Calon (14 page)

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

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 strengthened 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?’

As a consequence the modern rugby player, while physically robust, inhabits a fragile existence in which they occupy an ever-narrowing space between two
uncertainties
: the chance of injury and the doubt of selection. The two are interrelated, which is why many of these players never thought they would be on the bus today as
it drives on towards Cardiff and a Grand Slam decider against France. For all of them each selection is not only a matter of beating the others vying for your shirt, but also of defying the physical vagaries of the game: the twist, tear, break or dislocation that sees fortunes rise and fall in the turn of a second.

This has certainly been the case for all three second rows on the bus, their heads rising higher over the seats than the other players. At the start of the campaign the towering Luke Charteris, just a few inches off seven foot, still had his wrist in a cast. Alun Wyn Jones was out with ‘turf toe’, while Ian ‘Ianto’ Evans, after three years of injuries, considered himself so far out of contention he’d planned his wedding and honeymoon to coincide with the squad’s upcoming summer tour of Australia. And yet, in illustration of how drastically a player’s week, month or year can change, by the end of today Ianto will be the only Welsh player to have played every second of every match for the whole of the Six Nations. ‘You have to play the patience game,’ Ianto says, speaking of his years of injury. ‘It’s like hitting your head against a brick wall until the crack becomes a little bigger, until eventually you can get through it and see beyond it. But mentally it’s very tough,’ he adds, nodding his head in
recollection
. ‘Very tough.’

Across the aisle from Jamie, and one of the few on the bus not listening to music, is the hooker and ex-captain
of Wales, Matthew Rees, or ‘Smiler’, as he’s known to the squad. As his moniker suggests, Matthew’s natural expression falls into the suggestion of a quiet,
Mona Lisa
-like smile, as if he’s just remembered a joke at which you’ll only ever be able to guess. Even now, as he looks out at the cars passing the bus, tooting their horns, the fans giving thumbs up through their windows, the echo of a grin still plays at the corners of his mouth.

Today will be Matthew’s fiftieth cap. To mark the occasion he’ll lead the team out onto the field. As recently as a few weeks ago, though, Matthew thought he wouldn’t be here today. Having already missed the 2011 World Cup with a neck injury, he recovered, only to tear his calf muscle in training before the Ireland match, meaning he would miss the first three games of the tournament. ‘It was’, he says, ‘hard, very hard. The lowest point in my career.’

Matthew was part of the 2007 World Cup squad when an underprepared Wales underperformed and were knocked out by Fiji. So to go through the hardships of Poland, to feel the ‘sense of belief’ in this squad, knowing they’d trained harder than ever before, and then not to be able to join them was heartbreaking for Matthew, and even more so because he knew he’d lose the captaincy to Sam in the process. At the start of the Six Nations, after he injured his calf, it looked as if he’d have to
experience
the same again: to train with a squad hungry for the Grand Slam, and yet not be part of it. His only hope, as
all players know, was to give his all in rehab, which he did, working all hours of the day and night with Carcass to try and win back his place in the team.

‘Rehab’ is a word often used when talking about rugby players, but one that is strangely dislocated from the
reality
of its meaning. Only those who have undergone the million shoulder rotations, or the all-night, two-hourly icing of a thigh, or the endless repetition of the same stretch or single exercise will know that rehab is, in many ways, a tougher ordeal than regular training. Most of it is done alone, without a team beside you. And all of it is done in hope, not certainty. At the end, even if you are successful and return to full fitness, there is no
guarantee
another player hasn’t already staked a claim to your shirt in your absence. But however hard it is, rehab is also a truth of the modern game, the unseen struggle every player undergoes at some point in their career. Which is why, as the Wales bus continues down the M4 towards Cardiff, along with the players inside, it also bears their thousands of hours of rehab, as much a part of this team as their years of playing and training on the pitch.

Even without injury, from the longer perspective of his childhood Matthew never imagined he’d one day be on this bus, travelling towards his fiftieth cap. Although as a child he was an avid rugby fan, rushing out to play in the street after watching Wales on TV, coming from Tonyrefail in the Rhondda Matthew didn’t think international players came from places like his valley,
his home. That he began to think they might, and that he could be one of them, was down to one man: Chris Jones, the coach of Rhondda schools. It was Chris who gave the eleven-year-old Matthew a sense of belief, who opened the possibility for him that perhaps, just perhaps, if he worked hard enough, he could make that journey from playing on the streets of the Rhondda to playing on the national ground in Cardiff. Which, fifteen years later at the age of twenty-six, he did, running out at the Millennium Stadium against Australia in 2006.

Such is the brevity of a rugby generation that today’s bus is able to contain not just Matthew’s achievement but also, in Jenks sitting a few rows in front of him, the symbol of his boyhood aspiration. When Matthew went out onto those streets as a kid to chuck a ball around, he and his mates would choose which Welsh players they’d like to be. Matthew always chose to be Neil Jenkins, Wales’s outside-half points machine. Within a few years he found himself rooming with Jenks, when they both played for Pontypridd. Now, as player and coach, they are both on this bus, members of the same Wales squad. And yet to this day Matthew has never told Jenks that when as a boy he’d dreamed of playing for Wales, it was through him that he did so. Jenks who, like Chris Jones, has had a hand in developing the talents and aspirations of so many young players, Matthew Rees, even if he still doesn’t know it, being one of them.