Calon

by Owen Sheers

  On 16 August 1944 at Barfour, Normandy, France, Lieutenant Watkins’ company came under murderous machine-gun fire while advancing through corn fields set with booby traps. The only officer left, Lieutenant Watkins led a bayonet charge with his 30 remaining men against 50 enemy infantry, practically wiping them out. Finally, at dusk, separated from the rest of the battalion, he ordered his men to scatter and after he had personally charged and silenced an enemy machine-gun post, he brought them back to safety. His superb leadership not only saved his men, but decisively influenced the course of the battle.

  Roger walks on towards the stadium. Once inside he’ll take the VIP lift up to the President’s Lounge on level five, where he’ll begin welcoming over a hundred guests for the pre-match lunch. These will include members of the Fédération Française de Rugby, the first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, ex-players, politicians, sponsors, business people, academics and broadcasters. A team of young men and women will take coats, hanging them on two long racks on either side of the door into the lounge. Once inside waiters and waitresses will greet the guests with trays of red and white wine, while others circulate with canapés. A bar will serve beer and gin and tonics. The room itself, with its bank of windows looking out over the County Club and the city, will be charged with a heightened sense of being, like the Blims on the pitch this morning, at the centre of the centre.

  Once his guests are seated, Dennis Gethin, the president of the WRU, will address the room first in Welsh, then in French and finally, ‘for the less civilised among us’, in English. His introductory speech over and grace recited, the starters will be served and everyone will begin to eat and drink, to drink and eat, laying napkins over protruding stomachs or across the hems of delicate dresses. The whole lounge, five floors above the changing rooms where Carcass is preparing his strapping station, where Ryan mixes the rehydration drinks and Prof. John is checking his needles and thread, feasts, drinks and talks, celebrating together before the game begins.

  And in the sponsors’ boxes around the stadium, too, meals are being served and drinks are being poured. And in the bars on level three the ‘joy machines’ are already pumping out twelve pints at a time. And in the family rooms and the ex-players’ lounge those who are closest to the squad and those who have been here before them eat and drink, drink and eat. The whole stadium, from top to bottom, apart from those two quiet changing rooms either side of the tunnel, is loud with expectation, occasion and alcohol.

  Inside the jacket pockets of the men and in the hand-bags of the women dining in the President’s Lounge long WRU wallets hold their other invitations for the day: for post-match tea, and later to the black-tie post-match dinner at the Hilton. On each glossy invitation is the image of a Welsh rugby shirt, its fabric and feathers filled out by the chest and shoulders of a player, their head cropped off at the base of the neck.

  12 p.m.

  Twelve miles further west a quieter pre-match lunch is coming to an end in the Wales team room at the Vale. The remaining players at the tables are silent, occupied in thought. Leigh Halfpenny is still nervous. As much as possible he will not talk to anyone before the match, or smile. The eighty minutes of the game, everything for which they have trained, is almost upon them. The whole team know how the story is meant to go today, and each player has rehearsed his role in its performance. But they also all remember their last game against France; how it got away from them, and in so doing, wrote them out of the World Cup final.

  Sam, their captain who watched that match slip away from the sidelines, is finding it difficult to eat. Twelve miles away the Millennium Stadium is already filling with 75,000 spectators. Two hundred and fifty thousand people are on the streets of Cardiff. The bars of the pubs are three deep with drinkers. The build-up to the match has been on TV and radio all day. Images of Sam and the squad are all over the newspapers. Children across Wales have woken and put on Wales rugby shirts. Not that long ago, he was a child himself, telling his mother from his pillow he’d never be a rugby player. Today he is a rugby player. Today he will captain his country. Sam looks down at his plate and, for that child and for his country, spears another piece of chicken and eats.

  Two floors above the team room, Thumper Phillips, the Wales team manager, is getting into his number ones. Standing before the mirror in his room he loops a WRU tie about his neck, constructs a knot and pulls it tight before flipping down the collar of his shirt. Lifting his jacket off a hanger, he puts it on and, leaning into the mirror so he can see better, pins a daffodil to his lapel.

