Calon (3 page)

On the pitch itself the Welsh squad often trained under the eye of a man who has had his own fair share of Olympic experience. Frans Bosch is one of the world’s leading experts on biomechanics. Specialising in the high jump, he has coached many athletes to Olympic level, using his techniques of fine-tuning running efficiency to improve their performances dramatically. As the Welsh
players ran through their moves on the pitch in Spała, Frans, with his shoulder-length hair and salt-and-pepper stubble, moved among them, watching with both the eye of an expert and that of an artist.

Before he became a specialist in physical training, Frans was, for twenty years, a well-known painter. Although he turned his back on his exhibitions and paintings before some of these Welsh players were born, he still draws as much upon his artistic experience as his scientific. ‘It’s about how you see movement,’ he explains. ‘An artist’s eye is trained to renew the perception of what you see time and time again. If you can do that with looking at running, then human running is one of the most
remarkable
movement patterns there is. Renewing what you see helps to find the errors and how they are connected, and how best they can be corrected.’

Frans has no national allegiance to Wales and he thinks rugby is ‘a pretty ridiculous sport’. Yet every time he trains with the Welsh squad he finds himself rooting for them beyond a professional interest. Compared to other ‘more corporate’ teams with whom he’s worked, he can’t help but warm to the ‘family coherence’ of the Wales
set-up
and to the national love of rugby as a sport. ‘I went to watch a match in Cardiff ’, he says, ‘and I realised I was seeing the country, not a sport. A cultural event, not a game.’

At the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand Wales’s performance proved Warren and his team had been
right to follow their instincts in Spała. After a narrow defeat by just one point to a vastly more experienced South African side, the young Welsh squad displayed a mature determination in convincingly beating Samoa, Fiji, Namibia and Ireland. Before the tournament most of the squad were unknowns on the international stage: Rhys Priestland, Dan Lydiate, George North, Leigh Halfpenny, Jonathan Davies. A few years earlier many had been playing schoolboy rugby, and yet now the rugby world was talking about them, and not just because of their wins, but because of the manner of those wins; because of their style of play and their demeanour on and off the pitch.

Ever since rugby union went professional in 1995, every Welsh team has had to negotiate a delicate balance between tradition and innovation. The shadow of the great teams of the 1970s still falls across a
twenty-
first
-century squad. Many of those 1970s players are still present in the consciousness of the rugby public, as commentators, journalists, board members and coaches. The Welsh supporter demands a style of play, a philosophy, inherited from that Welsh rugby past: inventive and audacious, physical yet graceful. But at the same time there is now the pressure to compete at the leading edge of the sport, to ‘pinch an inch’ wherever possible in a game so much harder, faster and more brutal than the rugby of the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Cryotherapy, analysis, nutrition, sports science, GPS positioning, psychology:
the modern Welsh team, while aware of its heritage, has to be ever more forward looking.

In the Barn, the indoor training area at the Welsh Rugby Union’s National Centre of Excellence in the Vale of Glamorgan, two massive banners hang side by side above the expanse of emerald AstroTurf:

Forget the past and live for the moment
, the first seems to say.

Think of your legacy, the presence of what has been, forged in your now,
says the other.

As the Welsh squad do their drills and units in the Barn, they run between these two banners. Playing miss moves, set pieces, rucks and attacks they flow from one to the other as if the whole building is being
rhythmically
tipped from side to side. As a team and as individuals they shuttle between a statement and a question, between the past and the future.

At the 2011 World Cup Wales hit a balance between those two competing states. They arrived at the tournament as one of the most sophisticated sides of the twenty-first century. Their youngest players had graduated through the academies of professional clubs, travelling in a gilded
channel of top-level rugby since the age of fifteen or
sixteen
. And yet something in the squad’s personality, in the positivity of their play, still spoke strongly of the Welsh rugby past that fed their Welsh rugby present.

