Calon (4 page)

When Leigh was nine, his grandfather started picking him up from his primary school in Pontybrenin to take him for kicking practice on the rugby pitch in Gorseinon. If he was tired, Leigh’s grandfather would still persuade his grandson to practise. ‘Come on now,’ he’d say with a smile. ‘Let’s get it done, is it?’ Towards the end of a
session
he’d sometimes try to put pressure on him too, telling him, ‘One more, is it? But this one’s to beat England,’ or ‘This one’s for the final of the World Cup.’ As Leigh grew older, he needed little encouragement, practising his kicking every day of the year, including Christmas Day. The England fly-half, Jonny Wilkinson, became his role model. Leigh read all his books and watched all his DVDs just so he could study his hero’s kicking technique.

When Leigh was fifteen, he caught the eye of the Neath and Swansea Ospreys academy. But at the age of eighteen the Ospreys dropped him for being too
small. Determined to make it in top-level rugby, Leigh embarked on a stringent weights regime, putting
himself
through sets in which he regularly ‘lifted to failure’ – until his muscles could no longer work. His parents spent thousands on nutritional supplements. At the age of nineteen, having just been signed for Cardiff Blues, Leigh made his debut for Wales.

Three years later, under the floodlights of Eden Park, Leigh prepared to take the kick for which he’d practised all his life. This was his schoolboy’s dream made reality: the penalty that could take his country into its first-ever World Cup Final. After all those hours with his
grandfather
on the pitch at Gorseinon, after all those years of building himself up, after the pain of the Spała training camps in Poland, the moment he’d envisaged so many times had finally come.

Removing his skullcap Leigh placed the ball on the kicking tee as if it was the last piece in a delicate puzzle. Angling it away from him, he stood and stepped
backwards
and then to the side. Behind him, at his shoulder, was Neil Jenkins, or ‘Jenks’, the Wales kicking coach. Jenks, reciting a quiet list of pointers, knew this kick was within Leigh’s range. And so did Leigh. In training he’d regularly converted longer kicks than this from inside his own half.

Standing with his knees slightly bent and with his hands rocking rhythmically at his sides, Leigh stared down at the ball in front of him. The roars of the crowd
washed around the stadium, rising and falling like waves. Eyeing the posts for a last time he lowered his head and, slowly tipping forward, took a series of quickening steps towards the ball. Planting his left foot firmly beside the tee, Leigh struck the ball hard with his right foot, sudden and sharp, straight towards the posts.

The hands of the Welsh fans at Eden Park
immediately
rose above their heads. And in the Red Lion in New York, and in the Three Kings in London, and in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff thousands of other pairs of hands also reached into the air. And rising with them, across the time zones of the world, came a cheer, voiced as one by every Welsh supporter on the planet. The ball was sailing towards the middle of the posts.

But then, instead of building to a crescendo, the cheer began to fade. The raised hands began to fall – in the Red Lion, in the Three Kings, in the Millennium Stadium – coming to rest on the tops of their owners’ heads. And that’s where they stayed, in an image of despair, as the ball, turning end over end, dropped short of the crossbar by an inch. Leigh had missed the kick.

Five minutes later the match was over, the final score Wales 8 – France 9.

The script was written. Wales had lost.

Skirting the edge of the pitch I walk around the stadium’s bowl to the mouth of the player’s tunnel and walk up it, the thousands of empty seats diminishing behind
me. Once inside, further down the corridor that leads towards the Wales changing rooms, I can make out the eleven dark wooden boards on which every Welsh player’s cap number and name is written in gold leaf. The first, in 1881, is James Bevan, an Australian who played for my old club, Abergavenny, and the first captain of Wales. The last is number 1,089, Alex Cuthbert, a young winger who won his first cap here last month when he was
twenty-one
, just four years after he’d first picked up a rugby ball. Between them, nested in the tight rows at number 430, is my great-great-uncle, Archie Skym. Capped twenty times, Archie was nicknamed ‘The Butcher’, although at thirteen stone, regardless of being a prop, he’d still be the lightest member of the squad today.

I descend the flight of stairs and pass the silver dragon on the wall again. Pausing to look at it I realise this is the first thing a visiting team will see on a match day. That claw, raised between salute and attack.

Previous World Cups have been catalysts for change for Wales. In the wake of disappointing performances coaches were sacked, new methods adopted, a rash of new players brought into the squad. But the World Cup in New Zealand posed a different question for the national side. Here was a young squad, mostly at the start of their careers, already hitting their stride. They hadn’t felt lucky to be in that semi-final, but they had felt unlucky to lose it. So the question it posed to Wales was no longer one of change, but of promise. In both senses of the word.

