Calon (5 page)

The public have followed the press too, with fans, families and sponsors all converging on the Vale in the hope of meeting, or just seeing, one of Wales’s
prospective
Grand Slam champions. The players are the same men who started this campaign just six weeks ago, but
already success has gilded each of them with the blessing and the curse of being ‘a child o’ the time’.

Like many of the squad, Jonathan Davies has attempted to escape the mounting pressure and protect his time away from training. He’s begun using the
service
elevators and back entrances of the hotel, and hasn’t read or listened to any of the press coverage of the match. The atmosphere at the Vale, he says, has become ‘surreal’. But at the same time it’s been impossible to avoid the thought of what a win against France today would mean. Over the last few days, as he and Jamie have discussed game plans and tactics in their room, they’ve also allowed themselves, for the first time, to speak those two words openly – ‘Grand Slam’. Not as an inevitability, but as a whispered possibility. With the other four matches of the campaign successfully behind them, they’ve begun to imagine what the wake of a fifth victory might look like. What would Wales look like if, through the alchemy of today’s match, they could transfigure the current ore of expectation into the precious metal of celebration?

For Jamie, who debuted for Wales against Scotland during their Grand Slam campaign in 2008, his
projection
of that possible future is conjured upon the taste of experience. For three of the older players in the squad – Ryan Jones, Gethin Jenkins and Adam Jones – a win would mark their third Grand Slam each and see them join a select group of just three other Welsh players who’ve achieved the same. But for Jonathan and the majority
of this young squad this would be their first experience of a Grand Slam. The squad’s younger players are all in unfamiliar territory, on the brink of realising a childhood dream which none of them, until these last few days, had dared to think could ever come true.

Now just twenty-three, Jonathan was a spectator in the stands at Wales’s last two Grand Slams, in 2005 and 2008. When he was growing up in west Wales, he remembers it being an ‘unwritten rule’ that every Welsh boy would try to play rugby at some point in their life. Jonathan was just five years old when he answered that national stipulation, picking up his first rugby ball at Bancyfelin Primary School, the same school where Mike Phillips, Wales’s scrum-half today, began his playing days. Jonathan played as a junior for St Clears, then, when the side disbanded, for Whitland, before, at the age of
fifteen
, moving on to the Scarlets academy. It was, though, a summer of fitness training with the father of one of his brother’s friends, Jeff Stephenson, that Jonathan cites as the crucial turning point of his teenage years. Training with Jeff over those summer weeks turned him from a ‘chubby kid’ into what he describes as ‘more of a
physical
presence’. As he got bigger, so his position altered, moving down the line from scrum-half, to outside-half, to centre.

Throughout his youth Jonathan always considered himself as one of the bigger backs in the game, and he’d have been right to think so. Just listening to his voice
without seeing him is enough to give you an idea of his size. Assured and gravelled it seems to rise from a deep Welsh quarry, resonant with his sixteen stone three pounds of weight. But size is relative, and in this
current
Welsh team Jonathan has come to think of himself as being on the smaller side. Of the six other men in the Welsh backline today three are taller and heavier than him, including his room-mate in the bed next to him this morning, Jamie Roberts, who at six foot four and seventeen stone four pounds still isn’t the biggest back in the squad.

There was a time when the positions in a rugby-union team catered for a broad spectrum of body shapes: from the full-sail bellies of the props and the tall, cross-
beam-shouldered
locks, to the shorter, terrier-like scrum-halves and the more slender full-backs and wings. In Wales particularly this pattern resonated with an echo of the country’s class and economic hierarchy: the claustrophobic, bowed, scrummaging forwards working at the coalface of a match to win possession for the more individually minded backs, who using their greater freedom of movement and expression would exploit the forwards’ efforts, cashing in with a profit of tries and conversions.

In Wales these backline entrepreneurs were traditionally the smaller men on the pitch, quick and visionary with game-changing side-steps and tackle-defying low centres of gravity. Their body shapes were those of the Welsh soldiers observed by Wilfred Owen in the trenches
of the First World War, the ‘stocky mountain men’ of his ancestry whose same attributes of quickness and shorter stature made them, in the eyes of the poet, good
infantrymen
as well as good backs.