The character of the squad was embodied by their captain, Sam Warburton, who at twenty-two was the youngest-ever captain of a World Cup side. At six foot two and sixteen stone three pounds Sam is a relentless, scavenging open-side flanker. Against South Africa he personally made almost a quarter of Wales’s ninety-nine tackles. Physically imposing, a man of few words with a craggy, Roman profile, Sam leads by example. A
teetotaller
with a highly developed sense of duty and fairness, he’s the first onto the training pitch, the first to put on his recovery skins, to make his protein shake or to fill the ice bath. Under his captaincy ‘no sapping’ became the ethos of the team. If you’re hurting, tell the physios, but not your teammates. If you’re tired, tell the conditioning coaches, but not the other players. If the English squad at the tournament were displaying the qualities of Prince Hal in
Henry IV Part I
– going out drinking, being careless with their reputations – then Sam and his team were more like the young king of
Henry IV Part II
: determined, ruthless and choosing to harness their youth for the fight, not the revels.

When Sam and his twin brother Ben were born five weeks premature, the maternity nurse tried to explain the situation to Sam’s parents. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ she said.
‘They’re never going to be rugby players.’ Seven years later, as his mother was putting him to bed, Sam
remembers
talking to her about what he might be when he was older. ‘I want to be a footballer,’ he told her from his
pillow
. ‘Why?’ she asked him. ‘Well,’ he replied. ‘I’m never going to be a rugby player, am I?’

But Sam was fast, frequently winning the sports-day sprints, and his junior-school teacher, Frank Rees, was a rugby man. When Sam finally listened to Frank’s
encouragement
and played for his school against Willowsbrook, he scored four of the team’s tries. Willowsbrook’s teacher coached for Cardiff schools and knew a good player when he saw one. Within weeks Sam was playing for Cardiff.

On his fifteenth birthday Sam’s parents gave him a multi gym, which he set up in their garage in Whitchurch. He knew he had to bulk up and get fit for rugby, so
whenever
he could he lifted weights in that garage or went running in the streets. As he ran, dreaming of playing for Wales, Sam listened to ‘Refuse to Be Denied’, a song by Anthrax, his father’s favourite metal band.

Seven years later, on the night of 15 October in Auckland, as he sat in the changing rooms of Eden Park preparing to captain Wales in the biggest game of their history, Sam listened to that song again. With his head bowed and the headphones snug over his ears, the lyrics of his childhood, the lyrics that had accompanied him through countless weights sessions and through the night-time streets of Whitchurch, spoke to him once more:

When the Welsh squad first gathered at Spała, Warren and his assistant coach Rob Howley had spoken to the players about it being their destiny to meet New Zealand in the final of the World Cup. It was a private, in-camp conversation, informed by what the coaches knew about their young side’s potential and the training ahead of them in Poland. As the World Cup progressed, however, that private conversation became increasingly, in the eyes of the rugby-watching world, a public expectation.

All sports fans have a love of narrative, for the stories that feed into key matches, big fights or prize-winning races. They are the stories that raise the stakes and heighten the enjoyment of sport’s vagaries. For rugby fans in the autumn of 2011 that story had become the rise of a young Welsh side towards a tantalising final against the tournament’s hosts, the New Zealand All Blacks. Wales’s place in the final began to feel deserved, somehow
right
. Support spread far beyond national borders, with even former English players such as Will Greenwood tweeting in the minutes before the France match, ‘I want to be Welsh!’

The destiny of which the Welsh coaches had spoken in Spała was now, in the hours before kick-off, being spoken of by the rest of the world.

The last of the fireworks have fallen. 2012 is only ten
minutes
old and already the excitement of its birth is ebbing. The streets beyond are subdued, and the stadium falls back into a strangely natural soundscape: the running of rainwater in the storm drains, a cave-like dripping in the stands, the occasional creak of an aisle sign like the groan of a branch in the wind.

