Calon (19 page)

The ball crosses the touchline inside the Welsh twenty-two. France, with one kick, are in their best position of the match so far. After winning the line-out they suddenly find their rhythm, rolling a maul towards the Welsh posts. Adam tackles Servat, bringing him to ground in a brief spiralling embrace.

Dan goes for a different technique on Harinordoquy, cutting him down below the knees and spinning him onto his back. But Gethin, who joined Dan in the tackle, doesn’t release his man before going for the ball. Joubert blows his whistle and raises his arm, awarding a penalty to France in front of the Welsh posts.

The Welsh players line up under their posts in a strung-out echo of their anthem formation.

When Joe Lydon, the WRU’s head of rugby, was playing for England under-18s, his coach told him before a fixture against Wales: ‘Just remember, they’re not defending their tryline, they’re defending their border.’

That metaphorical border still remains unbreached, but from their position standing along their tryline the Welsh players have to watch, after all their effort, as Yachvili strikes the ball with his left foot and sends it clean between the uprights. A swelling cheer follows it over the crossbar.

Wales 0 – France 3.

From the restart Harinordoquy, the French number eight, gets under the ball and readies himself to carry it upfield. George, however, has pursued the kick and is there to haul him in, as if he’s netting a struggling shark.

Leigh catches a French clearance just inside the Welsh half, but this time he attacks on foot, not with his boot. As he sprints towards the French, his smaller frame makes his limbs appear to move quicker than other
players
. Approaching the first French defenders, he slips on the wet pitch, but rebounds to spin through a tackle and drive on another couple of feet.

It was a Welsh full-back of the 1970s, J. P. R. Williams, who came to embody the attacking potential of the
position
. It was a Welshman, too, who first demonstrated that the last line of defence on a rugby pitch could also be the first line of attack.

Vivian Jenkins came from Bridgend. Having learnt his rugby at the same college in Llandovery as George, he won three Oxford Blues at centre before being selected for Wales at full-back in 1933. At the time the required qualities of the position were meant to be a safe pair of catching and tackling hands, with a good boot to kick for touch. But in 1934, during a match against Ireland in Swansea, Jenkins initiated an attack from his own twenty-two, finishing the play seventy-five metres later by collecting a pass from his winger to cross the Irish line. The purists were not impressed and it was
suggested
Jenkins had played beyond the boundaries of his
position. It would be twenty-eight years before another full-back would score in the championship, in 1962.

As if in homage to Jenkins’s inversion of his role, in the next Welsh attack Jamie, known for his crash ball and bulldozing of defences, delicately chips the ball past the French instead. Toby wins the line-out, but without clean possession, resulting in a slow ball eventually being birthed from a maul to Mike.

For the next minute the Welsh rhythms feed the game as they go through eight phases of play. But the French defence, varying their drift with different currents of opposition, sustain attacks from Alex, Ianto, Dan, Matthew in a repeated pattern of French blue
extinguishing
fire after Welsh fire. The last to attack is Leigh, once again turning out of a tackle like a spinning top, finally to be quashed under a deluge of French bodies.

As 75,000 spectators follow Leigh and the ball, the TV cameras tracking his route upfield, focusing the gaze of millions, several other pairs of eyes are looking elsewhere. Up in the stands in the coaching box Wales’s attack coach, Rob Howley, is watching the spaces away from the contact area, following his players off the ball. ‘My mantra about attack’, he says, his sentences rising at their ends, ‘is it isn’t what you do with the ball, it’s what you do without the ball. Your ability to get off the floor, to get to a support player. The ball needs a lifeline and someone to help, so the more bodies you have around it, the more successful you’re going to be.’

