Calon (15 page)

All the players on this bus have coaches like Chris
Jones in their past: the friend’s father who volunteered at their mini-rugby games, the school PE teacher, the coach of their junior, youth or local sides. The coaches who put in the hours when these men were boys, who first lit their touchpapers of hope and enthusiasm. Or it may have been someone later in their development: a regional skills or defence coach, or the head of strength and conditioning. Whoever it was, they took their game to the next level, spent time with them, passing on knowledge and advice, pushing them further and
making
them believe.

Whoever these men are, they too, along with the squad’s thousands of hours of training and rehab, are travelling on this bus into Cardiff today. As each player boarded at the Vale, they carried the influences of these men onto the coach with them. And they carried on, too, the memories of the hundreds of pitches and
playing
fields across the country on which they learnt their craft. In Risca, Bancyfelin, Abercrave, Carmarthen, Llandeilo, Rhayader, Gorseinon, Tonyrefail, Aberavon, Llangefni, St Clears. On pitches levelled out of high
valleys
like Aztec terraces; or on West Walian farming fields, scattered with dandelion and thick with clover; or on school pitches with turf worn away by the patterns of other sports. As the bus takes a slip road off the
motorway
and drops towards the capital, these fields and places of Wales, with their
tir
and their
pridd
, are also freighted on this coach; distinct yet shared echoes in each player’s
past as they make their way towards today’s match and its eighty minutes of heightened present.

A few seats along from Matthew, Leigh, looking out at the passing buildings, is listening to a song by the Foo Fighters; then, as the bus is guided through a set of traffic lights by its escort, a dance track he’s copied from Gethin Jenkins. Jonathan Davies sits opposite him, looking out at the passing shops, parks and trees. Like Matthew he doesn’t wear headphones. He used to have a
match-day
playlist for this journey, but he’s stopped that now. Keeping things simple has become Jon’s mantra for a match day instead. Keeping it calm and simple.

Alun Wyn Jones is also choosing to keep it calm,
listening
to the languid songs of Ben Howard. When he was younger he wanted heavy stuff – rock and dance – but with experience he’s learnt not to stoke his emotions too soon. Like the rest of the squad he’ll be spending the next two hours trying to reach the right balance between aggression and focus, between adrenalin and nerves. At the moment, as the bus moves through Cardiff, that
balance
is still weighted more towards nerves. But this is how he likes it at this stage in the day. If he isn’t nervous now, with the stadium just minutes away, then that’s when Alun Wyn becomes fearful, worried he’s become too complacent, too accepting. But this, the bubbling of anticipation under the skin, the blend of
foreknowledge
and the unknown, the gradual building of internal
energy, these are the kind of nerves that work for Alun Wyn and which will, he hopes, provide the tinder to fire him when he takes to the pitch.

The bus drives on, the fizz and beat from leaking
head-phones
still the only sound. With four miles to go they are over halfway. The more experienced players have an idea of what will be waiting for them as they drive deeper into the city. For winger Alex Cuthbert, though, who played his first fifteen-a-side game just this time last year, he only has the stories of those who have already
witnessed
a Grand Slam with which to try and picture what is waiting for them on the streets of the capital. What he does know for certain, however, is that they are about to break the bubble of their isolation. In four miles’ time they will be delivered from their week of preparation in the Vale, from their days of focused and steady training, straight into the heat of a Welsh cauldron of expectation and hope.

For Alex, sitting as he has done for all four
previous
matches on the right-hand side of the bus, today is the pinnacle of a dizzying ascent to the top of
international
rugby. It was only four years ago that a coach at Hartbury College spotted him playing a lunchtime game of sevens with some mates. He was playing football for Gloucester City at the time, and while he’d always been into his sports, from athletics, in which he was a
forty-nine
-second 400m runner, to show jumping, Alex had
never properly tried rugby. Within a year of that
lunch-time
game he was playing for Wales Sevens, and within another two he had a contract with Cardiff Blues and had been called up to the full national squad.

