by Owen Sheers
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.
And we’ll all hold hands and drink to each other’s good health,
And we’ll all hold hands and thank the Lord we’re born Welsh,
And the more we drink the more we’ll sing Calon Lan,
And we all hope Wales win the Grand Slam.
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.
10 a.m.
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.’
‘Follow through.’
Follow through.
Leigh has been training with Jenks ever since the ex-Wales and British Lions fly-half came to Swansea to run a kicking session for the Ospreys academy. Leigh was just sixteen at the time and ‘nervous as hell’ about meeting Wales’s greatest-ever kicker. But his grandfather recognised that the session marked the next step in his grandson’s career. ‘The apprenticeship’s over now, boy,’ he told Leigh that day. ‘I’ve taken you as far as I can. You’re with the main man now.’
As Jenks talks Leigh through his practice kicks on the Castle pitch this morning, a clear sky burning off the river mist, he does not necessarily look like ‘the main man’ or, some would say, like a rugby player at all. As he paces behind Leigh, a pair of rugby balls tucked under one arm, two more held in each hand, he walks with a rolling, agricultural gait, his close-cropped red hair receding from his forehead and temples to a pair of protruding ears. He is not especially big and his frame is softer-edged than you might expect. But Leigh’s grandfather’s statement is still impossible to deny. Anyone who knows their rugby also knows that Jenks is every inch ‘the main man’.
In his thirteen-year international career Jenks racked up more points than any Welsh player in history, scoring a total of eleven tries, 130 conversions, 235 penalties and ten drop goals. When he retired, he was the only player in the world to have scored more than a thousand international points. As he punts balls back down the pitch to Leigh this morning each kick betrays why that was the case. Every ball, nine years after Jenks hung up his boots, still lands with precision at Leigh’s feet.
Between them Jenks and Leigh, coach and player, mentor and pupil, bridge the gap between rugby’s amateur past and its professional future. Both Jenks and Leigh debuted young, at nineteen. Both had relatives putting in the hours in the wings: Leigh his grandfather; Jenks his uncles Peter and Andrew, drilling him towards a style and a rhythm on the training pitch at Pontypridd. But where Leigh came into the Wales set-up via the academies and a professional career, Jenks was filling a skip in his family’s scrapyard when his father returned from the pub one day to tell him he was in the Welsh squad to face England. When he learnt about his second cap, he was tiling a council house and listening to the team announcement on a radio. Where Leigh built himself up through years of weights, strength programmes and supplements, Jenks was conditioned by swinging a sledgehammer or dragging an old tyre on shuttle runs in the alley behind his house. Jenks was a player formed in rugby’s amateur era, driving lorries of scrap metal the length of Britain or working in Just Rentals between games. In contrast, Leigh has been shaped by the professional game, the hours of his days portioned by the training, media and fixture schedules of club and country.
Yet as they work together on the Castle pitch this morning, rehearsing the combinations that will unlock each kick, there is more shared territory between these two men than not. However much rugby has changed, there will always be fundamentals of a player’s experience that will never alter and will continue to form strong bonds between the generations. For Leigh and Jenks the goal-kicker’s ritual of solitary practice, that silent benediction exercised on a succession of empty pitches, has provided them with thousands of hours of shared experience. Though practised years apart, the two men’s characters have been formed in the shadow of these repeated attempts to balance that ever-unstable equation of man, r
ugby ball and posts.
And then there have been those other shared experiences too. Rarer, but more intense, when under the stiletto-pressure of a match-day kick that coalface of practice is converted into a few diamond seconds under the eyes of millions. When a stadium and two stalled teams all wait upon the strike of your boot to tell them how, this time, the script will be written.
