by Owen Sheers
whichever way it falls, cast forever,
and theirs to carry for the rest of their lives
until, like those who’ve passed through
this crucible before, they too will join
the soil, the tir, the pridd of this land
they were prepared to suffer for.
GAME DAY
Wales vs France, 17 March 2012
6 a.m.
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:
2007 – Ireland
2009 – England
2011 – Argentina
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 you
ng 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.
6.30 a.m.
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.
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.
