Calon

by Owen Sheers

  Other text around the room is more specific, telling the story of the match to come later today. A list of players to be strapped by the physio teams is written in black marker pen on white medical tape stuck to the wall:

  Team I Team II

  George Jug

  Smiler Luke

  Tips Alun

  Bom

  Cuth

  Yanto

  On a whiteboard above a table of Powerade drinks the pre-match schedule for the Italy game is still written up in blue, its timings yet to be replaced with those for today:

  14.02 – Come together – melon

  14.03 – Leave changing rooms

  14.04 – Warm up with Beardy

  14.09 – Squad together – short and long passing

  14.11 – Split

  14.15 – Defence

  14.19 – Back to changing rooms

  14.26 – Wales out

  14.27 – Anthems

  14.29 – Bag hits

  14.30 – Kick-off

  Elsewhere, on several walls throughout the four rooms, those banners appear again:

  Yesterday is in the past.

  How do you want to be remembered?

  *

  When Wales played England this year, it was J.R.’s responsibility to recreate this home changing room within the aircraft carrier that is the stadium at Twickenham. Denuded of stalls or any of the symbols painted on these walls, J.R. brought the squad’s equipment from Cardiff, hung Welsh flags above the players’ benches and put up two new banners. The first, hanging in the physio area, read:

  WINNERS DON’T WAIT

  FOR CHANCES THEY

  TAKE THEM.

  The second, hung above the whiteboard written up with the pre-match schedule, where everyone could see it, told the players:

  BE PREPARED TO SUFFER.

  If proof were ever needed that when two national rugby teams come together on a pitch, it’s never just two sides that meet, but two cultures, two histories, then for over a century the annual Wales vs England fixture has been all the evidence required. Historically attuned as sport is, few other matches are so invested with meaning. Every year the eighty minutes of these games have been fuelled by centuries of association, either drawing upon the perennial Welsh grievance of oppression by a ‘recently arrived’ more powerful neighbour, or stoked by contemporary events such as the flooding of Welsh valleys for English reservoirs or Margaret Thatcher’s heavy hand in the miners’ strike. Culturally, each game against England is, too, a reminder of the class difference at the root of the sport in each nation. As J.R. was recreating the Welsh changing room in Twickenham that day, English supporters were already arriving in the car park outside to unpack hampers of champagne and caviar from their Range Rovers.

  In his pre-match speech in 1977, the Welsh captain, Phil Bennett, openly drew upon the fractious relationship between the two nations:

  Look what these bastards have done to Wales. They’ve taken our coal, our water, our steel. They buy our homes and live in them for a fortnight every year. What have they given us? Absolutely nothing. We’ve been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English – and that’s who you are playing this afternoon.

  When the teams met ten years later in Cardiff, the crowd witnessed what has since been described as the most violent twenty minutes of Six Nations rugby ever, with four players eventually banned after the match.

  But that was then. Now, along with professionalism, things have changed. The contemporary Welsh players, some of whom were born in England or who have an English parent, have moved beyond an emotional response to the English game towards a more focused perspective. As Warren has warned them, ‘Emotional energy can catch a team out.’ The fixture is still undeniably charged, but where many Wales supporters would say that beating England is still more important than winning the other matches in the rest of the Six Nations, the players, if they are to bring about that win, have to see things differently.

  England presented a significant challenge for Wales this year. An equally young side, they were ambitious to salvage their reputation after a disastrous World Cup and eager to perform well for their caretaker coach, Stuart Lancaster. They were also, like Wales, currently unbeaten in the tournament, having scraped through two wins against Italy and Scotland. Whoever won at Twickenham stood a good chance of winning the Grand Slam. And so it was that Sam Warburton and his team prepared themselves for a physically intense match, not in the way of punches thrown in animosity, but in the way of a fast, hard game motivated purely by the desire to win.

