by Owen Sheers
16 mins
Joubert, the conductor and referee, tells the forwards to ‘get into line-outs quicker’. Both teams are trying to impose their own rhythms on the game: France slow; Wales fast. But Joubert is trying to ensure it flows too. This is, after all, entertainment as well as sport, business as well as a game.
Sam rises at the tail of the line-out to win clean ball for Mike.
Down the line Jon straightens the Welsh attack. The second-phase ball is passed to Leigh, running in from deep. He looks dangerous until a massive hit from Fofana picks him off both feet and knocks him to the ground. The crowd accompany the hit with a stadium-wide expression of empathetic pain.
*
‘Your body almost shorts out,’ is how Ryan explains being on the end of a hit like that. ‘You have that white-flash moment, when you don’t know if you’ve hurt yourself or not. You go through a checklist. Fingers? Toes? Arms? Legs? Everyone’s carrying injuries, and you know you’re only one bump away from being finished.’
Such are the impacts of the modern game that players’ blood samples after an international have shown cortisol levels equivalent to being involved in a car crash at 30 mph.
*
Mike spins the ball from the breakdown of Leigh’s tackle to Rhys, who punts it high into the French twenty-two.
Yachvili is there again, under the ball, but this time with the eighteen and a half stone of Ianto bearing down on him. Catching the ball with Ianto just metres away, Yachvili shouts, ‘Mark!’ and like a spell the power is taken from his opponent’s run. Slowing before the French scrum-half, Ianto immediately turns his back and walks away from him.
And everywhere else on the field, too, the game is powered down by that single word, bringing each player’s intention to a sudden halt. If the suspended jumper in the line-out is the game’s pause button, then the call of ‘Mark’ is its reset switch.
Yachvili clears the ball into touch, the French defence having soaked up everything Wales can throw at them. And everyone knows, Welsh players and fans, that they still haven’t tried to attack. Like Muhammad Ali’s ‘rope-a-dope’, the French are letting the Welsh batter them. But are they just biding their time, or have they really lost the ability to counter against the giants of the Welsh backline?
17 mins
Alex cuts into the French line at an angle, making more progress than most, breaking a tackle and tying up four defenders as he scrambles forward. Mike takes on the attack himself but gets caught in the cluster of a maul, the red and blue bodies suddenly collapsing like the opening of a strange flower.
‘No boots!’ calls Joubert.
18 mins
In the whole game so far Wales have made four tackles. France have made twenty-nine.
Wales have completed forty-one passes. France just ten.
Wales have had 75 per cent of the territory.
But France still lead 3–0.
19 mins
A short move at the front of a French line-out unlocks a flurry of attack. Suddenly, they’re off the ropes. The Welsh defence shifts into gear. A charging Servat is taken down by George. Both Sam and Dan chop at the French attackers with sliding sweeps at their ankles. The squad have developed this style with Shaun, and it is stunning in its effect. Throughout this championship Dan, particularly, has made it his trademark, bringing attackers down with such suddenness that they often have no opportunity to offload the ball. Dan, meanwhile, free of his opponent’s fallen body, is often straight back on his feet, looking for the next threat to the line or jackal-ing at the breakdown for turnover ball. As Shaun understands, in modern rugby it’s more often a case of defence being the best form of attack, rather than the other way round.
20 mins
When the French are penalised at the breakdown, Rhys clears the ball far upfield into touch. As the team follow for the line-out, he removes his gumshield to give instructions to Adam to pass on to the forwards, and then to the backs lining up outside him. A reserved character off the pitch, when playing at ten both a maturity and a command settle upon Rhys as he attempts, as best he can, to marshal each period of play before it happens.
The two packs line up in formation, and Matthew, his right forearm bandaged in black, his right bicep patterned in tattoos, lifts the ball above his head, as if in sacrifice. In front of him, beyond the two lines of forwards, the stadium’s West Stand rears up from the pitch, a tsunami of red, frozen in motion.
On either side of the line-out Mike and Yachvili rest their hands on their thighs, watching for the direction of the ball.
A series of calls are shouted from the Welsh forwards as, like the switching cups of a street conjurer, the dummy runners swap positions up and down the line. The ball goes long and Dan, lifted by Adam and Alun Wyn, takes it cleanly to drop it to Mike. Rhys chips through, but the ball is gathered by Palisson, who counter-attacks, breaking Jon’s tackle, only to be cut down by Sam. This time, though, he manages to offload to Dusautoir. But, as ever, Dan is there, harvesting the Frenchman’s legs from under him.
Which is when it happens.
With Dan is Alun Wyn, who on seeing the split second of a chance drives through to scramble the ball from Dusautoir and turn it over. The Welsh front row immediately recognise the opening too. Binding together, Adam, Matthew and Gethin dive in behind Alun Wyn to secure the Welsh position, the voice of the crowd driving them on. Their wave of a roar accompanies Dan as he moves from his tackle to the base of the breakdown and, with Sam shouting and pointing behind him, makes the pass to Rhys.
The ball is in Rhys’s hands for less than a second before he passes it long, missing Ianto, to find Alex, a year on from his first fifteen-a-side game, picking up speed on the wing.