Two and a half months ago, on the night of Wales’s semi-final against France, this empty pitch in front of me was filled with Welsh rugby supporters. Thousands more sat up in the stands, their Welsh jerseys rashing the stadium red. In all, 65,000 fans came here to watch Wales that night, even though their team was playing on the other side of the world. But this was no ordinary match. This was a match to be shared. And so the fans came, to watch together under the stadium’s closed roof as the game was screened at either end of the pitch. Undiluted by supporters of another team, never before had so many voices sung the Welsh national anthem in this stadium. Half a world away the Welsh team, lined up on the pitch at Eden Park, their arms about each other’s shoulders, also sang. And in the Red Lion pub on Bleeker Street in New York, and in the Three Kings in London, and on Aviano air base in Italy and Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, and in homes and pubs and rugby clubs across the world, Welsh supporters sang. Because whatever the time of day, the story of this game was just too good to miss.

But it was also too good to be true.

The script of a rugby match is written not by prophecy or hope, but by the second. And a second was all it took for Wales’s story to change that night; the 1,061st
second
, when Sam Warburton, refusing to be denied, threw the full force of his weight into a tackle on the French winger, Vincent Clerc.

When the Frenchman received the ball from a line-out, Sam had been waiting for him, crouched in anticipation. Wrapping his arms about his waist and pulling at the backs of Clerc’s thighs, Sam straightened from his crouch to drive his right shoulder up and under the winger’s
ribcage
. At just fourteen stone, two stone lighter than Sam, Clerc was lifted into the air, his feet swept up over his head. As he fell backwards towards the ground, head and shoulders first, Sam’s grip loosened as if he already knew, even before Clerc had landed, what he’d done.

Immediately the Welsh and French forwards tightened around the point of collision, running in to shove and pull at each other’s jerseys. Wales’s Luke Charteris pulled Sam from the melee as the referee, Alain Rolland, blew on his whistle three times to break up the arguing
players
. Clerc lay on his back behind the scuffle, the French doctor and physio kneeling beside him.

Reaching into his pocket, Rolland pulled out a red card and showed it to Sam, pointing with his other hand off the pitch. He was sending Sam off for an illegal tip tackle. Sam walked to the touchline, his head bowed, and
sat in one of the sub’s chairs. Someone placed a tracksuit across his shoulders, someone else ruffled his hair. But Sam just looked out onto the pitch, his chest still heaving with the effort of the game, trying to take in what had happened. Wales, with just a 3–0 lead and sixty minutes of the semi-final still to play, were without their captain and down to fourteen men.

Across the world commentators and fans were
complaining
about the harshness of Alain Rolland’s decision. Online a flurry of protests broke out on forums and
websites
covering the match. A yellow card, it was felt, would have been fair. The tackle had gone too far, but there’d been nothing malicious in Sam’s intent. When Sam
himself
, however, was shown an image of the incident, he immediately accepted Rolland’s call and said he saw no reason to appeal, accepting the citing board’s judgement of a three-week ban.

In most rugby matches, on being presented with an advantage like Sam’s sending off the opposing team would pile on the points. In international rugby, to lose a man like Sam is to lose strength in the scrum,
dominance
at the breakdown, cover in defence and support in attack. It is to unlock the door of victory for your
opponent
. Somehow, though, Wales held on and the match remained close. But their rhythm was broken. The story wasn’t meant to go this way, and it began to show.

Wales’s fly-half, James Hook, missed a penalty. France, meanwhile, kicked three. A dummy and darting try from
scrum-half Mike Phillips brought Wales back into
contention
, but James missed the conversion. Then Stephen Jones, replacing James, missed another penalty. With just six minutes of the match left and the score lying at Wales 8 – France 9, Wales were awarded yet another penalty. The story, after everything that had happened, could still find the ending for which Wales had hoped.

The penalty was just inside the halfway line,
forty-nine
metres from the posts, so it was Wales’s long-range goal-kicker, twenty-two-year-old Leigh Halfpenny, who stepped up to the mark.