Though written into the game as early as the 1900s, this Welsh signature of backline play became epitomised in the great teams of the 1970s, in the form of Barry John, Gareth Edwards, J. P. R. Williams, Phil Bennett and Gerald Davies. Of these it was perhaps Gerald Davies who made the most from the tension drawn between the contrasting scales of his physicality and his
penetration
on the field. Although slight of build, Gerald could tear opposing teams apart, in more than one match
scoring
every time he touched the ball. His defining skills – a quickness of reaction, a side-step of both feet at full speed, his spatial reading of the game – were all
products
of his smaller stature. Carwyn James has written how Gerald developed the ‘instincts of a forest animal’, exploiting a survivalist’s fear to keep him out of harm’s way and, therefore, the hands of the opposition. ‘Fear’, James writes, ‘is an important element in the make-up of such a player.’

The resulting style of rugby played by Gerald rang true against the dominant notes of Welsh support – a demand for beauty as well as brutality, a celebration of the small winning over the big. It’s a playing style that’s been kept alive by a succession of smaller backs, most recently in the quickstep feet of Shane Williams,
the diminutive winger who, having scored more tries than any other Welshman, retired in December with yet another try against Australia, followed by a gymnast’s farewell somersault. But while Gerald’s body shape remained largely unchanged throughout his playing days, Shane’s increasingly showed the pressure of the times. Compared to his younger self, the Shane who accepted the crowd’s applause after that somersault was almost two stone heavier than the Shane who first took the field for Wales. His neck was thicker, his arms pushed wider by bulked-up lats, his shoulders were piled higher and his chest and biceps were tight with new muscle. The change in Shane’s body was a sign of what was to come for Wales. He still scored tries through flexibility and speed, but to stay in the modern game he had to be able to take and give the hits too.

Ever since rugby union turned professional, the body shape and contribution of its players have become more uniform. While each position still has its specialism, the breadth of an individual’s requirements in top-flight rugby have also grown. Forwards are now expected to move quickly around the field and handle like a back. In turn, the backs are expected to scavenge at the
turn-over
and put their shoulder to the rucks or mauls. And everyone tackles. Where Barry John could once claim to his captain ‘tackling isn’t in my contract’ as he ran out for the Grand Slam match against France in 1971, Wales’s number ten facing the French today, Rhys Priestland,
will more than likely make shuddering tackles well into double figures.

Wales’s response to the increased physicality in the game has been to enter a period of gigantism. On the eve of the Scottish match the
Guardian
, reflecting on Wales’s win in Dublin the week before, published an illustrated comparison of the backlines of four international teams: Wales, England, New Zealand and South Africa. The pictures of twenty-eight big men ranged across two pages of the paper. But for the first time ever, and against the grain of Welsh tradition, none of the other backlines was bigger than the Welsh, who stood on average two inches taller and almost a stone heavier. For their Six Nations opponents these statistics were all the more imposing because of what the rugby world had witnessed the
previous
weekend at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin: a backline of young Welsh giants, yet still possessed with the skills and speed of those men who’d worn the same numbers on their backs in the 1970s.

Many of those ex-Welsh players had travelled to Dublin to watch that opening match against Ireland, including Gerald Davies, who now writes on rugby for
The Times
. As a lover of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, Gerald had a CD of
The Four Quartets
in his car when he drove to the airport that weekend. As he listened to ‘East Coker’ on that drive, Gerald would have heard the poem’s
opening
line –
In my beginning is my end
. It’s a line which this morning, as the Welsh players at the Vale stir and wake in
their beds, rings truer than ever in relation to that
opening
match against Ireland. An opening match which not only set the tone for Wales’s tournament, but also laid the stones for today’s Grand Slam decider against France.