  Although Wales were favourites going into the match, the statistics were stacked against them. In twenty-four years they’d only ever beaten England at Twickenham twice, and never before had they won a Triple Crown, the trophy in their sights that day, on English soil. Changes to the side included the young Ken Owens starting at hooker, replacing the more experienced veterans Huw Bennett and Matthew Rees. Dealing with the positive expectation, meanwhile, rather than their more familiar role of underdogs at Twickenham, would be a test of the squad’s character as a whole.

  The nature of that expectation, after their first two victories over Ireland and Scotland, was apparent in Wales’s arrival at the stadium, both in the tone of their reception and the tone of their entrance. When the English team had arrived, looking crisply sharp with gelled hair and wafts of aftershave, although the fans outside welcomed them with baying support there was barely a tremor of response within the stadium. When Wales entered a few minutes later, having walked through the taunts of those same fans, the cleaners stopped cleaning, a handful of Royal Marines came in from the pitch and the RFU backroom staff stalled in their pre-match tasks, all to catch a glimpse of the Welsh squad arriving. As Wales came into the corridor between the changing rooms, they did so with an air of dark intent. Moving in single file, eyes forward, not a single man acknowledged those watching them. Their massed bulk, witnessed in succession, was as weighted with unremitting opposition as the opening bars of Mahler’s Fifth.

  Wales were here to make history, that’s what their entrance seemed to say. Inside the changing room itself, Shaun Edwards and Rhys Long had spelt out exactly how they intended to achieve that in five points on the game’s tip sheet, left on the players’ benches under each of their folded towels:

  Don’t hurt ourselves – charge downs, intercepts, sin bins.

  Smash their L/O drives – our width is vital after a breakout.

  Muscle up on T—, M—, F—and C—

  EXTRA AGGRESSION ON R—

  –SMOKE TARGET

  Speed into position. Work hard early.

  Keep square off the line.

  Following these points, in case there was any doubt, were two further statements, brutal in their simplicity, and a concession target for which to aim:

  ASSAULT THEIR ATTACK.

  BE RELENTLESS.

  12/13 POINTS TARGET.

  The English match was every bit as physical as Wales expected. Sam went to the post-match dinner with stitches in his eye, while Leigh Halfpenny had to endure the hits that came with England kicking to the corners throughout the whole eighty minutes. It was also, however, much tighter than they expected: down-to-the-wire close, with the final score of England 12 – Wales 19 exactly hitting Shaun’s projected concession of points.

  But it could have been so much worse. When Rhys Priestland was sin-binned for an offside tackle at the start of the second half, Wales, once again, had to play for ten minutes with just fourteen men. The last time they’d been a man down at Twickenham they’d conceded seventeen points. This time, however, with Mike Phillips bossing the game with a series of pick and drives, they held onto possession for eight and a half minutes and not only conceded no points, but also scored three through a penalty by Leigh. When Rhys took the field again, the score stood at England 12 – Wales 9, and a significant psychological contest had been won. But the match itself still wasn’t, and wouldn’t be until the seventy-sixth minu
te, when a moment of individual brilliance from a player off the bench finally snatched victory for Wales.

  There’s something of a tradition in Wales of such moments providing the turning point in matches against England: Ieuan Evans out-sprinting Rory Underwood in 1993 to secure a 10–9 victory; Scott Gibbs’s last-minute crash and jink under the posts to set up Jenks’s conversion that put England away 32–31 at Wembley in 1999; Gavin Henson’s seventy-sixth-minute long-range penalty to beat them again in 2005.

  In 2012 it would be another Scott who helped Wales turn the corner: Scott Williams, a twenty-one-year-old centre who just a year earlier had been training as a plumber. With only five minutes left on the clock, Scott, having come on for the injured Jamie Roberts, followed the advice of that banner in the changing room and, when he saw it, took his opportunity. As Courtney Lawes, the English second row, was being tackled by Sam on the halfway line, Scott ripped the ball from his arms and grubber-kicked it past the English defence. Judging the bounce as he accelerated in pursuit, he gathered the ball as it rose sweetly to his right and away from Tom Croft, the English flanker bearing down on his left.

