Calon (9 page)

This pattern of complementary opposition is repeated across the Wales management. In contrast to the increased physical and temperamental uniformity of the modern player, the diversity of the Welsh
coaching
staff, in appearance and personality, still reflects how multi faceted a sport rugby is, and is a reminder of the huge range of qualities the game demands of its players. Within each area of the Wales set-up, men work
cheek-by
-jowl with colleagues who, like Adam and Dan, often appear to be polar opposites. But however mismatched the components may appear, the mechanism as a whole works smoothly again and again, not in spite, but
because
of these differences.

At the physio tables in the team room Prav Mathema, the head of medical performance, works alongside Mark Davies, or ‘Carcass’, as he’s known within the squad. In contrast to Prav’s easy-going energy and default smile, Carcass, an ex-international himself, is the squad’s stoic, possessed of a granite-like stillness and a ‘wise man of the
mountain’ air. Where Carcass is sparse of speech, Prav is talkative; where Carcass is tall, Prav is shorter. If Prav’s approachable manner and gelled hair are those of an
affable
TV presenter, then Carcass, with his thousand-yard touchline stare and motionless, broken-nosed profile, is more reminiscent of an Easter Island statue that’s done time in the ring.

The differing personalities of the coaches who work alongside Jenks on the squad’s defence, attack and
forward
play are all rooted in their respective roles, with each man embodying the traits of his specialism. Rob Howley, the Wales attack coach and one of the country’s greatest-ever scrum-halves, is quick and involved, as alert to nuance and lateral vision in his coaching off the field as he was in his playing days on it. As he moves between the players on the training pitch or harries them through patterns of attack in the Barn, Rob’s natural expression is one of furrowed concern, betraying a restless mind always on the lookout for the unexplored strategy, the gap to exploit.

As a player Rob had to punch above his weight from an early age, having been told on more than one
occasion
that he was too small or too slight to make it in international rugby. But the schoolboy who’d spent his weekends playing out his dreams of captaining Wales on the local park behind Priory Avenue in Bridgend was not going to be denied. Having made the Wales number-nine jersey his, he finally ran out to captain Wales against Italy
in 1997. The circumstances, however, were not as Rob would have wished. His opportunity came, like Dan’s, in the wake of the previous captain, Gwyn Jones, breaking his neck. Unlike Dan, Rob knew Gwyn well and had spent much of the weeks before that Italy game beside his hospital bed as his friend came to terms with being told that he may never walk again.

Gwyn supported Rob’s appointment as captain, and Rob went on to lead Wales to their greatest number of successive victories ever. He was also, though, captain through some of the country’s most difficult periods, and it’s this mixed experience of success and failure that appears to drive Rob: the tenacity of the underdog
coupled
with the drive of a winner; the scent of success
married
with a heightened awareness of its fragility.

On first meeting Shaun Edwards, the Wales defence coach, he can seem as impregnable as the strategies he’s woven into the fabric of the squad, his set pit-bull expression imprinted with the same ethos as his rugby –
Thou shalt not pass
. But those who get to know Shaun get to know the depths of the man, and with them, closer to his core, a certain warmth. Possessed of a strong sense of ‘code’, of what is and isn’t important in life, gained from his time as a rugby-league player for Wigan and Great Britain, Shaun is possibly the most decorated player in the country, his broken nose and the scars on his bald head testament to the extent to which he’s lived his
learning
. That he would live a life immersed in rugby was
never in question. His father played professionally for Wigan, until, at the age of twenty-four, a spinal injury almost crippled him. Unable to play himself, Shaun says his father didn’t so much push him into the game ‘as kick me in’. As a young boy he’d sleep with a rugby ball in his bed, and every day he walked past Wigan’s ground at Central Park on his way to and from school. At the age of just seventeen, that ground became his new destination when the club signed the schoolboy Shaun for a
record-breaking
£35,000.

