Calon (10 page)

The current Welsh squad’s personality is an imprint
of Warren’s own: honest, hard-working, level-headed and accepting of its own responsibility. It’s a coaching style Warren partly inherited from those who coached him through school, club and national levels back in New Zealand: men such as Glenn Ross, Kevin Greene and Alex Wyllie. But his coaching philosophy also owes something to his time working as a teacher in the
country
too. Rugby players are, he says, ‘often like big kids’, so applying the principles of teaching makes sense to Warren. Meetings are kept short, points to remember kept to as few as possible, and loyalty won through
honesty
and fair treatment. The resulting coaching style is perhaps more subtle and roundabout than most,
reliant
upon empowering an individual rather than loading them with information, but the end ‘product’, Warren feels, is worth it.

‘How many test caps you got now?’ he’ll casually ask one of his young backs, drawing the question through a languid Kiwi accent. When they tell him twenty-nine or thirty, Warren will raise his eyebrows. ‘Yeah?’ he’ll say, a surprised pitch rising through the word. ‘That’s a lot. You must be one of the most experienced out there, eh? You should be talking a lot. You talking a lot out there?’ And the seed, Warren hopes, is sown. Despite being only twenty-two or twenty-three, the player walks away
having
been given the nod, and the nudge, that as a relative elder statesman they have the licence to play like one.

That coaching can be about giving time as well as
taking it is an aspect of the role Warren understands. Family, he says, comes first. If a player needs a day off because their wife is having a scan, or because there’s
trouble
in the marriage, then Warren would rather lose that player for a day or a week, and win their loyalty in doing so, than keep them in camp and lose it further down the line. Having coached in the northern hemisphere for over twenty years, but with his wife Trudy and son Bryn still living in New Zealand, Warren is no stranger to the strains rugby can put on family life. It is, as he often says when talking about rugby, an ongoing question of
balance
and negotiation. About knowing when to put the pressure on, and when to ease off.

Today, with still four hours until the anthems, it’s time to ease off; a time for restraint, for not over-coaching so close to a match. Because of this, Warren will keep to himself for much of the day and will try his best not to broadcast his nerves to the squad. The first time he’ll see them will be for the walk-through of moves and
line-outs
. Then, like all the coaches, it’ll be about keeping to his match-day routine until the team meeting and the boarding of the bus. Rob Howley will use this time to call home and speak to his wife and kids, absorbing himself in their plans for the day rather than his own, which are already being broadcast across the country. Rob McBryde will go to the gym, get a feel for the mood of the
players
over breakfast, then ‘stick his head in a book’ to pass the time. Shaun, too, will try and say as little as possible
to the players, and will also often read a book. When he was a player, together with praying before a match,
reading
was a technique Shaun often used to cope with his nerves. It’s one he passes on to some of the players too. Sometimes he will even take his book up into the
coaching
box, and he has been known to carry on reading it while in there.

Whatever their routine or habits, all the coaches will try and use this period of the day to focus on their roles and do whatever they can to kill time, until the only time that matters finally arrives: the eighty minutes of Wales against France, played in the Millennium Stadium by a squad they’ve relentlessly coached, advised and analysed, and whose fortunes and well-being have consumed the last ten weeks of their lives.

On taking charge of Wales in 2007, Warren switched the home changing room in the Millennium Stadium from the northern side of the players’ tunnel to the southern. The years preceding his tenure had been unstable and volatile. The spark of brilliance that won Wales a Grand Slam in 2005 was soon extinguished by rifts between players and coaches. A series of stuttering performances finally culminated in a pool-stage knockout by Fiji in the 2007 World Cup. Warren wanted a new start for the Welsh team, a new home within their home. So he moved their dressing room down the corridor, meaning that instead of turning right off their bus Wales now turn left to enter the four dragon-painted rooms that make up their changing rooms within the stadium.

Those four linked rooms are where J.R., the squad’s kit man, has been working for most of the morning,
preparing
them for the arrival of the team. Having arrived himself at 9.30 a.m., he’s spent the last hour and a half, as he has for every Welsh game since 1985, unloading equipment from his van, laying out the players’ kit and clipping in their names and cap numbers above their changing stalls.

Sometimes J.R. works in silence. When he does, there is something of the Catholic ritual about his process, a solitary and sombre dedication at twenty-two separate
altars. This morning, however, he’s been working to music playing from an iPod dock plugged into the side of Adam Jones’s stall. ‘Living on a Prayer’, ‘More Than a Woman’ and the Stereophonics’ ‘Local Boy in the Photograph’ have all animated the low-ceilinged space as J.R.,
occasionally
slipping his glasses to the end of his nose to read the label of a shirt, prepares the room. Moving around the three-sided changing area in an anticlockwise
direction
, he builds the folded piles of kit on the right-hand side of each player’s bench, working in reverse order to what they’ll need first. He begins with the white towels, folding each one as meticulously as a Savoy
chambermaid
, before dropping them to the benches with a series of soft rhythmical thuds. The dark wood of the changing stalls makes them appear all the brighter, a comforting reward or consolation waiting for each player after their eighty minutes of violent exertion.

