happened that we had the best players, I was very fortunate and we won the division in seven out of my eight seasons. Penrith and Cronulla were among the easy beats but they were the ones who subsequently got the nod into the big time. Initially, we were told it would be us but geography won the day, Cronulla were south of Sydney and Penrith off to the west, whereas we were no more than a mile from Parramatta. Wentworthville’s exclusion was probably the only really sad thing that happened to me in my rugby life. Derek Hallas was at Parramatta for some of the time I was out there, before he came back home, but I rarely bumped into him and Barbara. On one occasion, in 1968, I played in a curtain raiser to a Great Britain World Cup match down under. The oddest thing was playing in front of 60 or 70,000 people at the Sydney cricket ground in a domestic game, Wentworthville didn’t normally attract that many. During the match, at half time, I can recall a couple of the British lads – Mick Shoebottom and his partner-in-crime and room mate ‘Flash’ Flanagan - popping over for a chat."