In front of Howley, Rhys Long is looking at his
computer
screen. With six dedicated analysis cameras around the pitch, and another stitching images together to provide a floating, bird’s-eye view, he’s watching the same
match several times at once. And he’s also watching it on more than one level. Andy and Rod, his primary coders at pitch-side, are inputting the team’s key performance indicators – line speed, timings, gain lines and clusters of activity. Another five analysts, meanwhile, are coding three players each as they watch the game remotely from their homes around the country. All of this information is coming into Rhys’s computer live, so as he watches the players’ movements on its split screen, he is also
tracking
the vital signs of the game; reading the rucks, breaks and kicks happening on the pitch in front of him as figures, maps and graphs. ‘People always say to me,’ Rhys’s mother once said to him, ‘“Why doesn’t Rhys ever smile on the TV?”’ ‘Because’, Rhys explained to her, ‘I’m in my office, working.’

Down on pitch-side Prav and Carcass are running a touchline each for the duration of the game, their eyes trailing three seconds behind the action. Like Prof. John sitting with the subs, they are watching for players left on the field after a collision or a ruck, observing their movements after a hit, ready to run onto the pitch if they see anything of concern. The subs, too, are watching the positions they might replace, ready to start warming up at the first sign of injury. Ken tracks the movements and tackles of Matthew; Lloyd Williams those of Mike.

In the south-eastern corner, meanwhile, Lee, the head groundsman, and his assistant Craig are watching the pitch itself. After their months of dedication, their
weeks of coaxing the turf to grow, their long nights
slow-walking
its length, they are now observing its destruction. Making mental notes of the scars and gouges, they watch as scrums churn at their mown patterns, boots and studs send divots flying, and tackling players cut thin trails of mud in their wakes.

Yachvili is penalised for not rolling away and the game, having had its pulse quickened, pauses. Jenks and Adam bring on water for the players, and also messages, both men running communications from the coaches in the box.

The coaching team have noticed that the French are varying their use of a tail-gunner in the line-outs. All the Welsh models have been built on France’s number seven being in the line, but he frequently isn’t,
positioning
himself instead inside his number ten, ready to stop an attack from Jamie. Rhys Long discusses this with Rob McBryde. They hope the players have picked up on the change, but just in case they send a message on with Adam for the forwards: if Bonnaire is inside his number ten, then drive through the line-out itself instead.

As the team drink their water and Adam relays this message to the pack, Rhys Priestland lays the ball on the kicking tee for Wales’s first opportunity to level the scores.

When Rhys was at Bristol University, Jenks would travel to the city specifically to help him practise his kicking. ‘I was stunned I was getting that kind of treatment,’ he says. ‘Without Jenks most of us wouldn’t be able to kick the way we do. And he always had time for me too,
telling
me, “Any issues, give me a ring,” that kind of thing. He’s a great bloke.’

That depth of history between the two men came into play during the England match, not in terms of Jenks’s knowledge of Rhys’s kicking, but in terms of his
knowledge
about his personality. Rhys was having a tough game, and for a while nothing was going his way. From up in the stands Warren discussed with Jenks at pitch-side over their radios if they should replace Rhys with the veteran outside-half, Stephen Jones. It was a crucial match and some would say there was more than enough reason. But they didn’t. After the match Warren told the press
conference
he thought it was better for Rhys’s development to learn on the pitch. Which is exactly what Jenks, having known Rhys since he was eighteen, had said at the time. ‘He’s not going to learn anything here sitting beside me,’ Jenks told Warren over the radio.

So Rhys stayed on, his game improved and Wales won the Triple Crown. Those last few minutes on the pitch, though, were definitive for Rhys beyond his personal development. As with the end of the Ireland game, it was, he says, when he felt the
belief
of the team. In both matches ‘we never panicked. It was quite strange being on the field. Myself, not being one of the senior
players
, if it’s tight I’ve been used to people shouting, “We gotta do this, we gotta do that.” But there was none of that. Warby would speak, Gethin too, just saying, “Don’t panic, we’ll get down there, no silly mistakes.” I think it’s because we’d trained so hard and we’ve got a lot of trust in each other as a squad.’