Over the years of their relationship the experience Leigh shares with Jenks has been deepened with inheritance. As with all the youngsters with whom he works, along with general skills advice Jenks has also passed on specifics of his own technique to Leigh. It’s a lineage of knowledge that lies at the heart of Jenks’s coaching philosophy, an ongoing attempt to undo one of the central paradoxes of rugby: that a player’s knowledge will always progress in inverse proportion to the ability of their bodies. As a young player improves mentally, emotionally and technically, as he learns to read the game and himself better, so his body will slow and weaken with age and the violence of the sport.
Jenks reached the peak of his own playing knowledge towards the end of his career, when he had just a handful of games left. In coaching the lessons he’s learnt to younger players now, Jenks hopes to shortcut them to that peak earlier in their own careers, and so increase the number of games in which their mental and technical skills are on a par with their physical ones. This is why he prefers to work with players like those kicking today – Rhys Priestland, James Hook and Leigh – from as early as fifteen or sixteen years old. Bad habits ruin more kickers than good habits make them. At eighteen or nineteen it’s often too late; those bad habits are already stitched into a player’s style. But at fifteen, sixteen Jenks knows he can build upon a player’s skills without first having to unpick existing faults.
Although Jenks hasn’t taken the field himself for almost a decade, his coaching work means a part of him still runs out with young players onto grounds across Wales every weekend. And a part of him still faces up to the posts on those grounds for the kicks at goal too. Every young kicker with whom he’s worked eventually develops their own method, their own stance, approach and follow-through. But until they do they’ll first glean what they can from the DNA of Jenks’s kicking style. When the young Hunter S. Thompson decided to be a writer, he typed out the entire manuscript of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, just so he could ‘feel’ what writing a great novel might be like; its rhythms, pace and style. In a similar way young kickers working with Jenks will imitate the handwriting of his technique before creating their own, so they too can ‘feel’ how it might be to kick like one of the greatest in their game, before attempting to be so themselves.
The most important technique Jenks passed on to Leigh as a young player was psychological rather than physical. Wherever Jenks was kicking for goal, be it at the Arms Park in Cardiff, Kings Park in Durban or the Stade de France in Paris, as far as he was concerned he was never inside those stadia, but many miles away instead, on Cae Fardre, a field near his childhood home in Pentre’r Eglwys. With each of those kicks, as Jenks stepped back from the ball he also stepped back onto Cae Fardre, the place where he’d spent thousands of hours practising alone as a kid; where he’d kicked for fun and where things had always been easy.
Future visualisation is key in sport: the marksman sees the bullet penetrate the bull’s eye before he shoots; the sprinter sees himself breast the line before he starts; and the goal-kicker sees the ball sailing through the posts before he makes the kick. But when Jenks was taking place kicks for Wales or the British Lions, his visualisation always projected two ways: forwards and backwards. Forwards to the successful kick, and backwards to those hours kicking alone on Cae Fardre. For Jenks, each place kick was also a kick about place: about using one location to protect himself from another, about drawing upon his memories of Cae Fardre so as to isolate himself from the pressures of the place in which he stood at that moment, facing up to the posts inside the crucible of a stadium.
It’s this other dimension to ‘place’ kicking that Jenks has passed on to Leigh, so that now, when Leigh lines up a kick for Wales, it’s another corner of the country that’s conjured into stadia around the world: the pitch in Gorseinon where he and his grandfather first went to practise, and where they still go together whenever they can. Just as Cae Fardre used to insulate Jenks at the moment of a kick, so an image of Gorseinon, its trees and houses spreading through the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, insulated Leigh in Dublin that day from the gathering noise and whistles of the crowd as he quickened his steps towards the ball and, with just fifteen seconds left on the clock, struck it with all the power he could muster.
Keep upright.
Make good contact.
Follow through.
The ball was still in the air when Leigh turned his back on that kick, and he was already running back to his teammates when the linesmen raised their flags. He knew the kick had been successful, and he knew that Wales had won. After the match, when he’d finished his interviews and his signings for fans and sponsors, Leigh found his grandfather and gave him the pair of boots with which he’d just kicked Wales to victory. The Irish match had begun with a try for one grandfather, and it was finished with a kick for another. In more ways than one Wales’s first fixture in the Six Nations had been a game about starting points, foundations. In my beginning, as Eliot says, is my end.