  At fifty-eight Thumper is the same age as Roger Lewis and was brought up in the same part of Wales too, in Kenfig Hill, half a mile down the road from where Roger took Warren for tea with his mother. The two men have known each other since they were twelve, when they first met on the playground of the local comprehensive. On leaving school they took diverging paths in life, but both, eventually, have led them back into close proximity, working either side of that relationship between the business and the players that lies at the heart of the WRU.

  It was Thumper’s uncle, Alan, who first took his nephew to the midweek Floodlight Alliance games at Maesteg and the Brewery Field in Bridgend. On those dark Wednesday nights the ten-year-old Thumper watched enthralled as the likes of Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett played to capacity crowds. Already showing promise as a player himself, within another ten years it was Thumper who was running onto those pitches instead, having been selected for Cardiff directly from the Kenfig Hill youth team.

  A few weeks before he first played for Cardiff, Thumper was walking back from training in Kenfig Hill to his home in Pyle when a car pulled up and its driver asked him if he knew where he could find Alan Phillips. Thumper said he did, and that if the driver gave him a lift into the village he’d show him where he lived. As they drove into Pyle the man introduced himself as Gary Davies of Cardiff RFC. He asked Thumper how he knew Alan Phillips. ‘Because’, Thumper replied, ‘I am Alan Phillips.’

  Along with Roy Bish, Gary had recently watched Thumper score all his team’s points in a 24–12 victory over Llanelli. Within a week of having stopped him to ask him where he could find Alan Phillips, Gary had Thumper training with Cardiff. Within another week he was playing for them too, thumbing lifts into training from Pyle after work and getting dropped off back in Bridgend by Gary afterwards. Sixteen years later, at the age of thirty-four, Thumper retired, having played more games for Cardiff than any other player in the club’s history, earning himself eighteen Welsh caps and a 1980 Lions tour to South Africa along the way.

  Today, as Wales team manager, Thumper finds himself overseeing boys young enough to be his grandsons who, he says, ‘play a totally different game’ to the one he knew when he was making his way at their age. As Thumper often says, ‘Only the shape of the ball is the same now.’ The changes have mostly been driven by professionalism, but also by changes in the rules around the contact area and a gradual eradication of the hard-man culture that in Thumper’s day rarely saw a clean game of rugby.

  ‘I played in a period when there were no touch judges, nothing like that, when people were punching from behind, running across the field when you least expected it. It was a dirty game, a dirty game. But no one ever got hurt, mind, not really hurt. A few broken jaws maybe, that kind of thing.’

  The current players, though, don’t necessarily have it any easier. ‘You couldn’t get away with that now, you have to respect the rules of the game. But it is physically tougher,’ Thumper admits. ‘The boys are quicker, more powerful. I mean, I was fourteen and a half stone as a hooker. Matthew Rees is seventeen and a half, three stone heavier. Ken Owens, Hibs, they’re big men, big men. There’s less time, everyone’s under analysis. It’s hard.’

  Possessed of a quartermaster’s manner, Thumper carries out his duties with the same confrontational style he once brought to his forward play. With a restless pointing finger, often addressing people from over his glasses, and his signature black satchel cross-gart
ered over his chest, Thumper is a man who wants to solve problems, and who is confident in his ability to do so. His diplomacy is direct and frequently followed by the effective technique of walking away before a counterpoint can be made. It is often, too, edged with sharp humour. While on tour to Canada Thumper christened one of the team’s liaison officers ‘Thrush’, ‘because he was an irritating little cunt’.

  Beneath Thumper’s organisational bluster is a deep well of care, both for the individual players and for the game of rugby itself. ‘It’s a great game to protect,’ he says. ‘It teaches you respect by bashing the shit out of each other, but you also have to respect the rules. But you’ve gotta protect it, its traditions, because if you lose them, then you lose the respect of the game, and without that’, he adds, shaking his head at the worst possible fate, ‘we’d be like football.’

