IT isn’t just in the last couple of seasons that Rodney Parade has been a graveyard for lofty sporting reputations. Leicester City’s players might have become the most recent group of stars to have been humbled at the home of Newport County, but as they crashed to an FA Cup upset last month, Claude Puel’s squad were following in some illustrious footsteps. As Middlesbrough manager Tony Pulis knows only too well, Rodney Parade has seen some sights down the years.

Back in 1963, the all-conquering All Blacks headed to Newport for their third game of a tour that would eventually see them play 36 matches. They were unbeaten in 35 of them. But when they turned out at Rodney Parade on a midweek October afternoon, they were beaten 3-0 by Newport RFC. To this day, it remains one of the greatest moments in Welsh sport.

“It’s only recently it’s become a football ground,” said Pulis, who was born and raised in the Pillgwenlly area of Newport, a close-knit working-class community centred around the town’s docks. “When I was a really young lad, I went and watched the All Blacks there on a Tuesday afternoon. It was a rugby ground then – it’s only later that it changed to football.

“You had to play rugby in my school. I played both, you didn’t play one without playing the other. Rugby is still massive in that area, but there’s always been a strong following for football too. Being a Welshman, I’ve got a strong affinity for all the Welsh teams. I love Wrexham and all the way down.”

Pulis didn’t start his career with Newport as he joined Bristol Rovers’ school of football excellence as a teenager, but he spent two years as a County player in the mid-1980s and some of his earliest sporting memories came at the club’s previous home at Somerton Park.

“I used to go with a couple of friends,” he said. “I was a ball boy there when I was very young. I used to go and watch them and watch Cardiff, but mostly I would play on Saturdays and Sundays so I couldn’t get to that many games.

“I played for the local team, the YMCA, so it would be a midweek summer or winter game when you’d go and watch them (Newport). From a very young age, it was school football on a Saturday, then I’d play for the YM on a Sunday.”

Raised as the son of a steelworker, Pulis spent his formative years in Pillgwenlly, a tightly-knit community centred around Newport’s docks. He will not get the opportunity to call on some old haunts when Middlesbrough travel to Newport for today’s FA Cup fourth-round replay – along with his players, he is flying to Wales this morning before boarding a return flight to Teesside straight after the game – but he doesn’t have to physically travel to ‘Pill’ to revisit his roots. In so many ways, the proud, working-class ‘town within a town’ has never left him.

“The area I was brought up in, which is on the other side of the river to the football ground, was a fantastic area to be brought up in,” he said. “It was a community, a wonderful place. Everybody felt like they were part of the community there.

“The docks were vibrant, there was the steelworks down there, and you also had the cattle market and the wood-yards. Everybody was busy making a living and bringing families up. Big families. We had six, the Jones’ down the road had six. It went on. Everybody was together.”

Little wonder that Pulis sees strong parallels to Middlesbrough, and the industrial heritage that has shaped life on the banks of the Tees.

“The people in Teesside, in this area, the people I’ve met out and about have been very warm. They are very honest, very straight-forward and very warm people and it reminds me so much of South Wales.

“One of my great mentors was a person called Bill Dodgin who was from County Durham and Bill always used to talk very, very highly of this area.

“Bill was the one that set up the network, the school of excellence in South Wales that brought so many good Welsh lads through to Bristol Rovers at the time.

“Bill used to always talk about this area, about how honest, hard-working, straight-forward the people were and he thought South Wales reflected this area and that’s going back now four generations. Even now, after four generations where the world’s changed enormously, I still feel that warmth.”