Rhys stands and steps back from the ball, still studying it, like a sculptor getting distance from their work. Turning his back on it, he walks further away before facing the posts once more. This time, as he looks at the ball he seems to have developed a more inward gaze. He takes a breath, licks his lips, blinks rapidly, before turning his focus to the posts. To his right Ianto is breathing
heavily
, his hands on his hips, sucking in the air he needs to recover.

Rhys looks at the posts as if they are a puzzle to be solved, as if he is trying to understand something about them. He glances at the ball one more time, then back at the posts. Straightening his shoulders, as if coming to attention, he returns his gaze to the ball again. Taking four steady steps towards it, he strikes it cleanly, with the sound of a cricket ball against a bat.

A sigh cascades from the stands as the ball hits the slender upright of the right-hand post. It rebounds to the French below and Yachvili clears it upfield and into touch.

Joubert, the conductor and referee, tells the forwards to ‘get into line-outs quicker’. Both teams are trying to impose their own rhythms on the game: France slow; Wales fast. But Joubert is trying to ensure it flows too. This is, after all, entertainment as well as sport, business as well as a game.

Sam rises at the tail of the line-out to win clean ball for Mike.

Down the line Jon straightens the Welsh attack. The second-phase ball is passed to Leigh, running in from deep. He looks dangerous until a massive hit from Fofana picks him off both feet and knocks him to the ground. The crowd accompany the hit with a stadium-wide expression of empathetic pain.

‘Your body almost shorts out,’ is how Ryan explains being on the end of a hit like that. ‘You have that white-flash moment, when you don’t know if you’ve hurt yourself or not. You go through a checklist. Fingers? Toes? Arms? Legs? Everyone’s carrying injuries, and you know you’re only one bump away from being finished.’

Such are the impacts of the modern game that players’ blood samples after an international have shown cortisol levels equivalent to being involved in a car crash at 30 mph.

Mike spins the ball from the breakdown of Leigh’s tackle to Rhys, who punts it high into the French twenty-two.

Yachvili is there again, under the ball, but this time with the eighteen and a half stone of Ianto bearing down on him. Catching the ball with Ianto just metres away, Yachvili shouts, ‘Mark!’ and like a spell the power is taken from his opponent’s run. Slowing before the French scrum-half, Ianto immediately turns his back and walks away from him.

And everywhere else on the field, too, the game is powered down by that single word, bringing each player’s intention to a sudden halt. If the suspended jumper in the line-out is the game’s pause button, then the call of ‘Mark’ is its reset switch.

Yachvili clears the ball into touch, the French defence having soaked up everything Wales can throw at them. And everyone knows, Welsh players and fans, that they still haven’t tried to attack. Like Muhammad Ali’s ‘
rope-a
-dope’, the French are letting the Welsh batter them. But are they just biding their time, or have they really lost the ability to counter against the giants of the Welsh backline?

Alex cuts into the French line at an angle, making more progress than most, breaking a tackle and tying up four defenders as he scrambles forward. Mike takes on the attack himself but gets caught in the cluster of a maul, the red and blue bodies suddenly collapsing like the opening of a strange flower.

‘No boots!’ calls Joubert.

In the whole game so far Wales have made four tackles. France have made twenty-nine.

Wales have completed forty-one passes. France just ten.

Wales have had 75 per cent of the territory.

But France still lead 3–0.

A short move at the front of a French line-out unlocks a flurry of attack. Suddenly, they’re off the ropes. The Welsh defence shifts into gear. A charging Servat is taken down by George. Both Sam and Dan chop at the French attackers with sliding sweeps at their ankles. The squad have developed this style with Shaun, and it is stunning in its effect. Throughout this championship Dan,
particularly
, has made it his trademark, bringing attackers down with such suddenness that they often have no opportunity to offload the ball. Dan, meanwhile, free of his opponent’s fallen body, is often straight back on his feet, looking for the next threat to the line or jackal-ing at the breakdown for turnover ball. As Shaun understands, in modern rugby it’s more often a case of defence being the best form of attack, rather than the other way round.