by Owen Sheers
The other home nations weren’t always comfortable with this class distinction. At the turn of the century there were even complaints that Wales had an unfair class advantage. As working men, it was argued, the Welsh were able to get into better condition than their amateur gentlemen opponents. At the 1903 AGM of the Irish RFU it was noted that:
Over £50 had been paid for a dinner to the Scotsmen and only £30 for a dinner to the Welshmen. The reason for this was that champagne was given to the Scotsmen and beer only (but plenty of it) to the Welshmen. Whisky and porter were always good enough for Welshmen, for such were the drinks they were used to. The Scotsmen, however, were gentlemen, and appreciated a dinner when it was given to them. Not so the Welshmen.
The early association of rugby with a renewed sense of national identity also continues to contribute to its contemporary resonance in Wales. George Borrow, the nineteenth-century travel writer, wrote in his book Wild Wales that the Welsh character was partly shaped by the fact that ‘the Welsh have never forgotten they were conquered by the English, but the English have already forgotten’. With rugby’s territorial contest of possession and confrontation, Wales was gifted a communal way to continue that never forgetting. On a rugby field the knowledge that the Welsh and their language are stubborn survivors of a pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain is a rich seam of national consciousness which even in the twenty-first century is still evoked and defended every time Wales take the field.
Then there is the question of scale. Wales has always been a small nation. With a population of just three million, the country can draw upon roughly the same number of players as Yorkshire. Its diminutive size means matches against opponents such as England, Ireland and France have always been laced with the potency of a David versus Goliath narrative, however much the bookies or the fans might favour Wales.
To what extent class, history and size are at the forefront of a twenty-first-century Welsh supporter’s mind as they watch a Wales match today is debatable. But what is certain is that this cultural heritage is still inherited and therefore, at the very least, still sensed. Similarly, a twenty-first-century Welsh player can’t escape the traditions they pull on with their jersey. Their minds might be occupied with video analysis, nutrition, team policy, tactics and preparation, but however diffuse the hinterland of Welsh rugby’s earliest days might be, it’s still a part of what fuels the modern player. Even those who play with individuals more than a nation in mind, those who take the field for the grandfathers, mothers, coaches who’ve helped them on their way, those individuals will all, in some way, have embodied the national ethos of the game. All of which goes to explain why it’s never just a country that runs out onto this pitch at the Millennium Stadium, but a culture, a way of being. Every match played by the national side is an act of national memory.
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Over the last few years, as Welsh players have pulled on their jerseys in the dressing rooms they’ll have glimpsed a word printed inside their collars. The jersey itself will have been made by an American company, Under Armour, constructed from some of the most high-tech materials of the twenty-first century. The military-grade fabric will feature ArmourGrid technology and body-mapped compression insets. The word inside each collar, though, will be thousands of years old and a reminder of the latticework of history and culture that’s still woven into what it means to play rugby for Wales.
Between 2008 and 2010 the word players saw inside the collar of their home shirt was ‘Calon’, meaning ‘heart’. In their away strip it was ‘Hiraeth’, meaning ‘a longing for something lost’.
From 2010 to 2011 they were reminded again, inside their home shirts, to ‘Dal dy Dir’ – ‘hold your ground’ – while in the away collar they wore ‘Balchder’ – ‘pride’.
Since 2011 the word players will have seen when pulling on their black away shirts is ‘Cymeriad’ – ‘character’. Inside their red home shirts it is ‘Braint’, meaning ‘privilege’.
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Midnight.
A wave of cheers washes into the stadium from the streets of Cardiff beyond. 2012 has arrived. The first fireworks shoot into the night sky and explode in reds, greens and gold. In the empty bowl of the stadium, resonating between the stands, they sound like cannon fire. A rapid fusillade of smaller rockets crack and whistle from elsewhere in the city, disturbing a seagull from its perch in the stadium’s roof. As it flies over me the growing lights on the pitch briefly illuminate it from underneath, casting its feathers as pristine as a player coming off the bench. More fireworks erupt in other areas of the city. The year has turned.
