by Owen Sheers
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.
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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:
The Irish are flying; they’ve got three teams through to the quarter-finals of the Heineken Cup and have a strong squad. I’m expecting Ireland to beat Wales by at least 14 points. Put me on the spot and I’d say 27–9 because the Irish players have been doing so well in Europe. It will be pretty tough for Wales. I’m predicting they will finish fourth in the Six Nations table with only two wins, against Scotland and Italy.
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.
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.
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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.
9.00 a.m.
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.
A long time ago before I was born we once had a team that was always adored,
with sidesteps and sideburns and Grand Slams galore,
our magical boys wrote their names in folklore.
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 fi
re, 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.