Upon each towel J.R. lays a pair of red and white socks, a pair of white shorts, a red training top and a red Welsh shirt, its number facing up. Taking each item of clothing fresh from its packaging he inspects it, then folds it with precision. As he lays down each player’s shirt, he gives it a single stroke across the number on its back, as if calming a highly strung animal or bestowing a brief blessing upon its wearer. The numbers themselves are composed of thousands of images of fans’ faces. Together with the word ‘
Braint
’ inside the collar, these faces are a further reminder for whom the squad are playing when they
put on these shirts, and never more so than today, when the weight of Welsh fans’ expectations will press heavier upon their backs than ever.

J.R.’s manner and appearance as he works in the Wales changing rooms is reminiscent of an owner of a hardware store, the kind of blue-aproned shopkeeper who’ll shake his head as he studies your list, before retrieving even the most unlikely of parts from his cupboards. Although J.R. says he sees himself at the bottom of the ladder within the Welsh squad, he’ll be quick to point out, in his matter-of-fact Barry Island accent, that ‘you can’t play a game without kit, without the kit man you can’t play the game’, the mirroring of his syntax lending a further inevitability to his role.

He’s right, but there’s another reason for the fundamental quality of J.R.’s presence too. Having first worked for the Welsh team in 1985, J.R., as he’ll tell you himself, ‘has more bloody caps than anyone’. Over the last twenty-seven years, as he’s gone about his duties, J.R., like Lee and Craig in the groundsman’s office, has seen hundreds of players and coaches pass through the team. He was already established within the squad when the current home-grown Wales coaches all got their first caps, when the WRU chairman, Dai Pickering, was captaining the side and when a young Rob Howley ‘wanted a cup of tea and a chat’. In an environment of flux, in which players, kit and coaches change all the time, J.R. is a rare seam of continuity within the Wales set-up, his knowing
world-weariness, as if nothing could surprise him, lending him the air of a minor Shakespearean character moving among the brief tragedies and triumphs of the players and coaches. Like the porter in
Macbeth
who, as Macbeth wracks himself with worries about his destiny, goes about his business, having seen many great men come and go through his gates, so J.R. keeps his vision close,
occupying
himself with the necessities of his role and little more.

As J.R. works in the Welsh changing rooms, singing along to M. C. Hammer’s ‘Hammer Time’, he is
surrounded
by the symbolism of his country. The WRU’s version of the Prince of Wales feathers is imprinted at the back of each player’s stall, and again across the entrance to the changing area. In the gym next door a bright-red dragon, its claw raised, fills the floor space between the weights machines. Dragons appear again on the Welsh flags hung throughout the other rooms, and a dragon’s tail coils between the statements written above the players’ heads: ‘RESPECT THE JERSEY’, ‘
DAL DY DIR
’.

Other text around the room is more specific, telling the story of the match to come later today. A list of
players
to be strapped by the physio teams is written in black marker pen on white medical tape stuck to the wall:

On a whiteboard above a table of Powerade drinks the pre-match schedule for the Italy game is still written up in blue, its timings yet to be replaced with those for today:

Elsewhere, on several walls throughout the four rooms, those banners appear again:

When Wales played England this year, it was J.R.’s responsibility to recreate this home changing room within the aircraft carrier that is the stadium at Twickenham. Denuded of stalls or any of the symbols painted on these walls, J.R. brought the squad’s equipment from Cardiff, hung Welsh flags above the players’ benches and put up two new banners. The first, hanging in the physio area, read:

The second, hung above the whiteboard written up with the pre-match schedule, where everyone could see it, told the players:

If proof were ever needed that when two national rugby teams come together on a pitch, it’s never just two sides that meet, but two cultures, two histories, then for over a century the annual Wales vs England fixture has been all the evidence required. Historically attuned as sport is, few other matches are so invested with meaning. Every year the eighty minutes of these games have been fuelled by centuries of association, either drawing
upon the perennial Welsh grievance of oppression by a ‘recently arrived’ more powerful neighbour, or stoked by contemporary events such as the flooding of Welsh
valleys
for English reservoirs or Margaret Thatcher’s heavy hand in the miners’ strike. Culturally, each game against England is, too, a reminder of the class difference at the root of the sport in each nation. As J.R. was recreating the Welsh changing room in Twickenham that day, English supporters were already arriving in the car park outside to unpack hampers of champagne and caviar from their Range Rovers.

In his pre-match speech in 1977, the Welsh captain, Phil Bennett, openly drew upon the fractious
relationship
between the two nations:

When the teams met ten years later in Cardiff, the crowd witnessed what has since been described as the most violent twenty minutes of Six Nations rugby ever, with four players eventually banned after the match.

But that was then. Now, along with professionalism,
things have changed. The contemporary Welsh
players
, some of whom were born in England or who have an English parent, have moved beyond an emotional response to the English game towards a more focused perspective. As Warren has warned them, ‘Emotional energy can catch a team out.’ The fixture is still
undeniably
charged, but where many Wales supporters would say that beating England is still more important than winning the other matches in the rest of the Six Nations, the players, if they are to bring about that win, have to see things differently.

England presented a significant challenge for Wales this year. An equally young side, they were ambitious to salvage their reputation after a disastrous World Cup and eager to perform well for their caretaker coach, Stuart Lancaster. They were also, like Wales, currently unbeaten in the tournament, having scraped through two wins against Italy and Scotland. Whoever won at Twickenham stood a good chance of winning the Grand Slam. And so it was that Sam Warburton and his team prepared
themselves
for a physically intense match, not in the way of punches thrown in animosity, but in the way of a fast, hard game motivated purely by the desire to win.