The businessman Peter Thomas, whose pounds 500,000 gift to the club a year ago was their salvation, put together a package that includes eager sponsorship from the builders’ merchants Jewsons, and a last-minute donation from the millionaire rugby fan Dr Chris Evans.It is to them that Davies owes his moment of truth this afternoon. Alas, they have been too busy preserving the barriers that hitherto prevented it. Even now those barriers are down, I have still not heard the slightest yearning.Significantly, when Cardiff’s chief executive, Gareth Davies, went to Warrington to clinch the deal on Monday, he did so with backing that has not come from the game. Cardiff are not the only club to realise how easy, and how fatal, it will be to be left behind in the race to build strong club squads.It is odd that during Jonathan Davies’s long absence from the game I have never heard a top union official, and I don’t mean the Welsh particularly, express a desire to see Davies play union again. If he can inspire a break-out of free spirit among younger players he will have contributed enough. Whatever he brings home we have the Cardiff club to thank for that. As in England, the professional initiative is coming from the clubs and the talk and the movement, refreshingly, is not about administrators but about players.

It is ridiculous but there is no way he can avoid it, and we may well look on today as the moment the game in Wales began to restore itself.He hopes at least to prove what can be achieved if players are allowed to express themselves. His game is based on obeying an intuition that sometimes surprises even him and he fears that our team games are threatened by negative patterns and strategies. Indeed, he appears to have been awarded the task of single-handedly restoring the fortunes of Welsh rugby. “It will be good to get some nastiness back into Welsh rugby.

It is a hard, physical game and these sort of challenges make you into a better player.”The danger he faces, however, may come more from our expectations There is no trace of his being underestimated. No doubt there will be wing forwards in the weeks ahead anxious to convince him that, compared with league, union is not as easy as he recalls “I hope they feel that way,” says Davies. A survey of the top 14 rugby league clubs at the time revealed that the coaches of 12 would not have bought him Once more his size was regarded as too big a handicap. After his first few days in Widnes he was inclined to believe it himself, especially when the club’s physiotherapist burst into laughter as Davies presented himself for a medical inspection.Once more the impact of his success was magnified by surprise that he is capable of matching a unique instinctive skill with such an irrepressible physical accompaniment.