If you go to Miami, bring a trolley for your carry-on baggage or pretend to be crippled.Then I hit passport trouble. I am an Irish citizen and a British subject, so I can have two passports. Last October, at Heathrow, an American Airlines official looked at my British passport and said I couldn’t check in without a visa “But I don’t need a visa.”"Sorry ma’am. This doesn’t state you have the right of abode in Britain.”I tried reasoning (I’ve lived here since I was 21, my passport is full of proof that they always let me back, European law and the rest of it) “Sorry, ma’am.

We can’t let you on.”What was particularly rich was that in my suitcase was a copy of a book I’d recently written about the Foreign Office, with its full co-operation. I considered showing this to the airline official and explaining that in the circumstances, even if Michael Howard wanted to deport me, Douglas Hurd might be persuaded to put in a good word, but he did not look like a man to be swayed by a joke.Fortunately, I then remembered there was a multiple-bearer visa in my defunct Irish passport. The official said that would do nicely, I hurled myself into a taxi, asked the driver to step on it and at vast expense tore home and back. Naturally, when I got to Boston, they let me through on my British passport without a second glance.This time around, the Miami immigration official looked at the white form tucked into my British passport and asked where my visa was. Of course, the Irish passport was buried at the bottom of the toybag, so I lost my place in the queue as I rummaged for 10 minutes on my knees I proferred it “This is out of date, lady.”"But the British one isn’t. Anyway, the visa wasn’t required last time I came here.”At this stage, he put on the expression officials adopt when confronted by people they regard as half-wits, and clutched his head in his hands. I wanted to do the same, but I wanted even more to catch my connecting flight He spoke slowly and clearly “Look, lady.

Why’d you fill in the white form when you shudda filled in the green? The white’s for a visa.”"Because the hostess didn’t offer me a green one and I didn’t notice this was a visa form.” Shaking his head in disbelief at this moronic Limey aka Paddy, he told me to “go fill in the green” He did not offer me a pen. Mine, of course, was buried at the bottom of my toybag.When he finally let me through, he did not instruct me to have a nice evening.. There never was a prouder Welshman than Ieuan Evans, but less of a tub-thumper it is impossible to imagine. There is more of the lyricism of a bard than the fire of a dragon in the attitude and demeanour of the Wales captain. There is, too, a poetry in the way he runs up the wing and scores tries to match the lilt in his heartfelt, articulate speech. This man is an ambassador not just for Welsh rugby but for rugby itself. Yet what does he want when Wales play England at Cardiff Arms Park this afternoon? Raw passion.
It is slightly disconcerting to hear him say so, but then his reference point is the 1993 Wales-England game.

Then, it was like days of old – not in the margin of the Welsh win, a mere point, but in the sense of a nation united in common cause.”It’s up to us, the players, to find the weaknesses in England’s defences but there is more to it than that. The atmosphere at the game two years ago [when who else but Evans should score the decisive try?] was a major factor in our win and a major help throughout the game. I had never felt anything like that before.”This last remark is a baleful commentary on the diminution of the Welsh crowd’s fervour, the failure of national support at a time – those good old days long since behind them – when a series of struggling Wales teams needed it more than ever.These days, though, Welsh rugby is more at peace with itself and the idea that the 50,000 or so inside the Arms Park today might “do it for Ieuan”, just as he has so often done it for them, is no less attractive for its sentimentality.If these people love the artistry of his rugby they are also in awestruck admiration of the resilience of his character. This game, after all, brings the latest of all-too-many comebacks from debilitating injury. Evans, 31 next month, has dislocated his right shoulder five times, necessitating two operations – each of which led to lay-offs lasting eight months.He calculates that he has lost more than three years of rugby and as many as 30 caps through his absences, which means that otherwise he would long since have passed John Williams’s Wales record of 55 and greatly extended his own tries’ record of 21. Instead, he wins his 49th today and is the sort of bloke who even accepts that it might, just possibly, have done him some good to have had so many breaks from the game.This is not intended as a pun, since the most recent injury – a fearful combination of broken fibula, dislocated ankle and snapped ligament – was the sheerest agony when it happened, playing for Llanelli at Cardiff last 1 October.

But it is none the less the case that Evans, after missing Wales’s most recent matches against France, South Africa and Italy, is at a peak of enthusiasm at the very best moment with the World Cup on its way.”I have no intention of finishing after the World Cup; I’m not even considering it at the moment,” he said “I’m hungry for rugby. I’ve lost so many seasons, missed out on so many caps, that I’m relatively fresh compared with anyone else of my age at this stage of his career.”I’m training as hard as ever, in fact harder than ever, because I don’t have that fatigue that many people seem to have. I’d like all those lost caps back, all that time I’ve spent getting rehabilitated after injury and, who knows, if I had played in all those games would I still be around or would I already have had enough?”Mind you, after seeing the grotesque angle of his left foot after this latest injury Evans could have been excused for never wanting to see a rugby ball, or more especially an opposing tackler, ever again. Yet he somehow turned the thought of dragging his body through yet another recuperation into a stimulus.”The short-term aim was very, very short term: the only thing going through my mind was `would someone please put the ankle back in and ease the pain?’ I have to say that thoughts about my rugby future did not impact at all and anyway as soon as we got in the ambulance John Fairclough [the surgeon] said he would have me back playing some time in the new year. He has been true to his word.”Evans now has a plate and half-a-dozen pins holding his left ankle-bone together. He spent five days in hospital and just over two weeks in plaster, was able to jog by the end of November, joined his Llanelli team-mates for training at the beginning of January and had his first game, a cup- tie in a morass at Glynneath, on 28 January. In each of his two subsequent league appearances he has been a try-scorer.”The psychological battle is as important as the physical but it has never, whenever I’ve made a comeback, affected me too badly.