by Owen Sheers
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:
Refuse to be denied,
Refuse to compromise.
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.
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.
5 February
Ireland 21 – Wales 23
12 February
Wales 27 – Scotland 13
25 February
England 12 – Wales 19
10 March
Wales 24 – Italy 3
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
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Nor
ton’
There are moments in history
when a nation becomes a stadium.
When a country’s gaze and speech
tightens in one direction.
When a population leans, from sofas,
pub stools, in village halls, to watch.
Or strains to listen at the sides of roads,
or in tractor cabs in silent fields.
There are moments when the many,
through the few, become one.
A faithful but demanding tribe,
hungry for a win but also more.
For beauty as well as strength,
for art as well as war.
But romance, history, fervour,
are the privilege of watchers only.
For the men who must do,
though fuelled by the colour of the jersey,
the feathers on their chest, there can be no past
or future when, but only now.
For them those eighty tightening minutes
will be an ever-living present
composed of the angle of their runs,
the timing of cross kicks, the learned set piece
that fires the line to light the match.
It will be the focused practice
of what their bodies have learnt on the training pitch.
The thousands of hours of solitary pain,
the sacrifice that has led them,
and them alone, to this –
A nation sharing a pulse
as the clock counts up to the final whistle
when now becomes then. The moment,