Had it not been for his strong desire to live near James, the son he had with Heather Small, the lead singer of M People, Wigan might still have Shaun now. As it was, Shaun chose to move south to be closer to James. Having switched codes he became head coach at Wasps in West London, before Warren Gatland brought him across the border to shore up the Welsh defence.

Suitably, perhaps, for a devout Catholic who counts priests and monks among his closest friends and family, there is more than a touch of the Shaolin monk about Shaun’s position within the Wales set-up. Fiercely
individual
, seemingly immune to the day sheet’s kit
instructions
, Shaun is a reader and a thinker, existing along a tensile fault line between the intellectual and the physical. When analysing a game, he does so with the vision of a chess player, explaining the multiple patterns and attacking possibilities in a soft Manchester accent
frequently
lifted and quickened by an enthusiast’s passion.
Praise from Shaun is a rare jewel, and as such is valued all the more highly among the players.

As the Wales forwards coach, Rob McBryde is
responsible
for the set pieces of the game, the line-outs and scrums upon which Shaun’s defensive strategies and Rob Howley’s patterns of attack are built. And Rob is, indeed, as ‘set’ a character as the tightly packed scrummaging formations he oversees. Solid, thick-necked and
boulder-shouldered
, there’s something of the carthorse’s reliable strength about Rob. Capped for Wales at hooker and selected for the British Lions tour to Australia in 2001, he was also once crowned ‘Wales’s Strongest Man’. Of North Walian stock, his laconic presence at training is reminiscent of a hill farmer come into town for a cattle auction. But there’s something timeless about Rob too, his mountain-worn manner sounding a strong note against R. S. Thomas’s closing lines on Iago Prytherch;

As a first-language Welsh speaker, Rob moves easily between the Welsh and English spoken by the players in the squad. In 2007 he took on the bardic duty of Grand Sword Bearer at the National Eisteddfod, accepting the mantle from its former title-holder, the late Ray Gravell. It’s a role that fits Rob well. Where others might look 
awkward or out of place in a druid’s robes, when Rob holds that ceremonial sword aloft he looks all too authentic, and it’s no stretch of the imagination to picture him wielding it in the defence of his country a thousand years ago.

Warren Gatland, or ‘Gats’, the man who manages and has this coaching team at his disposal, is the still point at its centre; a locking pin around which the daily work in camp revolves. With a plaintive set to his eyes and
close-cropped
silver hair, Warren moves slow and easy about the training pitch like a tracksuited, philosophical teddy bear, his hands in his pockets, assured yet approachable, open to the world yet lost in private thought.

Straight talking, sometimes to his own detriment, Warren also knows how to weigh the power of silence. Before a game he often won’t speak in the changing rooms but will just stand at its centre, the players
preparing
around him, his head bowed, arms crossed,
sometimes
padding out a pattern of small repetitive steps, as if performing a meditative ritual.

It’s a sparse verbal style suited to the nature of the squad, or perhaps the squad have suited themselves to Warren. Either way, much of the communication in the Welsh camp is non-verbal, a gesture or a look doing the work of sentences. Even at the rugby sessions on the Castle
training
pitch Warren and the other coaches are minimal in their vocal instruction. The players themselves will erupt into frantic calling and shouting when running moves or
doing rucking and spidering sessions, sounding
disturbingly
like soldiers caught in sudden contact. But on the whole Warren will reserve his voice for afterwards, for when the squad gather round him at the centre of the pitch, hands resting on knees to catch their breaths,
leaning
in to listen. At the end of these training sessions, just as in the changing room, Warren will often just stand on the halfway line, arms folded, as with a syncopated
pattern
of hollow punts and thuds the squad practise their various kicks, the balls rising and falling about him like brief constellations.

At these moments Warren embodies the coach as observer, silently weighing the attributes of the players and staff around him. But his are far from the only eyes watching training. At every session there are always
cameras
too, mounted on poles, tripods or hand-held by one of the team of analysts. The man who oversees this team and the information they collect is Rhys Long, a big
no-nonsense
thirty-something with spiky dark hair who, as he puts it himself, ‘is paid to watch rugby’.