Ahead of him is Bonnaire, the French number seven, but as Alex side-steps off his right boot either the rain or Shaun’s brother, Billy-Joe, comes into play. The flanker slips on the greasy turf and is left flailing as Alex surges on, outstripping Maestri, who also lunges at the winger’s disappearing back. Stepping inside again, Alex passes a final defender, who also slips on the wet pitch. The crowd are on their feet now, screaming, willing him forward. The noise is so loud Alex can no longer hear his own breathing as he sprints over the French line and dives into the turf, sending tufts of grass spinning into the air before him. Immediately, he’s back up on his feet, a single thought in his mind: ‘Did I just do that?’
21 mins
Confirmation that he did comes with the rest of the team and the subs rushing in to celebrate with him. As Dan Baugh hugs and picks him off his feet, the deafening applause and cheers of the crowd fill the stadium. Just two months ago Alex didn’t know if he’d be in this team. Like the rest of the squad, he knew it would be a tight game. His job was ‘to chase and clatter them, to keep looking for the ball’. Which he has done, and now, as he jogs back up the field, Jamie hugging him as he goes, Wales are leading France 5–3 and Alex’s life, in a matter of seconds, has changed for ever.
As his teammates regroup behind the halfway line, Leigh converts Alex’s try, and the scoreline, with eighteen minutes of the first half still remaining, stands at Wales 7 – France 3.
*
The match is far from won, but Alex’s try is still a turning point, proof that Wales’s method and the weight of those statistics can come true in the scoreline itself. The relief of the crowd is palpable. The muscles of the stands relax, as if the whole stadium has taken a collective deep breath. It isn’t long, however, until they begin to tighten again. The expectation of a win crackles through the spectators. But the chill of possible defeat follows close on its heels.
For the rest of the half the earlier patterns of the match are repeated. The two sides continue to trade kicks; France’s long and searching, Wales’s high and testing. Wales, angled across the field for attack, continue to face up to the flat line of the French defence. By the twenty-eighth minute the number of Welsh tackles stands at only thirteen, while those made by France has risen to forty-six.
In the coaching box Warren and Rob, in their number ones, and Shaun and Rob McBryde, in tracksuits, look on, frowning. In front of them Rhys Long and his computer screen continues to feed them analysis. In training Warren is wary of ‘paralysis by analysis’: of overloading a player with information before a match. But now, at the heart of the game, Rhys’s statistics and measurements, as much as a side-step or a tackle, could win the day. Any messages the coaches have for the team they send via Jenks and Adam when they take on the water. But the time lag, and number of messages, has to be carefully managed. It’s no good sending advice applicable to ten minutes ago and, as Rob says, ‘As a player the last thing you want is a message every break. It undermines confidence, and then we wouldn’t be doing our job.’
Down on the pitch, however, the Welsh team are translating their training to their playing in every phase of play. Rhys turns the big Harinordoquy with a judo throw of a tackle reminiscent of Dan’s padded Red Room in the Barn; George, bravely exposing his ribcage, leaps to meet incoming balls as he has done hundreds of times on the Castle pitch, with Rob Howley throwing them higher and higher; the range of Gethin and Adam, the two Welsh props, is testament to Adam Beard’s fitness regime, while all the players spider and scramble at the breakdown as they have done thousands of times against tackle bags in training.
In the thirty-seventh minute, however, an injury to a nerve in Sam’s shoulder unleashes a furious French attack. As Matthew throws in for a line-out, Ianto, as if breaking from underwater, surges into the air but fails to get his hands to the ball. As it travels towards the line-out’s tail, both Bonnaire and Sam jump to contest for it. As Sam stretches his left arm into the air, however, his right fails to rise. Bonnaire takes the ball and charges forward, triggering a French attack that runs the width of the field.
Sam, meanwhile, runs to the first forming ruck, cradling his inert right arm against his chest. He goes to make a tackle, and again his arm doesn’t move. At the next break in play he looks up at the clock. Thirty-eight minutes. Two minutes until half-time, and he knows already, in the biggest game of his life and with the match still in the balance, that he will only play for those next two minutes, and then no more.
The half ends how it began, with a Welsh penalty, kicked by Leigh this time, once more hitting the righthand French post and releasing yet another stadium-wide sigh of frustration.
Joubert blows his whistle and the teams, beneath a deluge of applause from the crowd, jog back to the players’ tunnel, turning left and right at its end into their respective changing rooms.
On the pitch, teams of groundsmen, led by Craig and Lee, begin replacing divots and repairing, where they can, the damage done to their turf.
Half-Time
From his position outside the VIP lift Geraint hears the squad returning to their changing room: the clatter of their studs in the corridor, the sound of heavy bodies sitting, of lungs working against chests.
The lift opposite him opens, and Warren and the other coaches exit. Geraint pulls at one of the doors behind him and lets them into the changing room, where, for a few minutes, he will hear them say nothing.