Could Wales fulfil the promise they’d shown? And could they keep the promise they’d apparently made by playing so well at the highest level? Could they return to Europe and stamp their mark on northern-hemisphere rugby, not just by winning the coming Six Nations tournament, but by winning all five of their matches to secure a third Welsh Grand Slam in eight seasons? Only two other generations of Welsh players had ever won three Grand Slams: between 1905 and 1911, and between 1971 and 1978. Could Warren Gatland’s youngsters, with the majority of their international playing days still ahead of them, be the third golden generation of Welsh rugby? Ever since their semi-final defeat to France, this has been the question on the lips of Welsh supporters and, although unspoken, in the minds of the Welsh players too.

As I leave the stadium, nodding to Gwyn through the double plate glass of his security lodge, I know there’s no way of knowing the answer. Rugby’s script is written in the moment. Even the players in the squad do not know yet who will play in those five matches. Or which of them out celebrating tonight, as yet uncapped, might see their names added in gold leaf to those dark wooden boards. The only certainty is that those five matches will happen and that they will be won or not, each result
leaving
in its wake either a trail of disappointment or
jubilation
, celebration or mourning. ‘It’s either the wedding game or the funeral game with us,’ ‘Thumper’ Phillips,
the Wales team manager, once said to me from behind his desk at the Vale. ‘Nothing in between.’

Two of those five matches will be played away, against Ireland in Dublin and England at Twickenham. The other three will be played here, on the meadow and rye grass of the Millennium Stadium. First against Scotland, then Italy, and then, in Wales’s last match of the
tournament
, on 17 March at 2.45 p.m., France. Whether or not that last game will also be a Grand Slam decider for Wales will depend on the balance of the scorelines of the preceding matches, each of them a challenge in its own right, in which the Welsh players will push their bodies to the limit in their attempts to tip the scales of those scorelines in their favour.

From BBC News, 16 March 2012

Former Wales captain Mervyn Davies has died
following
a battle with cancer. He was 65.

Known universally as ‘Merv the Swerve’ the number eight won a total of 38 caps for Wales and went on two victorious British and Irish Lions tours in 1971 and 1974.

Davies won two Grand Slams with Wales and three Triple Crowns. Davies was handed the
captaincy
of Wales in 1975 and skippered the side to the Five Nations Championship in the same year, and the Grand Slam the following season.

At 6ft 3in, Davies sometimes appeared ungainly on the field, but that belied his strength in the maul. He also had an uncanny sense of
anticipation
, allowing him to get to the breakdown first – and his height made him useful in the line-out.

In a poll of Welsh rugby fans in 2002, Davies was voted greatest Welsh captain and greatest Welsh number eight.

Now and Then

Michael, a wiry seventy-five-year-old from Barry Island, gives Gwyn a wave as he enters the stadium. Gwyn doesn’t need to check his pass. Michael, white-haired, bespectacled, has been working as a volunteer with the ground staff here for years. And every match day he does this, walking in on his own at 6 a.m.

Gwyn follows Michael on the CCTV monitor as he makes his way past the players’ entrance and round a
corner
towards the service areas. Michael is the only person on Gwyn’s quartered screen, his small body marooned in an expanse of angled, unpainted concrete, as if he’s walking through an architecture built for a species more gigantic than human.

Following the coach-wide passageway, two storeys high, Michael passes through the groundsman’s
storage
supplies. Piles of fertiliser and nutrients, Kioti
tractors
, frames for the growing lights, spools of orange rope all crowd and gather at the walls. Three racing-green Dennis pedestrian cylinder mowers are parked in a row, clumps of grass like chewed cud collected in their barrels.
Everything around Michael is on a massive scale, like the sound stage of a film studio stacked with the sets of an epic.

As Michael enters a room on his left, however,
everything
is suddenly more intimate. With the single swing of a door, the stadium’s vocabulary of event is translated into a more domestic dialect. A round wooden table at the centre of the room is scattered with newspapers, four chairs around it: three plastic uprights and one
double-sized
ox-blood leather Chesterfield. Against the wall another, smaller table is crowded with mugs, teabags, coffee jars, a kettle and a small fridge. Apart from one life-size poster of Katherine Jenkins wearing a sequinned dress, the walls are covered exclusively with A4
photographs
of the stadium’s pitch, each of them labelled with a year and the name of Wales’s opponents on that day:

In each photograph the pattern mown into the grass is different: checkered, long and short rectangles, stripes, diamonds in the dead-ball area.

This is the groundsman’s office, which Michael shares with Lee, the head groundsman, and Craig, his assistant from John O’Groats. Lee and Craig call the photographs on the walls their ‘pitch porn’: a record of every pattern
they’ve ever cut into the grass of the national ground, each one the result of considered discussion around the wooden table, sketches on envelopes, the laying of miles and miles of orange guide string and a strict regime of cutting and double cutting.

‘I doubt no one else ever notices,’ Craig once told Michael in his Scottish accent. ‘’Cept for us. And our wives, when they see it on tha telly.’