Rhys was brought up in what is arguably the capital of British rugby analysis, Porthcawl, a small seaside town in South Wales. Just as neighbouring Port Talbot
produces
a disproportionate number of actors, so Porthcawl can lay claim to the head analysts of Wales, England, New Zealand, Exeter and Wasps, plus three more at the English Institute of Sport. As a young field, performance analysts make up a small community, and most of these
men were at Rhys’s wedding. His best friend, Michael Hughes, the lead analyst for England, was also his best man.

It’s Michael’s father, whom Rhys refers to as ‘the
godfather
of analysis, the oracle’, who is responsible for Porthcawl’s association with performance analysis. As an early pioneer in the field he moved his family to the town when he took up a position at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Michael was eleven at the time, an age when school friends were impressed by a father who made his living from studying the intricacies of sports.

Rhys, however, was going to be a professional rugby player, and had Adam Jones not fallen on his leg during an under-21s trial, breaking his tibia and ankle, then he may have still lived out his dream. He was playing at number eight for Bridgend at the time. The club had begun using an early version of Sportscode, software for sports analysis. As Rhys recovered from his injury, and knowing he was unlikely to return to playing, he ‘began messing around with it to see what it could do’. That messing around led Rhys, four years later, to the Welsh camp, where, since 2007, he’s upgraded and run their analysis.

His working methods are something of a ‘push–pull’ process. As he says, ‘A good analyst stays close to their coaches.’ So much of what he does is in response to what they want to achieve, to what they find effective and
helpful
in pursuing the model or policy they already have in
place. But at the same time Rhys will also initiate changes in training according to the nature of his findings. When his analysis revealed the Wales centre pairing had the lowest passing efficiency of all the Welsh regions, Rob Howley introduced a rigorous passing programme into their training schedule and their efficiency improved. Similarly, if certain players have a low record of success in the air or under high balls, training drills are developed to counter these weaknesses. ‘None of it is revolutionary,’ Rhys says. ‘It’s about aggregation of marginal gains. If you improve by 1 per cent in twenty different areas, then that’s a 20 per cent improvement overall.’

During the Six Nations this process of response and initiation is further complicated by the tight schedule of fixtures. With a match nearly every week, Rhys constantly has to look both ways, analysing Wales’s performance against the team just played and analysing the team they are about to play. It’s a delicate balance. Over-responding to readings from last week’s game against Ireland might be counterproductive if this week’s opponents, Scotland, play a totally different style of rugby. ‘It is’, Rhys says, ‘like trying to stay one step ahead, but one step behind too.’

Although most of Rhys’s working time is spent
analysing
Wales’s performance on the field, his analytical mind can’t help drawing from information off it too. One of the strengths of this current squad, he thinks, is their grounding beyond rugby. Many of the players
have strong families, older brothers, roots to which they return. A relatively high proportion have stable, settled home lives. Others, however, he admits, play better when not attached, as if ‘they need that George Best swagger to play their best game’. According to Rhys, though, Wales’s greatest strength is what some in the past have cited as their greatest weakness. ‘It’s our size,’ he explains. ‘Our ability to assemble the squad quickly, to centralise
everything
here. All the boys live close by so they can drop in any time, see Prav or Carcass if they’re injured. While they’re in camp, our boys, if they want to, go home on a Tuesday night, stay home Wednesday and come in again Thursday. They can see their families, wives, girlfriends, sleep in their own beds. It’s like Wales’, Rhys says proudly, ‘is the biggest club team in the world.’

Every coach, on taking responsibility for a team, will try to create a culture: a foundation of principles and
attitudes
around which a squad can bond, and to which new members can aspire. Although Warren brought a hive of Wasps into the Wales set-up – Shaun, Rhys, Howley and Prav all having worked for the London club he used to coach – he was still, in many ways, a stranger entering a tightly knit family. In this situation most coaches will use a change of culture as a short-cut to evoking new ties and cohesion. Warren’s greatest strength, however, is that rather than try and create such a culture, he
is
the culture.