  ‘If it had gone the other way,’ Scott later acknowledged in his laidback Carmarthenshire accent, ‘then I reckon he’d have got me.’ But it didn’t, and Croft didn’t, so with an arm raised in celebration Scott dived across the English line, untouched by opposition hands. For the first time in the match Wales were ahead and, following Leigh’s conversion, seven points in the lead. Five minutes later, after David Strettle’s last-ditch lunge across the Welsh line was ruled ‘inconclusive’, the match was over and Wales had won. Within a further fifteen minutes the careful order of J.R.’s changing room was undone by the disorder of victory, with pizza boxes, beer bottles and muddied kit strewn across the floor. The suited management stood in the middle of the half-dressed players, beaming as Gethin Jenkins put on a celebratory playlist and the Triple Crown, like the treasured loot it was, was passed from hand to hand for posed photos on iPhones and cameras.

  In the midst of their celebrations, however, many of the Welsh players were also anxious to leave the changing room. Since using cryotherapy in Spała and Gdansk, the squad had employed the services of a mobile cryolab to enable them to continue the treatment throughout the Six Nations. In the weeks between each match this van, converted from a police command unit and run by an evangelical former rugby player called Karl, has parked up in the country lane at the back of the Barn. As the local farmer herds his cattle between the lane’s hedges, down the road Welsh players have queued up twice a day to enter its futuristic silver pod for three minutes of extreme freezing. At home matches Karl parks the van in the subterranean passageways of the Millennium Stadium, but at Twickenham the RFU restricted him to the public car park. So this is where the Welsh players headed after the game, barefoot and chaperoned by Adam Beard, his head often reaching no higher than their shoulders. The crowd of thousands was still streaming out of the stadium, but this didn’t deter Sam and his team, or blur their focus in getting to the cryolab for their three minutes of treatment. Cryotherapy, by this stage of the tournament, had become something else for the squad: a crucial psychological as well as physical tool, as much a ritual of belief as a method of recovery.

  As one by one the Welsh players left the raucous celebrations to make their way towards the cryolab, the English changing rooms, across the corridor, were silent. A different bounce, more weight on a tackle or a breath of wind and it could have been them singing in celebration. The margins of modern rugby are ever tighter, and ever more cruel because of that. But that is also what energises the game. For the Welsh fans Scott’s try provided the kind of moment for which every rugby enthusiast hopes. A moment when the emotional contours of thousands move in exact alignment, switchbacking in just seven seconds from the anxiety of an English attack to the sudden jubilation of Scott’s kick through and score. The surprise conjured from the unexpected, the breaking of the pattern that makes the pattern more beautiful, the moment of chance that falls your way. To experience this jeopardy, to be at the mercy of the sport’s vagaries, is why we watch rugby. To care and to feel. To experience those moments of play which, as Seamus Heaney says in his poem ‘Postscript’, catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

  What a spectator sees as a moment of chance, however, from the perspective of a player or a coach is rarely just chance. Even moments of luck need to be built upon dedication to become winning moments of luck. For Scott it was chance that Jamie Roberts was injured and he took the field, but everything else about his try was the leading edge of a life in which from a young age he’d only ever wanted to play rugby. Watching his stepfather play for Neath on the TV, the hours of skills coaching he’d received at the hands of the Scarlets’ Eifion Roberts, Shaun’s defensive drills in which the squad had practised, again and again, ripping the ball from an opponent’s arms – all of these, too, were ingredients in those seven seconds in which Scott scored. As Jenks often says, paraphrasing the golfer Jerry Barber, ‘the harder you work, the luckier you get’.

  With his match-winning try at Twickenham, Scott, at twenty-one, had achieved what most players chase throughout their international careers: the iconic moment which, no matter what else happens, no one can take away from you. The moment for which you will be remembered. With that try he’s already answered the banner in the Barn which asks, How do you want to be remembered? And he’s questioned, too, that other banner next to it – Yesterday is in the past. Because as a rugby player, if your past happens to include a seven seconds like Scott’s at Twickenham that clear February afternoon, then a part of it, seven seconds of it, will always be in your present too.