For the current Welsh squad, this new year poses a question first formed under the floodlights of another pitch on the other side of the world in what is now, just, last year. Wales were playing France at Eden Park in Auckland in the semi-finals of the Rugby World Cup. Commentators were calling it the biggest game in the history of Welsh rugby. Not just because the squad were eighty minutes from a final against the hosts, New Zealand, but because never before had a World Cup semi-final pointed so strongly towards a Welsh victory. France had been off form. Their tournament had been erratic and distracted. Virtually estranged from their coach, the team had yet to discover the rhythm or the flair that had seen them do so well in previous World Cups.
Wales, by contrast, despite fielding eight players under the age of twenty-three, had been the team of the tournament. For the first time in their history the national coach, Warren Gatland, had had the squad for two clear months of preparation. They’d twice travelled to gruelling training camps at Spała in Poland, where, with the aid of regular three-minute sessions in the –150°C cryotherapy chambers, they’d trained harder and more often than any other Welsh squad had ever trained before.
Rugby coaches often talk about ‘strength in depth’: developing enough quality players to cover injuries to the first-choice team. In Poland, however, Wales were developing a different kind of strength and depth. Under the eye of Adam Beard, the team’s head of physical performance, the players’ bodies were being strengthened to the point where, as centre Jamie Roberts put it, ‘you’re thinking about your next move, not your next breath’. But the Spała experience was also about developing depth – of resolve and attachment.
The modern top-flight rugby player is often a hard man who leads a soft life. At a young age he’ll have life experiences most of us will never know, and yet his experience of life will be relatively narrow. While their peers are going through an expansion of independence, the young rugby professional experiences a contraction. Much of their day-to-day lives is organised by someone else. Travel and schedules are set, day sheets appear under hotel doors, food and drink is monitored. They are given the best treatments and good salaries, but they also no longer work side by side for long hours in mines, fields or factories.
Warren Gatland and his team knew that Wales had often lost key games in the closing minutes. When the time had come to dig deep, that depth wasn’t there. At Spała, where Adam Beard says he pushed the squad ‘150% harder than ever before’, the players hurt, and they hurt together. As one group waited for another to finish a session, there was silence in the room, such was the anxiety about what lay ahead of them. In the relatively simple surroundings of the camp, with no TV or computer games, they spent time together too. They talked, played cards and competed in quizzes. In previous squads there had always been some fighting between the players. But in Spała there was none. On their one day off, many chose to visit the nearby concentration camp at Auschwitz.
The Olympic Sports Centre in Spała was founded in 1950. Despite recent developments it still resembles a training camp for Soviet cosmonauts. Situated a hundred kilometres south-west of Warsaw, its buildings are located within hectares of oak forests through which herds of European bison once roamed. The village of just four hundred inhabitants is dominated by the centre’s presence. The ceiling of the nearby Olympic Pizzeria is papered with the front pages of a newspaper called Sport, while its menu offers a r
ange of dishes all named after Olympic cities.
The centre’s three simple hotels – Champion, Junior and Olimpijczyk – sit squarely and heavily between its facilities of indoor and outdoor running tracks, gyms, a cavernous sports hall, swimming pool, treatment rooms and – Wales’s chief reason for being there – cryotherapy chambers. In their preparation for the World Cup the Welsh players stripped off twice a day to enter the icy vapour of these liquid-nitrogen-cooled freezers. Wearing just a pair of shorts, long woollen socks, gloves, face mask, headband and wooden clogs, their blood pressures were taken by a nurse before they stepped, in groups of six, into the preliminary cooling chamber. A computer beside the chamber recorded its temperature as –50°C. The players crossed their arms, covering their nipples with their gloved hands as a member of staff dressed for an Arctic expedition opened the door to the secondary chamber. Outside on the computer screen the temperature in this second chamber can read anywhere from –120°C to –150°C.
