Calon (13 page)

Warren would meet some of that passionate support on his first night in Wales, when he came to stay with Roger at St Hilary. On taking him into his local pub,
The Bush, Roger was in conversation with Warren when a man approached from the bar and tapped Warren on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, Mr Gatland,’ he said. ‘I’d like to introduce myself. I’m one of the 2.9 million selectors in Wales. Good luck.’

It was a well-intentioned but premature gesture. Despite speculation in the media, Warren hadn’t yet accepted the position of Wales head coach, and Roger had yet to formally ask him. He had, instead, invited Warren to Wales to ‘just talk’, and to give him an
opportunity
to witness first hand the position rugby occupied within the country’s psyche and landscape.

The following morning, by way of beginning this process, Roger chartered a helicopter from Cardiff bay and flew Warren across South Wales, allowing the New Zealander to get a proper look at his prospective employer from the air. From Cardiff, following Roger’s instructions, the pilot flew along the southern corridor of Welsh
rugby’s
heartland. Tracking the unspooling M4, they passed over Newport, the ground at Rodney Parade and the Gwent valleys. Below them the long villages and towns of South Wales bled into each other, their roofs and streets frequently punctuated with the green of rugby pitches. Beyond their borders these towns gave way to hedged farmland or barren hillsides grazed by wild ponies. ‘It looks like New Zealand,’ Warren said, looking out of his window at the land spread below him. Turning west over Ebbw Vale they flew around the sculpted peaks of Pen y
Fan and the Beacons before dropping south over Rhigos and heading further west to Stradey Park in Llanelli, then over the building works of Parc y Scarlets, Rhossili Bay and around the peninsula of Worms Head. Heading back east the helicopter flew over Swansea and the city’s new Liberty Stadium and the ground at St Helen’s where Warren had once played. Taking in the Knoll at Neath and the Brewery Field in Bridgend, they finally returned to Cardiff, making a pass over the Millennium Stadium and the pitch which would, if Warren accepted the job, be his new home ground.

But Roger didn’t want the tour to end there. Having landed, they got into his two-seater Mercedes and drove up into the Rhondda, through Tylorstown and Treorchy, before passing through the Bwlch and down the Ogmore valley to his mother’s house in Cefn Cribwr, where Roger suggested they stop for some tea. As Roger stepped inside the small terraced house that was his childhood home, he introduced Warren to his eighty-one-year-old mother. ‘I know who he is!’ she admonished her son in reply, before turning back to Warren. ‘Now,’ she said, taking his hand and leading him into the living room, ‘what you going to do about Gavin Henson?’

As Roger emerges back onto Westgate Street, the Millennium Stadium rears into view. The first fans are beginning to enter the building, flowing up to the gates in steady streams. Others are already taking up their
positions
on the corner of the street outside the Angel Hotel or along the castle walls, ready to welcome the arrival of the Wales team bus into the city. All of Cardiff is engaged in a single conversation, the crowds bonded by a shared anticipation. A group of French supporters pose for
photographs
with a mounted policeman. A young woman in high heels and a mini-dress pauses beside them to stroke the horse’s neck, her gold sequinned handbag swinging from her shoulder. From further down the street a hooter sounds. Another replies. Outside Gate 3 an S4C TV crew are interviewing the welsh boxer, Joe Calzaghe, asking him for his prediction on the match. ‘Wales will win,’ Joe says, ‘but it’ll be close.’

Looking over Joe’s interview is a statue of the late Sir Tasker Watkins, once deputy Lord Chief Justice and ex-president of the Welsh Rugby Union. In a couple of hours’ time the tide of spectators will have risen even
further
, with thousands flowing up the incline of Gate 3 to maroon the bespectacled Sir Tasker, his hands behind his back, in a sea of red and blue.