Although Alex is as big and fast as George on the other wing, he is also raw and still learning how to read the game. George has been playing since the age of ten. Others in the squad, such as James Hook or Mike Phillips, have been playing since the age of five. These players have rugby in their veins; the rhythms and
patterns
of a match are woven into their spatial awareness. Alex, in comparison, is still being shaped with every
second
on the pitch. What he lacks in experience, however, he more than makes up for with his energy of attack and undying, emotional enthusiasm. When the exertion of a match is starting to show in others, Alex will still be
looking
for the ball, eager to unleash his coiled speed upon the opposition. As Rob Howley once said of him,
referring
to both his horse-riding past and his strength and stamina, ‘The thing about Cuthbert is, he is the fucking horse.’

Although he may have played for more years than Alex, George, sitting a few seats away, still fizzes with equal enthusiasm, no less genuine than the day he came home from his first rugby training session and told his father, ‘It’s awesome! You can run at people, run around them, and you can tackle them!’ During the first Wales match this year, against Ireland in Dublin, George performed
all three of those boyhood observations with world-class timing and focus. In the process, he provided a moment of brilliance that became emblematic of Wales’s
intentions
for the tournament.

It happened in the fifty-fourth minute of the game. With Wales trailing by five points George took the ball from Rhys Priestland in midfield to go outside Ireland’s D’Arcy before bulldozing the Irish centre McFadden with a massive impact. As he was tackled by another two defenders, George deftly off-loaded the ball to Jonathan Davies with a backwards ‘cat-flap’ of a pass. The sheer power of his flooring of McFadden drew a gasp from the crowd. It was immediately followed by a cheer of appreciation as he flipped the ball to Jon, who sprinted through the gap to score a vital try under the posts. In creating that gap George had not only taken out four Irish players, but had also displayed a perfect moment of ‘beauty and the beast’ rugby; an almost simultaneous show of brute strength and delicate skill that had kids across Wales copying his back-handed offload for weeks.

In the changing rooms after the match Warren acknowledged the remarkable disparity between his young winger’s age and his performance. ‘And to think you’re nineteen years old,’ he said to George in front of the whole team, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘You were world-class out there today.’ George, bowing his head, smiled in response.

And yet within the hour, in suit and tie at the
post-match dinner, George’s age seemed to have found him once more. As he bounded across to the bar, a Diet Coke disappearing in one huge hand, he looked, despite his height, every inch the sixth-former at a
school-leavers
’ disco, those massive limbs which had done such damage on the pitch imbued once more with a
teenager’s
energetic awkwardness. But however young he might have appeared that evening, it was the maturity and finesse of George’s play that continued to fire the celebrations. His determination, skill and strength in that single moment quickly became symbolic of Wales’s win, its resonance fuelling the Welsh fans’ drinking on the streets of Dublin and the smile of Roger Lewis as he played blues and boogie-woogie on the hotel’s piano long into the night.

George himself recognises that being thrown into top-flight rugby has accelerated his maturity. ‘It’s been an intense couple of years,’ he says. ‘Sometimes it feels as if I left home, grew up, played for Wales, straight one after the other.’ Which is, more or less, exactly what happened.

After a year of schoolboy rugby George had just one afternoon off at the end of his exams before starting
preseason
training with the Scarlets the next morning. Since then he hasn’t stopped through a year with the Scarlets, an autumn international series, a shoulder operation and rehab, more regional rugby and the Six Nations, the World Cup, the European Championship and now the Six Nations once again. With the end of the season and
the squad’s summer tour still ahead of him, by the time George finally gets a break from rugby in July he will, like many of the players on this bus, have been on a treadmill of playing and training for almost two years.

When George does get that break he’ll use much of it to return to his home in North Wales, driving the length of the country to get back to his family on Ynys Môn. For most of the drive there’s no phone signal, so, for once, no one can get hold of him. For a few brief hours, listening to music, looking at the views, George is alone as he heads north on the A470 through the mountains of mid-Wales. With each mile he drives, George is aware of an elision occurring in his mind between the length of a rugby pitch and the length of the country, the territory of one mapping over the other. It’s an elision he thinks of consciously in his car, acknowledging to himself that each tree, village, hill he passes is another part of the country he represents when he puts on the red shirt of Wales. Today the same thought will come to him again, but more sensed than known when, amid 75,000 voices, he’ll experience that eighty-minute contraction when the length of Wales is squeezed into those hundred metres of pitch. ‘I come from a small village,’ George says. ‘But when I play for Wales, I come from a big country.’

