Calon (6 page)

In the end everything worked out for Wales that day. The match was painfully close, at times no more than an inch or a second from being lost, and it was far from perfect. For ten minutes, when Bradley Davies was
sin-binned
, Wales once again found themselves playing with fourteen men. Rhys Priestland squandered eight points in missed penalties and conversions. But despite these
setbacks
Wales displayed a new strain of mental and physical
toughness for the full eighty minutes. For eighty minutes they brought their memories of Spała and Gdansk to the Aviva pitch and they used them, at the very last moment, to win against a home side on form and bent on revenge.

Winning in sport is often about repetition; about trying to recreate that elusive blend of preparation, discipline, rhythm and instinct. Routine, though never the key on its own, is often the path teams and individuals choose to bring themselves closer to that winning recipe. Today, in the eight hours before the match against France, the Welsh players waking in their beds at the Vale will each follow an interwoven pattern of individual and squad routines. Jonathan Davies, wanting to avoid a ‘dullness of the eyes’, will choose not to watch TV or play any computer games. Sam Warburton, when not focusing on fuelling his body, will isolate himself. Lloyd Williams, the young scrum-half, will begin a new book. Adam Jones, the tight-head prop, will call his wife and listen to the sounds of his new baby daughter on the phone.

Adam, or ‘Bomb’ as he is known within the squad, is one of the team’s better-known faces. Already a veteran of two Grand Slams, his distinctive mop of dark curls has earned him yet another moniker in public. When he played alongside another similarly hirsute prop, Duncan Jones, the pair became known as Wales’s ‘Hair Bears’. It’s an appearance which also caught the eye of Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who once claimed Adam
as his favourite athlete, both because he’d played prop himself and because he said Adam reminded him of ‘Cro-Magnon man’. Before Adam’s last match against France at the World Cup, Boris even phoned his hotel room to wish him good luck, which was, Adam admits in his quick Breconshire accent, ‘a very, very surreal moment’.

Within rugby, Adam is as well known for the quality of his scrummaging and the depth of his knowledge as for his haircut. The bar he’s set at tight head is so high it’s now the one position in the squad where Wales struggle to find equivalent cover. Over the last few years he’s brought his weight down from twenty-three stone to closer to
nineteen
, lifting his levels of fitness to keep pace with the
modern
game. Amenable and gentle off the field, with a quick sense of self-deprecating humour, Adam doesn’t think of himself as ‘a very confrontational bloke’. And yet during a match he’s often the epitome of the word, whether
packing
down to take on an opposition front row or throwing himself into tackles, his long hair flying about his head a visual register of the force he’s put into the impact.

In France the front row is as iconic among rugby fans as the outside-half is in Wales. The French pride
themselves
on their scrummaging ability, on their tradition of dominating opposing packs. So Adam knows today will be another hard day at the office, and that he’ll need to protect his right shoulder to avoid being shunted by the French. But at least he’s back with his British Lions teammates, Matthew Rees and Gethin Jenkins, both
recovered from injury. Between the three of them they present a front line of massive experience; a vanguard of hundreds of international hours behind which the team’s younger backline will hopefully be able to go to work.

Adam, like all the squad, will go for a ‘primer’ today. Not that long ago these didn’t exist, with teams doing all their physical preparation at the stadium. For several years they consisted of no more than a weights session. Today, although many players will still use weights to stimulate their nervous systems, to give their bodies a match-day sensation of tightness, the primer is more individually focused. Under the instruction of Adam Beard, Wales’s head of physical performance, the primer is now about responding to the specific needs of that player on that day. Some will stretch existing tension in certain muscle groups. Others will work on co-ordination skills, sharpen reaction times. The backs will also walk through their moves, while the forwards will walk through their
line-out
drills, laying down the rhythms of each call in their muscle memories. For Leigh Halfpenny, once again today’s long-range goal-kicker, his primer will be to do what he’s done a thousand times before: go down to the Castle training pitch and practise his kicks with Jenks. And because this is a match day he’ll do this not just for the kicking itself, but also ‘to get a feel for the day’: the quality and strength of the wind, the weight of the weather, the taste of the light.