The high-backed ox-blood Chesterfield belongs to Craig, the two gentle depressions in its seat marking the outline of his buttocks. He bought the chair via
fatfingers.
com, a website that lists misspellings on eBay. He wanted it for his home in Cardiff, only realising it was double-sized when he went to collect it. Stadium-sized.

‘My wife was’na havin’ it in the house,’ he explained to Lee when he turned up with it at the groundsman’s office. ‘So I thaw I’d bring it here instead.’

Under the unblinking smile of Katherine Jenkins, Michael makes a cup of tea, stirring in a spoonful of sugar before taking his mug back out into the passageway and up into the stadium’s bowl. He enters pitch-side via the ‘Dragon’s Mouth’, a hydraulic ramp that opens and closes like a set of massive jaws.

The stadium’s roof is open, but only by a metre. A slim line of early daylight falls directly onto the
halfway
line. Despite a forecast of rain, the French coach, Philippe Saint-André, has asked for the retractable roof to be opened. Warren Gatland, who would rather it
stayed closed, joked at a press conference a few days
earlier
that perhaps when they tried to open it, the
mechanism
would fail and the roof would have to remain shut. This morning, when staff began opening the roof, the mechanism broke, leaving just this hairline of light
falling
onto the pitch.

Michael stands at the north-east corner and sips his tea. When he was younger, it was football, not rugby, that was his game. In his twenties he even won a
couple
of Welsh caps. After his playing days were over, he got a job as a groundsman at a cricket club, and while he was there cricket became his focus. Having retired from the club, he was working as a gardener at a hotel in Cardiff when, six years ago, Lee’s predecessor asked him if he’d like to come and help out at the Millennium Stadium. Ever since, rugby and this stadium have
occupied
Michael’s interest.

Holding his mug in both hands, Michael looks out over the pitch. The grass is patterned in even rectangles of pale green and deep emerald. It has been cut, cleared of feathers from the young birds moulting in the roof, then cut again. The whitewash of the touchlines, trylines, twenty-two-metre, ten-metre, dead-ball and halfway lines has been replenished. Michael himself has trimmed the grass round each set of posts with a pair of scissors. The pitch is ready.

Michael takes a deep breath and begins to feel the
sensation
he always feels when he comes in this early on a
match day welling in his chest: ‘A deep fucking sadness.’ He gives the pitch a nod – part approval, part acceptance – then takes another sip of tea before starting his
customary
lap of the stadium. As he walks, the sadness continues to grow through him, like a blush of melancholy. ‘I don’t knows why,’ he says when asked about it. ‘It just does. There’s not another soul in the place, but I just feels so fucking sad. ’Cos it’s all over, I suppose. Until we start again.’

No one else spends as much time on the grass of the national pitch as Lee, Craig and Michael. Everyone feels ownership over it: Roger Lewis, the chief executive of the WRU; the members of the WRU board; Gerry, the stadium manager; the fans; and, of course, the Wales coaches and players. But if ownership were measured in time, then Michael, Lee and Craig could make a
better
claim than most. Every time Lee and Craig
double-cut
the grass it’s a twelve-mile walk if working on their own, or six miles each if working together. Between them they’ve seen hundreds of players pass across the turf. Their days start early, around 7 a.m., and on the eve of a match they’ll often be giving the pitch its final cut well into the night. As they work, pushing the mowers under the floodlights at a determined, steady pace, they both listen to Radio 2 on their headphones. Sometimes they’ll text in a request – ‘for the groundsmen working on the Millennium Stadium’. If the song is played, they’ll raise a silent fist to each other across the empty pitch, before
dropping their eyes to the turf again to continue their mowing, making sure to only ever ‘walk down the light and never the dark’, so as not to disturb their patterns of pale-and deep-green grass.

Michael pauses at the southern end of the pitch, the part of the stadium Lee and Craig call the ‘Bat-Cave’. Whatever the time of year, from row four back this
portion
of the ground never gets any sunlight. This is the turf that needs the most attention and the greatest amount of time under the growing lights. A succession of wheeling scrums in this part of the pitch can cause Lee and Craig, and therefore their wives, sleepless nights.

Facing Michael at the other end of the stadium is an Under Armour advertising banner. As long as several buses, it hangs from the roof behind the raked seating of the North Stand. The torsos and arms of five Welsh players fill its canvas, their red, three-feathered shirts stretched tight across their chests and biceps. At one time the banner used to show the players’ heads too, but now it’s been cropped, cutting them off at the neck. The
turn-over
in the squad became too rapid and the scale of the image too expensive to recreate.

A team is both eternal and ephemeral, its members forever changing. As Warren Gatland often reminds his young squad, they’re only borrowing the red shirt of Wales. Injury or another player rising through the ranks can be just around the corner. So the shirt is only
borrowing
them too. And that’s what the cropped banner
seems to say. You will borrow the shirt, and the shirt will borrow you, but only the shirt and the team will remain. You who fill out both are just passing through.
Yesterday
, as the banner in the Barn never lets the squad forget,
is in the past.

