The Day Wales Sang Before a Rugby Match and Started a Sporting Tradition

There are things in sport that feel as though they have always been there. The haka before New Zealand play rugby. A stadium standing for a national anthem. Thousands of people singing before a ball has been kicked.

But somebody had to do it first.

Amgueddfa Cymru records the match in Cardiff on 16 December 1905 as the first occasion a national anthem was sung before a sporting fixture.

With Wales, New Zealand and Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.

The team nobody could beat

New Zealand arrived in Cardiff having played 27 matches on their first tour of Britain. They had won all 27, scoring 801 points and conceding just 22. England had been beaten 15–0. Ireland had been beaten 15–0. Scotland had lost 12–7.

For seven and a half matches before arriving in Cardiff, New Zealand had not conceded a single point. This was not just another touring side. The Originals, as that New Zealand team became known, had become one of the stories of the sporting world.

Wales were waiting for them at Cardiff Arms Park.

And Wales had an answer prepared for something else New Zealand had brought with them. The haka.

The idea

The response was not entirely spontaneous. Tom Williams, a former Wales international and a member of the Welsh Football Union committee, had an idea.

New Zealand would perform the haka before the match. Wales should answer.

Williams wrote to the Western Mail suggesting that the Welsh players and supporters respond by singing Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. It was a simple idea. No ceremony. No carefully produced stadium presentation. Just a song.

When New Zealand finished the haka at Cardiff Arms Park, Wales winger Teddy Morgan began to sing. The other Welsh players joined him.

Then the crowd did the same.

More than 40,000 voices inside Cardiff Arms Park sang Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. There was no musical accompaniment. Just the players and the people around them.

Amgueddfa Cymru records it as the first occasion a national anthem was sung before a sporting fixture.

Something completely normal to us now was anything but normal then.

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau

The song itself was already nearly half a century old. Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau was composed in Pontypridd in 1856 by father and son Evan and James James. Evan wrote the words. James composed the melody.

Long before packed stadiums and televised internationals, it had become part of Welsh national life. But Cardiff in 1905 gave it another setting. Sport.

The connection between Welsh sport and Welsh song now feels almost inseparable. You hear it before rugby internationals and football internationals. In Cardiff and in away ends thousands of miles from Wales.

Sometimes sung properly. Sometimes shouted. Sometimes with hardly anything left resembling a singing voice by the final line.

That relationship had a moment when it began. And it happened against New Zealand.

It is part of the same relationship between song, symbols and identity explored across the symbols that have come to represent Wales.

Then Wales had to play them

The singing would have been remembered whatever happened next. What followed turned the afternoon into something much bigger.

Wales beat New Zealand 3–0.

The man who had started the singing scored the only try. Teddy Morgan crossed in the first half after a move involving Dicky Owen, Cliff Pritchard and Rhys Gabe.

New Zealand believed they had answered in the second half when Bob Deans went for the Welsh line. No try was awarded. Whether Deans had grounded the ball before being dragged back has been argued over ever since.

The score remained 3–0.

New Zealand played 35 matches on the tour. They won 34. Wales were the only team to beat them.

More than a rugby match

There are plenty of reasons why 16 December 1905 matters in Welsh sporting history. Wales beat one of the greatest touring rugby sides the game had seen. Teddy Morgan scored one of the most famous tries in Welsh rugby history. It was the first Test between Wales and New Zealand, beginning a rivalry that has lasted for more than a century.

But something happened before the rugby that travelled much further than the result.

A team sang its national anthem. A crowd joined them. And a sporting tradition was born.

Today we barely think about it. National teams line up. The music starts. The crowd stands. It happens across sports and across the world.

In Cardiff in 1905, there was no template to follow.

New Zealand brought the haka. Wales answered with Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.

More than a century later, we are still singing it.

That connection between Welsh identity and rugby still runs through matchdays today. Explore our Welsh rugby T-shirts, designed in North Wales.

Some songs need no introduction. This one helped change what happens before the game even begins.