Professional sport can be the cruellest of occupations. For all its glamour and glory, it cuts down its participants in the prime of their lives, suddenly decreeing that they can no longer do something they love and into which hitherto they have poured all their professional energies and emotions.
And often it leaves them in a bewildering state of physical disrepair. “I can’t drive for long periods, I can’t sit for long periods, I can’t pick up my one-year-old a handful of times before I start struggling,” Ken Owens says. “I’m not too bad at the moment. I’m managing but I can’t live a normal life.”
Little wonder, then, that the “Sheriff” is stepping down. Owens, the 37-year-old Wales and British & Irish Lions hooker,