Inside, it is a white-out. On stepping into this second chamber the players immediately lose sight of each other, their bodies lost in the freezing vapour. The sounds from beyond the chamber are muffled. Those inside have to keep talking to check in on each other, each man rocking from side to side or walking a tight pattern of steps. The cold is clean, dry and penetrating. The players’ brains, suddenly alert through instinctive survival, cause their blood vessels to contract and send endorphins streaming through their systems and blood rushing to their cores. Their skin temperature drops to below 12°C and the seconds begin to lag as any residual moisture – in the backs of the legs, in the crook of an arm – stings sharply. With a minute to go some of the players’ teeth are chattering. Others have broken into involuntary shivers. Eventually, the heavy metal door opens with a thick clunk and the players file into the preliminary chamber, then, after a few seconds’ acclimatisation, out into the warmth, a flood of dry ice blowing out with them around their legs into the room.
After each of these cryotherapy sessions the squad took to the bikes and rowers in the gym across the corridor. With the stereo turned up they did twenty minutes of gentle exercise, pumping the blood through their veins to achieve the ‘vascular flush’ which would complete the treatment’s rehabilitation of their damaged tissues. The fundamental science behind this method is the same as that which has seen sports teams use ice baths and other cold therapies for many years. The aim is to reduce inflammation, produce endorphins and dampen the nervous system. By shortening recovery periods the players can do harder training sessions, more frequently. An ice bath, however, causes stress to a player’s skin. In reaction their blood, before flooding to the core, first rushes to the surface. The shock also produces stress hormones such as cortisol, which can counteract the benefits of the treatment. For the Welsh players, who can have as much as four inches of muscle packed about their limbs, there is also the question of penetration. An ice bath may only affect the first two inches of soft tissue, leaving deeper tissue still inflamed and damaged.
Whatever the science or the balance of the physical and psychological effects, the squad in Spała soon became convinced there was no way they could have trained as hard as they did without the cryotherapy. In some weights sessions they lifted as much as four tonnes each. Every day they undertook levels of fitness training that would usually have left them aching all over with ‘the DOMS’ (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness). The cryo, however, had them waking each morning feeling refreshed and able to continue with Adam’s punishing regime. Coaches often talk about muscle memory, but the use of cryotherapy at Spała was more about muscle amnesia: about wiping away the residue of physical exertion to leave the effect but not the ache, the gain but not the pain.
When not training inside at Spała, the squad worked on a pitch in front of Hotel Junior ringed by a running track and overlooked by a statue embedded in the corner of Hotel Champion. Sculpted in the Soviet style, a male figure places one hand on his chest, while the other holds aloft a flaming torch which he looks towards in aspiration. Next door to the training pitch, also under this statue’s gaze, the Park Pokolen´ Mistrzów Sportu commemorates Polish Olympic champions such as Jan Mulak, Irena Szewin´ska and Wanda Panfil.
On the pitch itself the Welsh squad often trained under the eye of a man who has had his own fair share of Olympic experience. Frans Bosch is one of the world’s leading experts on biomechanics. Specialising in the high jump, he has coached many athletes to Olympic level, using his techniques of fine-tuning running efficiency to improve their performances dramatically. As the Welsh players ran through their moves on the pitch in Spała, Frans, with his shoulder-length hair and salt-and-pepper stubble, moved among them, watching with both the eye of an expert and that of an artist.
Before he became a specialist in physical training, Frans was, for twenty years, a well-known painter. Although he turned his back on his exhibitions and paintings before some of these Welsh players were born, he still draws as much upon his artistic experience as his scientific. ‘It’s about how you see movement,’ he explains. ‘An artist’s eye is trained to renew the perception of what you see time and time again. If you can do that with looking at running, then human running is one of the most remarkable movement patterns there is. Renewing what you see helps to find the errors and how they are connected, and how best they can be corrected.’
