Calon (17 page)

Almost immediately the sounds of the crowd fade behind them. Suddenly, after that brief exposure, the squad are isolated again. The bus enters carefully, as if boarding a ferry. Giant ventilation ducts run along the unpainted concrete walls; frames of folded growing lights are lined up along another. Making one last turn past Gwyn’s security lodge, the bus finally comes to a halt
outside
the set of double doors leading into the changing rooms. Parked ahead of it, already here, is the blue bus of France.

Stewards in orange fluorescent jackets, ground staff and five members of the Royal Welsh Regiment, along with their regimental goat, William Windsor 25142301, look on in silence as the Welsh team disembark. Filing through the double doors, their headphones back on, the squad take the stairs up past the silver dragon and turn
left towards the rooms that J.R., singing along to ‘More Than a Woman’, began preparing for them this morning.

From the moment the squad step off the bus, the
machinery
of the day steps up a gear. The next hour, with every minute accounted for, unfolds with a gathering
momentum
. The time of the kick-off is set at 2.45 p.m., and it will not move. At that moment the preparations will come to an end and the match will begin.

Once off the bus Thumper takes the team sheets to the broadcasters and checks through both countries’ lists of players for any changes or errors. Then he travels in the VIP lift up to level five to drop in on the lunch in the President’s Lounge. Checking in with Roger and Dennis, he tells them he’s never seen as many people on the streets to welcome the bus as he did just now. Many of the guests, aware he’s arrived with the squad, ask him how the boys are, how are they doing? Thumper nods tightly, telling them they’re fine, good, calm.

While in the lounge Thumper makes time to see his wife, Kerry, who has been dining with the players’ wives and girlfriends. Whether through arrangement or
osmosis
, Kerry performs a similar role with these women as Thumper performs with their husbands and boyfriends in the Vale, gently corralling them through the day’s schedule, welcoming new arrivals and easing them into the match-day environment.

As Thumper talks with Kerry and the girls on level five,
four levels below Adam Beard, having checked the
nutrition
tables and written the warm-up timings on his hand, synchronises his watch with the match officials, then goes to see Lee, the head groundsman, to get his update on the hardness of the pitch. Lee will have already sent him a report this morning, but since then, with the roof now fixed and open, there’s been a brief but heavy downpour. Based on his conversation with Lee, and having checked the boots France are wearing, Adam goes back into the changing rooms and advises J.R. on what boots and studs the team should use. This done, Adam’s priority for the rest of the run-up to the match is to steal time.

Once Sam’s huddle with the team is finished, Adam will lead the players through their warm-ups and
prematch
drills, his aim being to keep them out on the field for as long as possible. He knows the shorter the gap between the end of the warm-up and the start of the match, the quicker will be the players’ nerve
conduction
, the warmer their muscles and the higher their alertness. In previous matches, as Wales have continued warming up, opposing teams have often already returned to their changing rooms. Match officials will be telling Adam to finish so they can start the entertainment. Even Warren will be looking uncomfortable. But Adam knows how fine the margins are in international rugby, and how a split-second difference in the sharpness of one of his players could end up being the deciding factor between a win and a loss. So, like a chef trying to bring his recipe
to the perfect temperature, Adam will steal time, keeping the players out on the pitch for as long as possible.

As the team are getting changed and having their strapping done by Carcass and Prav, and as Thumper goes to level five and Adam goes to Lee, Shaun, dressed in his team tracksuit, takes a stroll on the pitch. The heavy downpour, although brief, is concerning him. The French have requested for the roof to be open, and now, under the recent rain, the Millennium pitch is slippery.

On one of his arms Shaun has a tattoo of his younger brother, Billy-Joe, who was killed in a car crash in 2003, aged twenty. Like Shaun and their father, Billy-Joe was a rugby player. Before the accident he’d recently signed with their home club, Wigan. As Shaun walks on the Millennium Stadium pitch now, feeling the turf with his trainers, he looks up at the clearing sky through the open roof. ‘Someone’s going to slip today,’ he thinks. ‘And it’s going to cost them a try. Please’, he continues, addressing Billy-Joe directly now, ‘just let it be one of them France buggers.’

‘Ten seconds, guys! Ten seconds for Wales!’

The suited event manager, holding one hand to the single earphone of his headset, calls down the corridor at the fifteen men in red standing in line along the wall. Moments earlier, accompanied by a sudden flurry of clapping and shouts from the substitutes, the Welsh team had emerged from their changing room, faces
expressionless
, their eyes focused beyond the cramped corridor in which they now stand. Lining up behind Matthew Rees, they hold that forward-looking gaze. Mike Phillips jumps twice on the spot. Jonathan Davies rocks from side to side. Jamie Roberts stands stock still. George North, further back, twitches his head in a couple of quick neck stretches. Alun Wyn Jones and several others push short, hard breaths through their mouths and
nostrils
, like penned bulls waiting for release. No one talks. Under their training tops, in memory of Mervyn Davies, the whole team wear black tape wrapped around the left sleeves of their shirts.

The French team are already on the field, binding in a tight circle against the noise of the stadium. The
double
doors to the tunnel are closed, but the sounds of the bowl, although deadened, are still audible. The waiting, silent squad can hear the pre-match music heightening to a crescendo, the bursts of giant flares firing at either
end of the pitch, the announcer’s excited voice echoing between the stands, stirring the capacity crowd louder and louder.