Roger Lewis, the chief executive of the Welsh Rugby Union, stands on the edge of the Millennium Stadium pitch, bathed in the warm light of a camera crew. Dressed in a grey suit, red WRU tie and red scarf, he is giving an interview to the BBC. Beside him the Blims, a five-man band from Bridgend, are warming up to play their Grand Slam song, ‘Sidesteps and Sideburns’, which over the past week has become a YouTube hit. They wear the red and white striped scarves of the 1970s, and the lead singer has thick sideburns reminiscent of the era. Even when celebrating today’s team, most of whom were born in the late 1980s, Welsh rugby’s stubborn memories of the 1970s still persist, as if support of a contemporary squad will always be tainted by comparison.

The camera turns towards the Blims, and they begin to play.

The BBC broadcast shows live on the big screens hanging from the North and South Stands, briefly
committing the Blims to a diminishing hall of mirrors as they appear on a screen within a screen within a screen. Roger looks on, smiling, knowing that today his stadium and his team are at the centre of the centre.

Roger is fifty-eight years old, but with his neatly parted brown hair, trim figure and senator’s smile he looks fifteen years younger. Having studied music composition and worked as a composer and musician, Roger came to the WRU in 2006 via executive positions at Radio 1, Classic FM, EMI and Decca. Although now firmly ensconced in rugby, he sometimes feels as if on a match day his two worlds still meet in this stadium, the teams like
orchestras
, the game a concert and the referee the conductor. Music and rugby come together at Roger’s home in St Hilary too, where he’ll often work into the night on his laptop beside the fire, deep in WRU business but always accompanied by one of the thousands of CDs from his room-sized library next door.

This morning marks the apex of Roger’s time with the WRU. When he first joined the organisation, it was struggling, on and off the pitch. In 2010, after a difficult season, he was questioned both privately and publicly about the wisdom of extending Warren Gatland’s
contract
as Wales head coach. Today, though, having reduced the organisation’s debt, opened up new revenue streams, secured Warren until after the 2015 World Cup and signed new sponsorship and broadcast deals, he will watch as Wales make a bid for their third Grand Slam in eight
years. There are still issues. Regional rugby is fighting to keep its head above water, and many in the game are
looking
to Roger and the WRU to throw it a lifeline. There have been accusations that the national game is thriving at the expense of local rugby. There are always others who would do things differently. But today, just a year after those doubts about his decision-making were expressed, Roger is enjoying, for a few hours at least, being at the helm of the WRU when the country is febrile with talk of a third golden generation of Welsh rugby.

In his own way, like the players and the coaches he employs Roger is a winner who thrives on the hit of
success
. Ruthless in pursuit of his ideas and a shrewd judge of character, he’s a man unafraid to explore the visionary and the experimental. Driven by a desire to fly ‘at great heights’, he’s moved swiftly through the higher echelons of the music and broadcasting industries. And yet, despite his current position and the depth of his past experience, there is still something permanently boyish about Roger, as if Just William had suddenly woken to find himself a successful executive, still effervescent with the surprise of his new-found powers in the grown-up world.

Behind Roger the stadium’s roof is still only open by a metre. All around him the building is being prepared. PR women high-heel down the players’ tunnel, phones to their ears, clipboards balanced like babies at their hips. The suited event managers speak to each other through headsets, while cameramen lay looping armfuls of cables
and the sponsor’s logos are painted onto the pitch. Thousands of folding seats click and tut from high in the stands as teams of cleaners move through the aisles and rows. Deeper within the building the staff of the Barry John and Gareth Edwards bars on level three are
connecting
their beer barrels and checking their pumps.

Back home in Barry, meanwhile, Michael, having finished his breakfast, sits in his favourite armchair and turns on the TV. The Blims appear on the screen, playing and singing their song.

