by Owen Sheers
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;
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.
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, W
ales’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.
The current Welsh squad’s personality is an imprint of Warren’s own: honest, hard-working, level-headed and accepting of its own responsibility. It’s a coaching style Warren partly inherited from those who coached him through school, club and national levels back in New Zealand: men such as Glenn Ross, Kevin Greene and Alex Wyllie. But his coaching philosophy also owes something to his time working as a teacher in the country too. Rugby players are, he says, ‘often like big kids’, so applying the principles of teaching makes sense to Warren. Meetings are kept short, points to remember kept to as few as possible, and loyalty won through honesty and fair treatment. The resulting coaching style is perhaps more subtle and roundabout than most, reliant upon empowering an individual rather than loading them with information, but the end ‘product’, Warren feels, is worth it.
‘How many test caps you got now?’ he’ll casually ask one of his young backs, drawing the question through a languid Kiwi accent. When they tell him twenty-nine or thirty, Warren will raise his eyebrows. ‘Yeah?’ he’ll say, a surprised pitch rising through the word. ‘That’s a lot. You must be one of the most experienced out there, eh? You should be talking a lot. You talking a lot out there?’ And the seed, Warren hopes, is sown. Despite being only twenty-two or twenty-three, the player walks away having been given the nod, and the nudge, that as a relative elder statesman they have the licence to play like one.
That coaching can be about giving time as well as taking it is an aspect of the role Warren understands. Family, he says, comes first. If a player needs a day off because their wife is having a scan, or because there’s trouble in the marriage, then Warren would rather lose that player for a day or a week, and win their loyalty in doing so, than keep them in camp and lose it further down the line. Having coached in the northern hemisphere for over twenty years, but with his wife Trudy and son Bryn still living in New Zealand, Warren is no stranger to the strains rugby can put on family life. It is, as he often says when talking about rugby, an ongoing question of balance and negotiation. About knowing when to put the pressure on, and when to ease off.
Today, with still four hours until the anthems, it’s time to ease off; a time for restraint, for not over-coaching so close to a match. Because of this, Warren will keep to himself for much of the day and will try his best not to broadcast his nerves to the squad. The first time he’ll see them will be for the walk-through of moves and line-outs. Then, like all the coaches, it’ll be about keeping to his match-day routine until the team meeting and the boarding of the bus. Rob Howley will use this time to call home and speak to his wife and kids, absorbing himself in their plans for the day rather than his own, which are already being broadcast across the country. Rob McBryde will go to the gym, get a feel for the mood of the players over breakfast, then ‘stick his head in a book’ to pass the time. Shaun, too, will try and say as little as possible to the players, and will also often read a book. When he was a player, together with praying before a match, reading was a technique Shaun often used to cope with his nerves. It’s one he passes on to some of the players too. Sometimes he will even take his book up into the coaching box, and he has been known to carry on reading it while in there.
Whatever their routine or habits, all the coaches will try and use this period of the day to focus on their roles and do whatever they can to kill time, until the only time that matters finally arrives: the eighty minutes of Wales against France, played in the Millennium Stadium by a squad they’ve relentlessly coached, advised and analysed, and whose fortunes and well-being have consumed the last ten weeks of their lives.
11 a.m.
On taking charge of Wales in 2007, Warren switched the home changing room in the Millennium Stadium from the northern side of the players’ tunnel to the southern. The years preceding his tenure had been unstable and volatile. The spark of brilliance that won Wales a Grand Slam in 2005 was soon extinguished by rifts between players and coaches. A series of stuttering performances finally culminated in a pool-stage knockout by Fiji in the 2007 World Cup. Warren wanted a new start for the Welsh team, a new home within their home. So he moved their dressing room down the corridor, meaning that instead of turning right off their bus Wales now turn left to enter the four dragon-painted rooms that make up their changing rooms within the stadium.