Frans has no national allegiance to Wales and he thinks rugby is ‘a pretty ridiculous sport’. Yet every time he trains with the Welsh squad he finds himself rooting for them beyond a professional interest. Compared to other ‘more corporate’ teams with whom he’s worked, he can’t help but warm to the ‘family coherence’ of the Wales set-up and to the national love of rugby as a sport. ‘I went to watch a match in Cardiff ’, he says, ‘and I realised I was seeing the country, not a sport. A cultural event, not a game.’
At the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand Wales’s performance proved Warren and his team had been right to follow their instincts in Spała. After a narrow defeat by just one point to a vastly more experienced South African side, the young Welsh squad displayed a mature determination in convincingly beating Samoa, Fiji, Namibia and Ireland. Before the tournament most of the squad were unknowns on the international stage: Rhys Priestland, Dan Lydiate, George North, Leigh Halfpenny, Jonathan Davies. A few years earlier many had been playing schoolboy rugby, and yet now the rugby world was talking about them, and not just because of their wins, but because of the manner of those wins; because of their style of play and their demeanour on and off the pitch.
Ever since rugby union went professional in 1995, every Welsh team has had to negotiate a delicate balance between tradition and innovation. The shadow of the great teams of the 1970s still falls across a twenty-first-century squad. Many of those 1970s players are still present in the consciousness of the rugby public, as commentators, journalists, board members and coaches. The Welsh supporter demands a style of play, a philosophy, inherited from that Welsh rugby past: inventive and audacious, physical yet graceful. But at the same time there is now the pressure to compete at the leading edge of the sport, to ‘pinch an inch’ wherever possible in a game so much harder, faster and more brutal than the rugby of the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Cryotherapy, analysis, nutrition, sports science, GPS positioning, psychology: the modern Welsh team, while aware of its heritage, has to be ever more forward looking.
In the Barn, the indoor training area at the Welsh Rugby Union’s National Centre of Excellence in the Vale of Glamorgan, two massive banners hang side by side above the expanse of emerald AstroTurf:
YESTERDAY IS IN HOW DO YOU
THE PAST WANT TO BE
REMEMBERED?
Forget the past and live for the moment, the first seems to say.
Think of your legacy, the presence of what has been, forged in your now, says the other.
As the Welsh squad do their drills and units in the Barn, they run between these two banners. Playing miss moves, set pieces, rucks and attacks they
flow from one to the other as if the whole building is being rhythmically tipped from side to side. As a team and as individuals they shuttle between a statement and a question, between the past and the future.
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At the 2011 World Cup Wales hit a balance between those two competing states. They arrived at the tournament as one of the most sophisticated sides of the twenty-first century. Their youngest players had graduated through the academies of professional clubs, travelling in a gilded channel of top-level rugby since the age of fifteen or sixteen. And yet something in the squad’s personality, in the positivity of their play, still spoke strongly of the Welsh rugby past that fed their Welsh rugby present.
The character of the squad was embodied by their captain, Sam Warburton, who at twenty-two was the youngest-ever captain of a World Cup side. At six foot two and sixteen stone three pounds Sam is a relentless, scavenging open-side flanker. Against South Africa he personally made almost a quarter of Wales’s ninety-nine tackles. Physically imposing, a man of few words with a craggy, Roman profile, Sam leads by example. A teetotaller with a highly developed sense of duty and fairness, he’s the first onto the training pitch, the first to put on his recovery skins, to make his protein shake or to fill the ice bath. Under his captaincy ‘no sapping’ became the ethos of the team. If you’re hurting, tell the physios, but not your teammates. If you’re tired, tell the conditioning coaches, but not the other players. If the English squad at the tournament were displaying the qualities of Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I – going out drinking, being careless with their reputations – then Sam and his team were more like the young king of Henry IV Part II: determined, ruthless and choosing to harness their youth for the fight, not the revels.