10.30 a.m.
Having taken just eight kicks at goal this morning Leigh and Jenks collect the balls and begin to make their way back to the team room up at the Vale. Eight kicks are all Leigh needs. These pre-match hours, for all the players, are a negotiation between preparation and freshness. About sharpening the blade without blunting it through overuse; about keeping as much in reserve as possible for the eighty minutes of the match ahead.
As they walk up towards the seventeenth-century turrets of Hensol Castle, which gives the training pitch its name, Leigh confides to Jenks that he’s feeling more nervous than usual today, and for some reason he can’t seem to shake it off.
‘Enjoy it, butt,’ Jenks tells him, giving him a pat on the shoulder. ‘Give it your all.’
*
‘All’ is what rugby is to Jenks, and his all is what he’s given the game. Which is why he knows about nerves. Within the squad he’s as well known for his pre-match anxiety as he is for his kicking. Whether it’s a fixture against Tenby or the All Blacks, whether playing or coaching, the run-up to every match will often see Jenks, wracked with nerves, retching in the changing rooms.
Jenks is also known within Welsh rugby for his encyclopedic knowledge of the game; for being able to tell you not only which team won on a certain date, but by how much and who scored when. If current players are still inheriting their aspirations from Jenks, then he in turn was first inspired by the players of the 1970s. When he was seven years old, he saw one of those Cardiff games in which Gerald Davies touched the ball four times and scored four tries. Ever since, fuelled by his rugby-playing uncles, he’s been obsessed by the sport, feeling it even more than he knows it. During a match he lives every kick, break and tackle made by the players he coaches. Afterwards he’ll absorb himself in analysing the patterns and plays. At the meal after the Irish match, as the two squads and their guests mingled around the tables talking and drinking, Jenks stood alone in a corner of the room, one hand in the pocket of his suit, the other holding a pint, looking up at a TV screen playing the match in which he’d just participated. It was as if even then, with the resonance of the game still fresh in the air and the grazes on the faces of the players still raw, Jenks wanted to see it all again, wanted to live it all again. As if, after all those months of preparation and training, he was reluctant to let those eighty minutes go.
*
For all the Wales coaches today the last forty-eight hours have been a slow process of letting go. Jenks, who will run messages during the match and be with the kickers for conversions and penalties, will have more contact with the players than most. But even for him, from the Th
ursday of a match week onwards the majority of his work is done. Like a director and stage crew in the run-up to an opening night, Warren Gatland and his coaching team have to make the uncomfortable transition from being at the centre of the cast, the team, to becoming a member of the audience, the crowd.
This transition from influence to observation is one of the hardest parts of the coaches’ jobs. As ex-players all of them first got involved in rugby to be on the field, and now they are off it, shaping policy and style of play, but unable to do anything at the moment of execution. As coaches they are still at the heart of the sport, so the sense of aftermath experienced by every ex-player is kept further at bay than for most. But on a match day that process is reversed, the proximity to the players and the game, the sound of the studs in the tunnel, the smells of strapping, mud and lubricant all magnifying rather than diminishing the distance between playing and not playing.
Even now, as Jenks enters the team room back at the Vale, although many of the coaching staff are in here with the players, sitting at the dining tables, looking through analyses on laptops, the impending match is already, minute by minute, opening the distances between them. Already they are growing apart. And yet the coaching relationship never ends, which is why all of the coaches, despite their own nerves or stress, will do their best to maintain an atmosphere of calm steadiness. In their own playing days teams and coaches often got psyched up, players shouting and head-butting walls in the changing rooms. But not today. Nowadays game day is about staying calm, about holding a level-headed gaze towards kick-off and what has to be done in the eighty minutes after it.