Those four linked rooms are where J.R., the squad’s kit man, has been working for most of the morning, preparing them for the arrival of the team. Having arrived himself at 9.30 a.m., he’s spent the last hour and a half, as he has for every Welsh game since 1985, unloading equipment from his van, laying out the players’ kit and clipping in their names and cap numbers above their changing stalls.
Sometimes J.R. works in silence. When he does, there is something of the Catholic ritual about his process, a solitary and sombre dedication at twenty-two separate altars. This morning, however, he’s been working to music playing from an iPod dock plugged into the side of Adam Jones’s stall. ‘Living on a Prayer’, ‘More Than a Woman’ and the Stereophonics’ ‘Local Boy in the Photograph’ have all animated the low-ceilinged space as J.R., occasionally slipping his glasses to the end of his nose to read the label of a shirt, prepares the room. Moving around the three-sided changing area in an anticlockwise direction, he builds the folded piles of kit on the right-hand side of each player’s bench, working in reverse order to what they’ll need first. He begins with the white towels, folding each one as meticulously as a Savoy chambermaid, before dropping them to the benches with a series of soft rhythmical thuds. The dark wood of the changing stalls makes them appear all the brighter, a comforting reward or consolation waiting for each player after their eighty minutes of violent exertion.
Upon each towel J.R. lays a pair of red and white socks, a pair of white shorts, a red training top and a red Welsh shirt, its number facing up. Taking each item of clothing fresh from its packaging he inspects it, then folds it with precision. As he lays down each player’s shirt, he gives it a single stroke across the number on its back, as if calming a highly strung animal or bestowing a brief blessing upon its wearer. The numbers themselves are composed of thousands of images of fans’ faces. Together with the word ‘Braint’ inside the collar, these faces are a further reminder for whom the squad are playing when they put on these shirts, and never more so than today, when the weight of Welsh fans’ expectations will press heavier upon their backs than ever.
J.R.’s manner and appearance as he works in the Wales changing rooms is reminiscent of an owner of a hardware store, the kind of blue-aproned shopkeeper who’ll shake his head as he studies your list, before retrieving even the most unlikely of parts from his cupboards. Although J.R. says he sees himself at the bottom of the ladder within the Welsh squad, he’ll be quick to point out, in his matter-of-fact Barry Island accent, that ‘you can’t play a game without kit, without the kit man you can’t play the g
ame’, the mirroring of his syntax lending a further inevitability to his role.
He’s right, but there’s another reason for the fundamental quality of J.R.’s presence too. Having first worked for the Welsh team in 1985, J.R., as he’ll tell you himself, ‘has more bloody caps than anyone’. Over the last twenty-seven years, as he’s gone about his duties, J.R., like Lee and Craig in the groundsman’s office, has seen hundreds of players and coaches pass through the team. He was already established within the squad when the current home-grown Wales coaches all got their first caps, when the WRU chairman, Dai Pickering, was captaining the side and when a young Rob Howley ‘wanted a cup of tea and a chat’. In an environment of flux, in which players, kit and coaches change all the time, J.R. is a rare seam of continuity within the Wales set-up, his knowing world-weariness, as if nothing could surprise him, lending him the air of a minor Shakespearean character moving among the brief tragedies and triumphs of the players and coaches. Like the porter in Macbeth who, as Macbeth wracks himself with worries about his destiny, goes about his business, having seen many great men come and go through his gates, so J.R. keeps his vision close, occupying himself with the necessities of his role and little more.
As J.R. works in the Welsh changing rooms, singing along to M. C. Hammer’s ‘Hammer Time’, he is surrounded by the symbolism of his country. The WRU’s version of the Prince of Wales feathers is imprinted at the back of each player’s stall, and again across the entrance to the changing area. In the gym next door a bright-red dragon, its claw raised, fills the floor space between the weights machines. Dragons appear again on the Welsh flags hung throughout the other rooms, and a dragon’s tail coils between the statements written above the players’ heads: ‘RESPECT THE JERSEY’, ‘DAL DY DIR’.