As an officer serving with the Welsh Regiment in the
Second World War, Sir Tasker was awarded a VC for leading his men in a bayonet charge in Normandy. When Graham Henry was Wales coach, he sometimes pinned Sir Tasker’s citation in the team’s changing room before a Six Nations match:

Roger walks on towards the stadium. Once inside he’ll take the VIP lift up to the President’s Lounge on level five, where he’ll begin welcoming over a hundred guests for the pre-match lunch. These will include members of the Fédération Française de Rugby, the first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, ex-players, politicians, sponsors, business people, academics and broadcasters. A team of young men and women will take coats, hanging them on
two long racks on either side of the door into the lounge. Once inside waiters and waitresses will greet the guests with trays of red and white wine, while others circulate with canapés. A bar will serve beer and gin and tonics. The room itself, with its bank of windows looking out over the County Club and the city, will be charged with a heightened sense of being, like the Blims on the pitch this morning, at the centre of the centre.

Once his guests are seated, Dennis Gethin, the
president
of the WRU, will address the room first in Welsh, then in French and finally, ‘for the less civilised among us’, in English. His introductory speech over and grace recited, the starters will be served and everyone will begin to eat and drink, to drink and eat, laying napkins over protruding stomachs or across the hems of delicate dresses. The whole lounge, five floors above the
changing
rooms where Carcass is preparing his strapping
station
, where Ryan mixes the rehydration drinks and Prof. John is checking his needles and thread, feasts, drinks and talks, celebrating together before the game begins.

And in the sponsors’ boxes around the stadium, too, meals are being served and drinks are being poured. And in the bars on level three the ‘joy machines’ are already pumping out twelve pints at a time. And in the family rooms and the ex-players’ lounge those who are closest to the squad and those who have been here before them eat and drink, drink and eat. The whole stadium, from top to bottom, apart from those two quiet changing rooms
either side of the tunnel, is loud with expectation,
occasion
and alcohol.

Inside the jacket pockets of the men and in the
hand-bags
of the women dining in the President’s Lounge long WRU wallets hold their other invitations for the day: for post-match tea, and later to the black-tie post-match
dinner
at the Hilton. On each glossy invitation is the image of a Welsh rugby shirt, its fabric and feathers filled out by the chest and shoulders of a player, their head cropped off at the base of the neck.

Twelve miles further west a quieter pre-match lunch is coming to an end in the Wales team room at the Vale. The remaining players at the tables are silent, occupied in thought. Leigh Halfpenny is still nervous. As much as possible he will not talk to anyone before the match, or smile. The eighty minutes of the game, everything for which they have trained, is almost upon them. The whole team know how the story is meant to go today, and each player has rehearsed his role in its performance. But they also all remember their last game against France; how it got away from them, and in so doing, wrote them out of the World Cup final.

Sam, their captain who watched that match slip away from the sidelines, is finding it difficult to eat. Twelve miles away the Millennium Stadium is already filling with 75,000 spectators. Two hundred and fifty thousand people are on the streets of Cardiff. The bars of the pubs are three deep with drinkers. The build-up to the match has been on TV and radio all day. Images of Sam and the squad are all over the newspapers. Children across Wales have woken and put on Wales rugby shirts. Not that long ago, he was a child himself, telling his mother from his pillow he’d never be a rugby player. Today he is a rugby player. Today he will captain his country. Sam looks down at his plate and, for that child and for his
country, spears another piece of chicken and eats.

Two floors above the team room, Thumper Phillips, the Wales team manager, is getting into his number ones. Standing before the mirror in his room he loops a WRU tie about his neck, constructs a knot and pulls it tight before flipping down the collar of his shirt. Lifting his jacket off a hanger, he puts it on and, leaning into the mirror so he can see better, pins a daffodil to his lapel.

At fifty-eight Thumper is the same age as Roger Lewis and was brought up in the same part of Wales too, in Kenfig Hill, half a mile down the road from where Roger took Warren for tea with his mother. The two men have known each other since they were twelve, when they first met on the playground of the local comprehensive. On leaving school they took diverging paths in life, but both, eventually, have led them back into close proximity, working either side of that relationship between the
business
and the players that lies at the heart of the WRU.

It was Thumper’s uncle, Alan, who first took his nephew to the midweek Floodlight Alliance games at Maesteg and the Brewery Field in Bridgend. On those dark Wednesday nights the ten-year-old Thumper watched enthralled as the likes of Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett played to capacity crowds. Already
showing
promise as a player himself, within another ten years it was Thumper who was running onto those pitches instead, having been selected for Cardiff directly from the Kenfig Hill youth team.