  11.15 a.m.

  ‘Go on! Guess! She was in Sister Act 2. You’ll know her, you will!’

  The Wales changing rooms in which J.R. has been working alone have begun to fill with other members of the Wales staff making their own preparations for the arrival of the team. Ryan Chambers, the squad’s sports scientist, is checking the protein shakes. At an away fixture this is the time when Ryan would usually be preparing the GPS pack each player wears between their shoulder blades in training and during a game. From these he’s able to study the players’ movements on the pitch, their distances, their speeds and even the momentum and angle of their tackles. In the Millennium Stadium, however, the overhang of the stands blocks the satellite signal, denying Wales this technology at home.

  Along from Ryan, Carcass is in the physio area preparing his strapping station, while Prof. John is organising his pitch-side medical equipment. Meanwhile, Ben, the team photographer, is being harried by J.R. to guess the singer playing on the iPod dock.

  ‘Whoopi Goldberg?’ Ben says, already unsure of his answer.

  ‘No!’ J.R. exclaims, as if a child should have known. ‘Lauryn Hill! She was in the film, she was! Sister Act 2.’

  As Ben and J.R. continue talking, J.R. snapping the players’ name plates into the clips above their stalls, Geraint, a member of the stadium’s security staff, takes up his position outside the rear doors of the changing room. Opposite him is the VIP lift which the suited coaches, each wearing a daffodil in their lapel, will hurry into after the anthems, frowning and unsmiling, to travel up to the box from where they’ll watch the match. At Geraint’s back are the double doors into the changing room, through which Ben and J.R.’s muffled voices reach him, the latest in a growing chorus of voices Geraint has heard spreading through the stadium for the last two hours. To Geraint, standing in that windowless corridor on his own, the whole building feels like a stadium-sized battery, charging with anticipation and nerves and excitement, every minute gone and every minute to come transfigured in relation to the 885th minute of the day, when the referee will finally blow his whistle and Wales’s last match of the Six Nations will begin.

  From here, though, outside the back door of the changing room, Geraint will see none of what happens after that minute. Even the roars of the crowd will be faint this
deep in the stadium. He will hear the team return at half-time, and he will, perhaps, hear some of the words spoken to them by the coaches. But then they’ll leave again, the clacking of their studs diminishing down the corridor towards the tunnel and the pitch. When the game is over, they’ll return once more, and only then, as Geraint listens from this side of the door either to celebratory music or to silence, will he know if Wales have lost or won.

  11.30 a.m.

  The streets of Cardiff are filling. The bright morning is still laced with winter but, with the sun’s warmth and a rainbow arcing above the walls of Cardiff Castle, it holds the promise of spring too. Roger Lewis, a cup of Costa coffee in one hand, his smartphone in the other, has left the stadium to walk through the city to witness a twelfth of the country’s population pour into its centre. Having finished his pitch-side interviews he called in on the changing rooms to see J.R. and the others, before making his way out of the stadium. At Gwyn’s security lodge he stopped for a moment to talk with Ryan Jones’s father, Steve, who has been walking his three-year-old grandson, Jacob, down the ramped entranceway at Gate 4.

  Ryan, at thirty-one, is one of the senior Welsh players. Although much has been made about the youth of the squad this year, it is still veined with a vital steadying seam of experience too. More than once during this campaign Ryan has come off the bench and, like a battle-hardened sergeant, brought a level-headed focus to the forward play, apparently finding, as the more capped players often do, an extra second with which to make his decision or move. As an ex-captain of Wales who has since had to play under others, and with two Grand Slams already to his name, Ryan and his family have, over the last eight years, been through most of the highs and lows that international rugby can throw at a player. If Wales win today, however, then Jacob will see his father reach a new peak, joining a select group of only five other Welshmen to have ever played in three Grand Slams. For Ryan’s own father, meanwhile, it will mark the pinnacle of a long journey, one which began many years before Ryan was born, with his own boyhood dreams of one day putting on the red shirt of Wales.