  One of Thumper’s most persistent challenges as team manager is satisfying the increasing demands of marketing and PR upon the squad, while still protecting the team they are trying to promote. In this respect Thumper sees himself as a buffer between the team and the world; an old-fashioned gatekeeper at the heart of a twenty-first-century squad. It’s his job, he says, to be the ‘awkward bugger’, to try and defend what sacred time and space the team still own. The words he uses most often when talking about this element of his role are ‘tradition’ and ‘respect’. In the face of an ever-increasing appetite for access to the players, the erosion of these qualities is what most concerns Thumper. ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘everyone can buy our kit now. Anyone. We have changing-room visits by sponsors after a game. These kids in marketing, they want to show more and more of us, give more and more of us away. I understand why it has to happen, but you got to keep something back, haven’t you? Otherwise what you got left?’

  Not that Thumper would ever want the team to withdraw from their fans. On the contrary, he sees the players as ‘ambassadors for Wales. How we act and conduct ourselves reflects on the people of Wales.’ To this end Thumper takes a gruff paternal interest in the manners of the younger players. ‘I tell them to keep their feet off the tables, how to eat at dinner, that kind of thing. And I always tell them to have time for the supporters too, be well-mannered, y’know? Because people are looking at these boys and they’re dreaming, aren’t they? When they look at them,’ Thumper says, beginning to walk away, ‘these people, when they see them, they’re seeing their dreams.’

  The Journey

  1 p.m.

  Sounding its horn five times in acknowledgement, the dragon-painted team bus of Wales pulls away from the kerb outside the Vale as the crowd of fans gathered behind orange barriers wave and cheer it on its way. As a police motorcycle escorts it onto the resort’s exit road, more fans are standing in the car park, cameras held before their faces in one hand, waving with the other. From behind the bus the applause and cheers outside the Vale continue.

  On board, however, it is silent.

  Thumper, his black satchel on his lap, sits at the front of the bus behind the driver. Warren sits in the other front seat, across the aisle. Behind them are the rest of the coaches: Rob Howley, Rob McBryde, Adam, Dan and Shaun. Behind them again the players of the squad have taken up a pair of seats each. Dressed in identical red tracksuits, many of them wearing headphones, they sit along the length of both sets of windows, their kitbags beside them. No one talks. Ahead of them, through the driver’s windscreen, a second police motorcycle escort has joined the convoy. The motorbikes lead them on through the golf-course grounds of the Vale. An approaching white Rolls-Royce, decked in pink ribbon, slows up and pulls over to let them pass. As they do, the bride and her father inside wave, and the chauffeur sounds his horn.

  The bus drives on, shuddering over a cattle grid and turning left up a hedged country lane towards the M4. As it reaches a roundabout the only sounds are its engine, climbing and falling through the gears, and the faint beat of dance tracks leaking from headphones. Adam Beard, sitting towards the front of the bus, thinks he can hear the heartbeat of Ryan Jones, sitting behind him.

  The bus takes the roundabout and drops down onto the M4 heading east, towards Cardiff. Still no one on board talks. And no one will, all the way into the stadium, this being one of the team’s most established match-day traditions. The bus, usually a place of banter and joking, on this journey becoming something else: a vehicle of transition, in which the men inside will go from being a group of players to becoming, in twelve miles’ time, Wales.

  In this moment the twenty-two members of the squad are both together and not. They are all on the same bus, travelling to the same destination, and yet they are also in twenty-two different worlds, listening to different songs and thinking about different people and pasts. But with every mile closer to the city they are a mile closer to shedding their separation, a mile closer to those eighty minutes when they will exist, instead, as a team. A fifteen-headed animal which will try, in the heat of a game and under the eyes of millions, to think, react and move as one.

  An overtaking car sounds its horn in support, a Welsh scarf flying madly from its open window. There are now four police motorcycles leading the bus, their blue lights rotating, as in the distance the capital of Wales begins to rise into view.