A few weeks before he first played for Cardiff, Thumper was walking back from training in Kenfig Hill to his home in Pyle when a car pulled up and its driver asked him if he knew where he could find Alan Phillips. Thumper said he did, and that if the driver gave him a lift into the village he’d show him where he lived. As they drove into Pyle the man introduced himself as Gary Davies of Cardiff RFC. He asked Thumper how he knew Alan Phillips. ‘Because’, Thumper replied, ‘I am Alan Phillips.’

Along with Roy Bish, Gary had recently watched Thumper score all his team’s points in a 24–12 victory over Llanelli. Within a week of having stopped him to ask him where he could find Alan Phillips, Gary had Thumper training with Cardiff. Within another week he was playing for them too, thumbing lifts into training from Pyle after work and getting dropped off back in Bridgend by Gary afterwards. Sixteen years later, at the age of thirty-four, Thumper retired, having played more games for Cardiff than any other player in the club’s
history
, earning himself eighteen Welsh caps and a 1980 Lions tour to South Africa along the way.

Today, as Wales team manager, Thumper finds himself overseeing boys young enough to be his grandsons who, he says, ‘play a totally different game’ to the one he knew when he was making his way at their age. As Thumper often says, ‘Only the shape of the ball is the same now.’ The changes have mostly been driven by professionalism,
but also by changes in the rules around the contact area and a gradual eradication of the hard-man culture that in Thumper’s day rarely saw a clean game of rugby.

‘I played in a period when there were no touch judges, nothing like that, when people were punching from behind, running across the field when you least expected it. It was a dirty game, a dirty game. But no one ever got hurt, mind, not really hurt. A few broken jaws maybe, that kind of thing.’

The current players, though, don’t necessarily have it any easier. ‘You couldn’t get away with that now, you
have
to respect the rules of the game. But it is physically tougher,’ Thumper admits. ‘The boys are quicker, more powerful. I mean, I was fourteen and a half stone as a hooker. Matthew Rees is seventeen and a half, three stone heavier. Ken Owens, Hibs, they’re big men, big men. There’s less time, everyone’s under analysis. It’s hard.’

Possessed of a quartermaster’s manner, Thumper
carries
out his duties with the same confrontational style he once brought to his forward play. With a restless
pointing
finger, often addressing people from over his glasses, and his signature black satchel cross-gartered over his chest, Thumper is a man who wants to solve problems, and who is confident in his ability to do so. His
diplomacy
is direct and frequently followed by the effective technique of walking away before a counterpoint can be made. It is often, too, edged with sharp humour. While on tour to Canada Thumper christened one of 
the team’s liaison officers ‘Thrush’, ‘because he was an irritating little cunt’.

Beneath Thumper’s organisational bluster is a deep well of care, both for the individual players and for the game of rugby itself. ‘It’s a great game to protect,’ he says. ‘It teaches you respect by bashing the shit out of each other, but you also have to respect the rules. But you’ve gotta protect it, its traditions, because if you lose them, then you lose the respect of the game, and without that’, he adds, shaking his head at the worst possible fate, ‘we’d be like football.’

One of Thumper’s most persistent challenges as team manager is satisfying the increasing demands of
marketing
and PR upon the squad, while still protecting the team they are trying to promote. In this respect Thumper sees himself as a buffer between the team and the world; an old-fashioned gatekeeper at the heart of a twenty-
first-century
squad. It’s his job, he says, to be the ‘awkward bugger’, to try and defend what sacred time and space the team still own. The words he uses most often when talking about this element of his role are ‘tradition’ and ‘respect’. In the face of an ever-increasing appetite for access to the players, the erosion of these qualities is what most concerns Thumper. ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘everyone can buy our kit now. Anyone. We have changing-room
visits
by sponsors after a game. These kids in marketing, they want to show more and more of us, give more and more of us away. I understand why it has to happen, but
you got to keep something back, haven’t you? Otherwise what you got left?’