The Welsh team flew to Ireland across a snow-dusted Wales and a corrugated sea, both suitable preparations for the frosty, rough-edged reception waiting for them in Dublin. The talk on the city’s streets and in the press was of World Cup revenge. Not for Wales’s loss to France, but for Ireland’s loss to Wales. Having outmuscled Australia, Ireland went on to the quarter-finals, only to be
out-thought
by a tactically astute Wales. As a reminder of that defeat, on the morning of the match the Irish papers carried a photograph of a jubilant Mike Phillips leaping into the air, his fist clenched, against a backdrop of bowed heads in green shirts. The Celtic tiger was still smarting and now, it was felt, on a cold Sunday in February, with every second mannequin on Grafton Street wearing one of those green shirts and the gulls skating across a frozen St Stephen’s pond, was the time to bite back.

There were other undercurrents of tension pulling at the Irish game too. Ten years ago the Irish Rugby Union had sacked Warren Gatland and replaced him with his assistant coach, Eddie O’Sullivan. Now, with the 2013 Lions tour on the horizon, it was well known that Warren and Eddie were both in the running for the coveted
position
of Lions head coach. In the wake of the World Cup
both teams were injury-hit, but with a strong record of home wins against Wales, recent club victories in Europe and an undefeated run at their new stadium the Irish, even without their talismanic captain Brian O’Driscoll, were the bookies’ favourites. Wales, meanwhile, had
followed
their World Cup loss to France with two more straight defeats, both against Australia. With these games in mind Austin Healey, the ex-England international, delivered a forecast shared by many commentators:

Psychologically, if not physically, every international rugby match begins weeks before the kick-off. For the Irish game, despite predictions like Healey’s, Wales had won this pre-match contest before they’d even landed in Dublin. The underdog label suited them. The squad would rather fight for a win from underneath than
protect
a perceived advantage from above. With a typical deftness of touch Warren had postponed his own team announcement until after Ireland had shown their hand,
having already seeded certain ideas in the minds of the Irish selectors. Photographs of Jamie Roberts sitting on the sidelines at training had been printed in the papers, suggesting the big Welsh centre wasn’t yet match fit. Jamie went on to have what he later described as ‘one of his best days ever in a Welsh shirt’.

However well Wales contested the build-up to the match, the game itself remained a massive challenge. A vengeful Ireland at home is a daunting prospect for any team. Without the retired Shane Williams Wales were fielding an untried new wing pairing of George North and Alex Cuthbert, as well as a vastly altered pack from the World Cup, with the towering Ian Evans back after three years of injury and the rookie Rhys Gill coming in at loose head to replace the veteran Gethin Jenkins. The question of promise posed to Wales in the wake of their World Cup defeat suddenly looked like a significantly harder one to answer.

For Jonathan Davies the Ireland match presented a more personal challenge. On the Thursday before the game his grandfather died, and Jonathan had to carry this loss with him across the Irish Sea and into the stadium that Sunday afternoon. Singing the national anthem when you’re about to play for Wales is emotional for any player; a moment when the compression of the occasion focuses a player’s thoughts upon certain individuals in their life. The lyrics may be of nationhood – ‘
Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi’
(‘The land of my fathers
which is dear to me’) – but in the minds of the young men singing them those lyrics often evoke people more than a place: the families, wives, girlfriends, parents and grandparents who over the years have helped make this moment possible for them, and whose own dreams, by playing for Wales that day, they are making come true.

For Jonathan, singing the anthem in Dublin was almost too much. Intensified through the prism of his
grandfather’s
death, it was all he could do to contain himself and gather his thoughts for the game ahead. The resonance of that emotional intensity, however, would remain with him for the next eighty minutes, and never more so than when, just fifteen minutes after singing the anthem, he gathered a sweetly timed offload from Rhys Priestland and crossed to score Wales’s first try of the match. As Jonathan walked back from the Irish tryline he flicked his eyes skyward, then kissed the ball with which he’d just scored before
raising
it, briefly, in salute. He went on to follow that first try with another in the second half, scored that cold Sunday, like the first, for his grandfather as well as for Wales.