  Halfway up the bus on the left-hand side Jamie Roberts is listening to the same song he always plays on this journey: ‘Lucky Man’ by the Verve. As he has been for all of the Six Nations, Jamie, who at twenty-five is the oldest in Wales’s backline, is today’s defensive captain. It will be his role to guide the team through Shaun’s defensive tactics, to decide when they blitz or drift, to keep an eye on line speed, the splitting of centres and the positioning of the back three. It was, however, as an attacking centre that Jamie made his mark in the Wales set-up, his seventeen stone four pounds providing the coaches with a midfield battering ram to deploy at will.

  This season, with the help of Adam Beard, Jamie has increased that penetrative power even more. On taking charge of Wales’s physical performance Adam was clear about where his priorities lay, and Jamie was the perfect candidate for his thinking. Adam wanted to develop not just the strength and speed of the team, but also their efficiency, specifically their running economy. As Adam once said to Sam, ‘The first thing a water-polo coach will do is train his players to swim properly. What do you spend most of a game doing? Running. But have we been teaching players to run?’

  The answer was no, and yet on average a player will run seven or eight kilometres in a match. For Wales, who prefer a high ball-in-play time – around thirty-five minutes – a player’s ability to move about the field quickly, to get off the ground, to ruck and chase is even more crucial. As Adam told the players again and again as he pushed them on the frozen beaches of Gdansk, ‘We should be the best at everything that doesn’t require talent. Effort doesn’t require talent. Hard work doesn’t require talent. We should be the best at hard work.’ And with that, he’d put them through another set of drills, asking them again to work through a level of fatigue they’d never felt before.

  From Adam’s perspective Wales had been creating big, strong players like Jamie, but not looking closely enough at their movement, at what was required of their bodies in a game. ‘We’d been creating these V8 engines’, he explains, ‘and putting them in shopping trolleys. But I wanted to put them in a Porsche or a Ferrari instead.’

  In Jamie’s case this meant trimming down his quads, putting more stiffness in the Achilles tendon and strengthening his hamstrings. The result has been to make him not only more efficient, but also faster, increasing the force of his momentum up into the region of George North’s one tonne of impact.

  Adam has gone through similar processes with all the players on this bus, examining points of strain along their kinetic chains, fine-tuning and adapting their physiques, then working with Dan to find drills and exercises through which to develop new patterns of muscle memory. With players like Toby Faletau, the young Tongan-born number eight from Ebbw Vale, Adam has strengt
hened certain muscle groups and introduced co-ordination training to bring his anaerobic test scores from down at prop level up to an impressive 130 seconds. In this way, borrowing from eastern European sprint coaches, Australian Rules football and athletics, Adam has moved beyond the formal studies of biomechanics and a purely mechanistic training routine. In doing so, combined with a carefully constructed programme of cryotherapy, he has managed to shift the squad out of those shopping trolleys and into supercars.

  Except, of course, this being rugby, each game Wales plays isn’t like taking those Porsches and Ferraris for a spin on the track, but more like putting them through the beating of a stock-car race. So the players on this bus have to be Land Rovers as well as Ferraris. And many other equivalent vehicles too. In the course of a single match they’ll be expected to run like sprinters, lift like weightlifters, kick with the skill of footballers and endure hits like Ultimate Fighters. All of which means that at some point, however sophisticated the training or the physio, their bodies will break down.

  That Jamie is playing at all today is an achievement. Throughout the campaign he’s been carrying a knee injury, and in less than a week’s time he’ll go under the knife. Somehow, though, Prav and Carcass, working alongside Adam from the other end of the process, have managed to keep Jamie match-fit, as they have the entire Wales starting backline for every match of the tournament. Given the attrition rate of modern rugby, this fact is a feat in itself.

  Injury is no longer an ‘if’ in the modern game, more a ‘when’ and ‘how bad?’ No player goes through a season fully fit, and an entire team will often take the field harbouring some kind of an injury. From a young age injury stalks a rugby player, and for many on this bus their careers will be framed by it. At any moment, regardless of how young a player might be, they may unknowingly already be at the peak of their game. Like Dan Baugh, someone else’s injury will open a door for them, before one of their own, eventually, will close it again. More than one player in the squad has admitted to thinking about this before each match. ‘Will this be the game that ends it? If not, how many more before I play the one that does?’