The event manager, touching two fingers to his headset, listens to an instruction. ‘OK, Matthew,’ he says. ‘When you’re ready.’

The double doors open and the noise is suddenly louder. With a deep breath Matthew Rees, who once
pretended
to be Neil Jenkins on the streets of the Rhondda, leads Wales out for his fiftieth cap. Walking at first, he breaks into a jog further down the tunnel. Behind him, Sam Warburton, holding the hand of Daisy, today’s
nine-year
-old mascot, follows. And behind Sam come the rest of the team, stepping up and dropping through those double doors like a squad of Paras jumping from a plane.

In a clatter of studs the team stream down the tunnel, running past two Under Armour banners on either side: ‘PROTECT THIS HOUSE’. Speeding up, they burst onto the pitch, fanning past Sam, who is crouching for a photo with Daisy. As the team sprint past him, all the flares erupt at once, shooting flames thirty, forty feet into the air and releasing a wash of petroleum fumes into the higher levels of the stands. At the same moment 75,000 people rise to their feet, delivering an imposing roar of a welcome as the familiar chant pulses through the
stadium
like a heartbeat:

‘Waaales! Waaales! Waaales!’

And in the Three Kings in London, and in the Red
Lion in New York, and in Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, and in pubs and homes across Wales and the world millions of Welsh applaud and cheer at the same time, foisting their hopes and their ideas of a nation upon the twenty-two young men running out onto the pitch.

And none of it matters. And yet all of it matters. Because for players and spectators alike this isn’t just about being alive, but feeling alive. This is where the known and the unknown meet. This is the arena, the coliseum. Where the present is electrified by its imminent transfiguration into the past. Where, as Philippe Saint-André said to an interviewer before the game, ‘We do not just play against Wales, but against the whole country.’

As George runs onto the pitch he momentarily dips to brush his fingers through the whitewash of the touchline, rubbing them against his thumb as he sprints on into the middle of the field. Raising his hand to his face, he smells the scent. This, for George, is ‘the final clunk in the cog’, the moment when he becomes, for eighty minutes, a different George.

‘Off the pitch I’m not that confident as a person,’ he says. ‘But once I smell that whitewash, once I cross that line I’m in a different zone. I find myself quite aggressive. Confident, but not arrogant, and generally quite mad at everyone on the other team. I don’t know what it is, but it’s like they’ve done something.’

George, feeling that switch of personality come upon him, gathers with the rest of the squad as they line up
for the anthems, their arms across each other’s shoulders. Next to them the French squad also come together, each player bringing with them their own hinterlands of past coaches, pitches, clubs and dreams. But as the two sides line up next to each other, they also bring their other histories to this moment. Not the histories of the players, but of the teams themselves. And as rugby histories go, they are as mirrored and balanced as the teams look now, spread either side of the halfway line.

Wales have played France eighty-nine times. Over the course of those games they have won forty-three matches each. France have scored 1,304 points, Wales 1,305.

The more recent history, however, tells a harsher story for Wales. Of the last eight games against France they have lost seven. The last time they played this fixture, in Paris last year, Wales failed to score a single try.

‘No one can take it away from you.’ That’s what Warren reminded the squad at their team meeting in the Vale this afternoon. ‘When you win a Grand Slam, it’s yours. No one can take it away from you.’

‘We know we deserve to win.’ And that’s what Sam told them just minutes ago in the changing room. He used to stress about that team talk, used to write it down. But now he just says what he feels is right at the moment. Which, today, was this. ‘We know we deserve to win, for us and the fans. We know how much work we’ve done.’

The media have been talking all day about the death of Mervyn Davies, another Welsh captain who twice led his side to Grand Slam victories over France. There has been talk of the team being spurred on by his death, being fuelled to play in his memory. But for the squad it’s more simple and, in a way, more personal than that. Sam does mention Mervyn in his talk, and they all know a great player has passed on. But in the hardest moments of this match they’ll be digging in for themselves and for
each other; for the pain they’ve shared and the sacrifices they’ve made, and in answer to that banner in the Barn that asks,
How do you want to be remembered?

For the next minute, however, it is Mervyn Davies and Jock Hobbs, the ex-All Black who also died recently, who are remembered as the full weight of a stadium’s silence falls upon the pitch. For sixty seconds the two teams, the match officials and the 75,000 spectators all stand motionless as images of Merv and Jock come up on the stadium’s big screens. After all the build-up, the bus journey into the centre, the superstitions of the changing room, Adam’s stolen time, there is, before the violence of the match, this. A strange moment of peace, the loud voice of the stadium silenced.

When the minute ends, the anthems begin. The French who have travelled to Cardiff sing ‘La Marseillaise’ with energy, but when the opening lines of the Welsh anthem are sung – ‘
Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi
’ (‘The land of my fathers which is dear to me’) – it’s as if the volume control on the stadium has been turned up to eleven. For the players at the centre of the pitch it’s an overwhelming experience. They’ve spent much of the last few hours trying to achieve a careful set of
psychological
balances: between aggression and discipline, emotion and focus, boldness and caution. And yet it’s as if this anthem has been designed to ambush them. The words of Evan James of Pontypridd and the music of his son, James James, coming together just seconds before
kick-off to lay an emotional minefield at their feet.