For George that feeling is simply the best thing in the world. There is nothing like it. He gets goose pimples just talking about it. And yet exactly because it means so much to George, because representing and winning for
Wales means everything to him, there are times when he has to remember it isn’t. That it is, in fact, just a game. This is something sports psychologist Andy McCann has worked on with the young winger. How to switch off away from rugby, in order to prevent, as George puts it, ‘the thing you love from killing you’. How to be prepared, but not over-prepared, to think but not
over-think
. How to treat a game as the most important thing in the world, yet still take the winning or the losing of it in your stride.

For George, most of these questions are answered with a negotiation between remembering and
forgetting
: forgetting the stresses and import of the game, and remembering the joy he’s always got from playing it, ever since he returned from that first training session as an excited ten-year-old. As the bus follows its escort into Cowbridge Road, this is what George reminds himself of again now. To harness the same pleasure for this match as that which he felt when throwing a ball around with his friends on the ‘cabbage patch’ beside Llangefni Thirds. Which is why, when George is sitting in his stall later, writing trigger words on his strapping, the first word he’ll spell out on the inside of his wrist will be ‘Enjoy’.

Dan Lydiate, sitting a few seats behind George, has worked with Andy on switching off away from rugby too. But along with Andy’s techniques Dan also uses his family farm in Llandrindod Wells to escape from the echo chamber of the game. Like George’s home of
Ynys Môn, Llandrindod is a couple of hours north of the country’s southern corridor of top-flight
competition
. So as a youngster Dan, too, had to make a
journey
south to pursue his playing career. Unlike George, however, his was taken gradually, the names of his junior and youth clubs picking out the stepping stones of his route: Llandrindod Wells, Builth Wells, Gwernyfed, Brecon, Newport Youth, Pontypool United and finally his current region, the Gwent Dragons. If he has a Friday match, then Dan takes the opportunity to reverse that trip south and will spend the weekend back on the farm. ‘It’s where I go to switch off,’ he says, speaking as he often does through a gentle smile. ‘I’ll potter around on the quad, drive round the sheep in the fields. I come back the next week feeling that bit more refreshed.’ He often does a bit of work too, helping out his father and brothers. Although as he admits, ‘It’s only the weekend jobs, so it’s still a quiet time.’

Today it’s Dan’s family who’ve made the journey south instead. He saw his parents this morning at the Vale when they came to pick up their tickets. They always come and see his home games for the Dragons too, and always sit in the same part of the stand, between the twenty-two and the halfway line, so that, as Dan says, ‘I always know where to look to find them.’

In a letter of advice to his son, Nicholas, the poet Ted Hughes once told him to always remember:

As the Wales team bus drives through the western suburbs of Cardiff, it would be hard to imagine a more masculine collection of men than those sitting inside. As Dan Baugh once described them, ‘They’re clichéd macho guys. That’s why they play rugby. I mean, they’re the stereo type, right?’ And yet what Hughes tells Nicholas is perhaps more evident in these men than in most. Whereas the majority of people have few visible ties to the child behind them in their daily lives, this busload of men are on their way to play the same game most of them fell in love with as children. The twelve-year-old Warren, still playing rugby barefoot in New Zealand; George on the ‘cabbage patch’; Smiler in the streets of the Rhondda; James Hook, hoping as a five-year-old that his brother’s coach will let him play with the under-9s; Rhys Priestland being taken to training by his grandfather and bought a sausage in batter and chips as a reward. The childhood games of these men have become their careers, the
fundamentals
remaining the same: the pitch, the ball, the exhilaration and the team. All the squad on the bus have been given licence to extend their childhoods, without
a break, into their adult lives. Jenks being coached by his uncles on Cae Fardre; Rob Howley’s dad, calling him in from the roof of the kitchen extension, disturbing his imagined last-minute try at Cardiff Arms Park; Shaun sleeping with a rugby ball in his bedroom opposite a pitch. And Thumper, who after stepping in to protect his mother from his father had to leave his childhood home at sixteen and who has, ever since, found his families in a succession of rugby clubs and teams instead.