Michael watches, another cup of tea in his hand, admiring the colour and pattern of the pitch on which the band are playing, the neatness of the grass around the posts.

If Jonathan Davies laid the foundation for Wales’s victory against Ireland, it was Leigh Halfpenny who sealed it by kicking a winning penalty in the dying seconds of the match. Just moments before that penalty was awarded it looked as if Eliot’s line –
In my beginning is my end
– would have a purely negative resonance for Wales, rather than the positive one it does today. A dead leg meant Sam Warburton didn’t come back in the second half, leaving Ryan Jones to step into the breach as captain. Bradley Davies’s sixty-fourth-minute sin-binning for dropping his opposite number in an off-the-ball tussle not only evoked the spectre of Sam’s World Cup red card, but once again reduced the team to fourteen men. With only four minutes of the match remaining, George North resurrected Welsh hopes by bowling over two Irish defenders to score in the corner. But then Leigh, having taken over kicking duties from Rhys Priestland, missed the conversion, leaving the scoreline of Ireland 21 – Wales 20 also looking like the final result.

But then, as if the gods of rugby were possessed of a perverted love of symmetry, another tip tackle, this time by Ireland’s Stephen Ferris on Ian ‘Ianto’ Evans, opened up a last window of opportunity for Wales,
acknowledged
by Ianto’s grateful ruffle of Ferris’s skullcap as he got back to his feet. The penalty was thirty-five metres
out and just to the right of the Irish posts. Ryan asked the referee, Wayne Barnes, how much time was left on the clock. His answer was picked up by the TV mikes and broadcast around the world. ‘Five zero,’ Barnes said. ‘Fifty seconds.’

As Leigh angled the ball onto the kicking tee he found himself in the same position as in the final minutes against France at the World Cup in New Zealand: just five steps and one kick from victory or defeat, success or failure, wedding or funeral. Had Wales’s World Cup experience made them weaker or stronger? Could Leigh, with one kick, help Wales come true on the promise they’d shown?

When Leigh had missed that kick in Eden Park, his grandfather, the man who’d first taken him to practise in Gorseinon when he was nine, had been watching from half a world away. For this kick in Dublin he was watching again, but this time from within the stands of the same ground, feeling the Aviva’s part-arena,
part-conservatory
atmosphere draw in tight as his grandson stood up from the kicking tee, stabbed the turf with the toe of each boot and began stepping backwards from the ball.

The voice of the crowd fell. A few isolated boos and jeers resounded against the stadium’s glass waves, but most of the 55,000 spectators just watched, silent and tense. The last eighty minutes had taken their toll on everyone. Once in position Leigh took a deep breath, his
hands swinging at his sides, and looked up at the posts. The noise of the crowd was building again. Whistles, shouts, jeers. The Irish players were lined up under the crossbar, steam rising from their shoulders. His Welsh teammates were standing down the field behind him, their chests rising and falling with heavy breaths. Closer to him, a few metres off his right shoulder, stood Jenks, quietly reciting the same liturgy of technique that he repeats for every kick Leigh takes.

‘Keep upright.’

‘Not too fast.’

‘Make good contact.’

‘Follow through.’

Listening to Jenks’s voice, Leigh looked down at the ball and located his point of contact. Ever since the kick he’d missed in the semi-final of the World Cup he’d thought about this moment. And every time he had, he’d made the same promise to himself. A promise that if he was ever given the opportunity to kick a winning goal for Wales again, he’d nail it. That he wouldn’t ever let what happened at the World Cup happen again. That there was no way he would let the ball fall short. That he wouldn’t just kick it, but would kick it as hard as he could.

Taking another deep breath Leigh stared down at the ball, Jenks’s voice becoming ever more distant as he tipped his weight forward and began his run-up:

‘Keep upright.’

          ‘Not too fast.’

                    ‘Make good contact.’