Warren likes to give the players time to catch their breath before he talks, to get their drinks and decompress from the crucible of the stadium in which they’ve just played for the last forty minutes. All the coaches have something to say, but they also have to remain calm. The temptation is to spill out their information immediately, to pass on what they’ve gleaned from their positions up in the stands behind Rhys Long’s computer screen. But they don’t. For the next few minutes it is each player’s chance to salvage some time for themselves before they return to the pitch. For others it’s also time with the medical staff. Dan is lying on one of the treatment beds, his eye bleeding, having his split nose stitched by Prof. John.
Sam, meanwhile, has already had it confirmed by Prav and the Prof. that he won’t be taking the field again. When Warren learns this, he crosses to Ryan’s stall in the substitutes area, set apart from the team, and asks him to step in at seven. Within minutes that private conversation is being broadcast on the BBC. Sam, Wales’s captain, will not play the rest of the game. For a second time against France, and for a third time in this championship, injury has taken him from the field.
For Sam it’s a massive personal blow. That boy who refused to be denied when running the streets of Whitchurch still wants to see this through, to make sure Wales put that World Cup semi-final, and this Grand Slam, to bed. But his arm remains motionless at his side, so passing the captaincy to Gethin he accepts, once again, that he’ll have to sit this out and watch his team play France.
The Second Half
When the Welsh team emerge from the tunnel, the crowd rise to their feet in welcome. The French are already on the field, bound in a tight circle, with their backs to their opponents’ entry. Dan’s stitched nose and cut eye are layered in Vaseline. Throughout the first half he repeatedly put his body on the line, cutting down the French attackers as if he were felling trees. By the end of this half, in which Dan will push himself to the point of breakdown, the farmer’s boy from Llandrindnod Wells will be named as man of the match. By the end of this week he will be named as player of the tournament.
Five years ago, when he was nineteen and playing in his Heineken Cup debut for the Gwent Dragons, Dan broke his neck. In the wake of a tackle several players fell on him, snapping his head forward. He heard a crack and, after a few moments, as he lay motionless on the pitch in Perpignan, he started to lose the sensation in his arms and legs. ‘I remember lying there,’ he says, ‘thinking, “Am I going to walk again?” It was pretty scary.’
The feeling in his limbs eventually returned, but an X-ray revealed a crushed disc, broken vertebrae and torn ligaments. Dan was told that although the surgeons didn’t have to operate, if they didn’t then any fall or knock could potentially paralyse him. He went for the operation, more for peace of mind than because he ever thought he’d play rugby again. For the next year, as he recovered, Dan worked back on the family farm. The 2008 Grand Slam was a dark time for him, and for much of the tournament he found it too painful to watch Wales play. He’d barely begun to fulfil his dream of playing for Wales, and yet for a while it looked as if his international career was already over.
A year later, though, and two years to the day after he’d broken his neck, Dan, at twenty-one, ran out at this stadium for Wales against Argentina. The night after the match he wore his Welsh cap throughout the post-match dinner. His mother, meanwhile, who with his father had made those ever-longer drives south, didn’t stop crying until the Sunday after the match.
After some initial hesitancy in the collision area, Dan was soon back to his younger form, playing with absolute commitment. The psychological healing, though, took longer. When the Dragons played Perpignan two months ago, Dan was stretching his legs on the pitch when he saw the spot where he’d heard that crack in his neck five years earlier. ‘I was quite emotional,’ he says. ‘And I had a lot of demons in my head before the match. I was screaming a lot. I just wanted to get through it. As soon as the final whistle went, I was, like, “Happy days.”’
*
Craig Joubert blows his whistle and the second half begins, Rhys drop-kicking the ball above the waiting French pack. Dan and the rest of the Welsh forwards chase in pursuit, still forty minutes away from the final whistle of this match, from Thumper’s wedding or funeral.
Wales open the half with an ongoing attack, Ryan entering the fray early, and Alex once again breaking the French line. But a different France seems to have emerged from the visitors’ changing room. No longer s
atisfied with just slowing down Wales’s game, they now put pace into their own, launching an attack down the left wing in response to another high kick from Leigh. In the final chase for the kicked-through ball Gethin proves again why he is the epitome of the modern prop, sprinting alongside Buttin to gather the ball on the bounce from an offside position. In doing so, while he saves Wales from a French try, he also gives France a penalty.
When Beauxis converts that penalty close to the Welsh posts, the scoreline narrows again, to Wales 10 – France 6. A single try by the French now, even without a conversion, will be enough to spoil the day for Wales. The numbers brought up on the stadium’s big screens resonate through its atmosphere. Wales have failed to get away from France and now, with thirty-five minutes still to play, the French are chasing them. The ghost of Wales’s own comebacks in this tournament begin to haunt the crowd.
For the next five minutes this new French team continue to play along the lines of their own ‘national’ style, probing at the Welsh backline with a series of attacks. For chess players, the French Defence is a playing model known for its solidity, but also for producing a cramped game. In a similar way, France today, though robust in defence, have strangled their game in being so. Now both they and the game open up. Where before the ball was traded in kicks, it’s now traded in turnovers.
Dan continues to tackle mercilessly, tracking each of his targets for a few seconds before pouncing at their ankles to bring them down. But the effort is starting to show. When the game breaks, Dan remains on the ground on one knee for some time, his chest and back heaving with his laboured breaths.