The eighty minutes of today’s match, though, are still in the future, and as Michael completes his lap of the stadium, this is what the men who’ll wear those red shirts today are thinking about as they wake up. It is still early, but as Michael leaves the stadium’s bowl by the Dragon’s Mouth, as he takes his growing sadness back to Barry, thinking, ‘Sod this, I’m off home for some breakfast,’ the Welsh players, twelve miles west in their shared rooms at the Vale Resort in Pontyclun, are already stirring. Their minds will have woken before their bodies, occupied with thinking about the day’s events. Their stomachs are light with nerves. Those who asked Prof. John, the team doctor, for a sleeping pill to get them through the night are still asleep. But those who didn’t are already waking and, therefore, from the second they open their eyes, preparing.

Their captain, Sam Warburton, wakes up thinking of food. Not the taste of it, but the value of it. Food as fuel. This will be his main concern for the rest of the day until he boards the team bus for the journey into the city
centre
. How to make sure his body has the calories it needs for the exertion ahead? As he lies in his bed he visualises his body as an empty tank, filling through the day’s three meals before the match so that, at kick-off, he will be ready. But to be ready he has to keep that food inside his
system, and on a match day that can be a challenge in itself. Sam wants the food, needs the food, but his nerves often kill his appetite and make his stomach
unpredictable
. More than once he’s coughed in the shower before a game only to find himself following through and
vomiting
up the pre-match meal. If that happens, Sam,
panicked
, will make straight for the team room to drink a protein shake and eat a banana. Although he doesn’t want solids inside him at kick-off, just their nutritional resonance, he knows he needs the fuel. And so he will eat, to give his body and the team he captains the best chance of coming through those eighty minutes on top.

Down the corridor from the room Sam shares with Dan Lydiate, his playing partner at blindside flanker, the team’s centres, Jonathan Davies and Jamie Roberts, are also rooming together. On international days, other than when eating Jonathan would usually sleep and nap through the hours in the build-up to a match. But today is no ordinary match and the prospect of what lies ahead will keep him awake for the rest of the morning and afternoon.

For the last two months the words ‘Grand Slam’ have rarely been spoken in the Welsh camp, although
journalists
at the ever-growing press conferences have been using the phrase with increasing regularity. The Welsh news papers, with typical enthusiasm, began seeding the phrase in their articles after the team’s first win over Ireland. But the Welsh players and coaches have always
remained focused on the next game in the competition, rather than the potential prize at its end. For a squad in camp, expectation and aspiration are volatile fuels,
essential
but combustible. Given too much of an airing they’ll easily explode the very potency that brings a team success. Privately, though, the thought of winning a Grand Slam has never been far from the thoughts of the Welsh squad. From the moment Wales lost to France in the World Cup, Sam, not usually a superstitious man,
acknowledged
a strong intuition that Wales ‘deserved something good to happen’ in the coming Six Nations. After another rehab and conditioning week of cold-weather training at Gdansk in Poland, the squad entered the tournament with the belief that they were just too good to fail. But they were also realistic. Sport can be cruel, and rugby more cruel than most. Key World Cup players such as Alun Wyn Jones and Gethin Jenkins were still injured, as was the hooker and former captain Matthew Rees. Nothing could be taken for granted. Which is why, as with each win Grand Slam fever infected more and more of Wales, the Welsh camp itself has remained an island of calm within the country.

Over the course of the tournament the players and coaches training at the Vale have been subjected to an ever-tightening focus of attention. Since last week’s
victory
over Italy, today’s match against France has
dominated
the national conversation. At service stations as you fuel your car, in cafes, pubs, restaurants, staffrooms and
offices, schools and hospitals, wherever you’ll have gone in Wales for the past week you will have heard aspects of the coming match being endlessly dissected and
examined
. Anticipation is the lifeblood of the sports fan. This morning, on the brink of a possible third Grand Slam in eight years, there are few in Wales who have not been anticipating today’s match and, for this week at least, not become fans.

And yet despite this overheated cauldron of obsession, the Welsh camp at the Vale – the Castle training pitch, the gyms, the team room, the Barn – has somehow
managed
to maintain its lower operating temperature. For the last two months, on entering its environment players and coaches alike have felt a palpable expansion of the chest and mind, as if it’s here, at the very eye of the storm, where they can think and breathe most clearly, where they can feel most at home.

Until this week. Over the last six days the seal on the Vale’s vacuum has begun to leak. The press conferences have continued to grow, with journalists arriving from France, Italy, Argentina. At each session a forest of
camera
tripods jostle for position, the Dictaphones on the top table multiplying like cells dividing.