Calon

by Owen Sheers

  While in camp the team room is the heart of a rugby squad; a transplantable heart recreated in other hotels for away matches, and across the world when the squad goes on tour. At the Vale Resort the team room is on the lower ground level of the hotel, accessed through an innocuous-looking door in the lobby. Take a short flight of stairs down through a set of swing doors and you’ll find yourself in a large, low-ceilinged room reminiscent of the lounge on a cross-channel ferry. In this room the fundamental elements of modern rugby are all within touching distance, lending it an atmosphere located somewhere between a canteen, a safe house, a student common room, a hospital ward and an Internet cafe.

  Away from the Barn or the Castle training pitch, the team room is where the squad can be a team, and also themselves. Two floors above, where the press conferences are held, coaches and players adopt public personas. Their body language and rhythms of speech alter, slipping into the cyclical statements of the sports interview designed to inform but give nothing away. But as they descend the stairs from those press conferences the players shrug their characters back on like comfortable hoodies, allowing their limbs a greater freedom of expression and, in the case of the younger members of the squad, letting the years slip from their faces to reveal, once more, the boys within the men.

  The first element of the team room you encounter on entering is the food, arranged on narrow tables along the left wall; a continually replenished row of silver-domed serving plates rotating through breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner. Every day in pre-season each player will consume around 4,300 calories to keep their bodies going, with high intakes of protein for muscle growth, and essential and saturated fats for maximal anabolic effect. In season the calories will drop to around 4,070 a day, but the intake of carbohydrates will increase in proportion to the longer distances covered during matches and training, with squad menus continually reviewed by the WRU nutritionist Jon Williams. The majority of those calories will come from these tables in the team room, and for that reason ‘players eat first’ is the most sacred rule in here. This food is fuel, and it’s the engine of the team that needs it the most.

  At meal times the squad eats perfunctorily at a collection of round tables spread and laid in a wedding-like formation. Hunkering over their plates, their bodies seeming too big for the chairs, conversation is often minimal. An arrangement of supplements sits at the centre of each table, as if a chemist has taken charge of the decorations. Printed sheets beside these pill bottles remind the players of their ‘SIX NATIONS 2012 SUPPLEMENT PROTOCOL’:

  Daily Supplements

  Maintain Beta Alanine, Aspartic Acid and Defence Daily

  Beetroot and Cherry Juice blend

  Game Week – 4 cups per day

  Training Week – 2 cups per day

  Colostrum will be added to recovery shakes on game weeks to support immune system, aid recovery and improve gut health.

  L-Carnitine will be added to shakes daily to aid recovery and fat loss.

  In the toilets plastic vials for tests by the in-house medics are scattered about the sinks.

  Close by the dining tables, and facing the food on the far wall, is a row of other tables on which the squad also spend hours of their time each week. These are the physio and massage tables on which, as some of the squad eat a meal, others will be lying, stripped to their underwear to receive treatments from the physios. Occasionally a blue-gloved dentist performs dental work in this area too. Fuel and repair, fuel and repair: the team room is also a pit stop.

  Pool and table-tennis tables at the centre of the room provide the main leisure activities, while beyond these a bank of WRU laptops are in constant use for video analysis, emailing, tweeting and downloading music and films. Behind a set of sofas another table is kept stocked with shirts, rugby balls and posters for the players to sign as they pass in and out of the room. Over the last two weeks this table’s surface has been increasingly obscured under the piles of signature requests and merchandise. Taped to the wall opposite, beside a Powerade drinks fridge, are the latest judgements of the fines committee:

  Jug – Wrong kit – £20

  Foxy – Late to units – £10

  Bomb – Late physio/no watch – £30

  As well as being the heart of the Welsh camp, the team room is also its hive brain. This is where the hydra-headed animal that is a team communicates with itself, where its tone and consciousness is set and can be measured. Step into this room on a Monday after a match and the atmosphere within these walls will immediately tell you whether the game was won or lost. This is where Thumper’s weddings and funerals are lived, the wake of each match turning the air light and charged or dense and oppressive, depending on the result.

  Movement within the team room, as elsewhere in the camp, is governed by the day sheet: the daily schedule of training, treatments, meetings and media duties handed out by Thumper the night before. Without announcement or instruction players and staff will drift like a shoal towards the seats in front of the projection screen and a defence or attack meeting will begin, as if triggered purely by the weight of bodies in that part of the room. Together with the day sheet’s instructions on which kit should be worn, such an apparently unconducted movement by so many men wearing identical clothes further heightens the sense of a herd mentality within camp; the blending of tens of individuals, many of whom regularly compete against each other for their clubs, into a single organism.

  *

  In one corner of the team room a pair of electronic scales are wired up to a couple of laptops on shoulder-height stands. On first entering the room every morning the players gravitate towards these machines before eating their breakfast. Standing on the scales they answer a series of programmed questions, tapping in their responses on the touch screens of the laptops.

  On a scale of one to five, how did they sleep?

  What is their mood?

  Any hint of a cold?

  An outline of a body appears on the screen.

  Do they have any aches and pains?

  If they do (and they nearly always do), the players press the on-screen body in the places where their own is hurting. By the end of breakfast their answers to these questions will already have been processed and sent directly to the iPhones and computers of the head of physical performance, head of medical and Warren Gatland.

  Before the players reach the computerised monitoring station they will more than likely already have said good morning to Dan Baugh, the assistant strength and conditioning coach. Those who haven’t are sure to see the barrel-chested Canadian approaching them soon afterwards, his hand outstretched in greeting. With a shaved head, beard and Heston Blumenthal glasses, Dan resembles a Hell’s Angel bouncer moonlighting as a lab technician. But when he says ‘Good morning’ to a player, there’s nothing intimidating about his voice, just a genuine warmth running through an accent falling somewhere between a Seattle rock singer and an Alberta lumberjack.

  This is how Dan prefers to monitor players, rather than rely solely on the £30,000-worth of computer equipment in the corner of the team room. ‘I’d rather shake hands, always have,’ he says. ‘I got it from the French clubs. First greeting of the day there, it’s tradition to shake hands, look someone in the eye, ask ’em how they’re feeling.’

  This personal contact is vital to Dan and is at the heart of his approach to coaching. He has an MA in Coaching Science, including a dissertation on ‘Emerging Defensive Philosophies in World Rugby’, so he more than understands the changing landscape of the modern game, the need to keep at the cutting edge. But in an environment where levels of technology and scrutiny mean there are increasingly few places for a player to hide his moods and emotions, Dan also tries to make the Welsh camp as personal as possible.

  ‘People ask me what we do up here, what’s so special about it? And I say we hug a lot. I tell the guys I love ’em all the time. Every aspect of the international game is pretty shitty. It’s intense, physically and mentally, you put your body under
ridiculous stress. But family fights harder than friends, y’know? You have to really care about the people you work with. On a subconscious level the body can react slower if you don’t care for your teammate.’

  As a flanker for Cardiff in the late 1990s and early 2000s Dan knows there was a time when international players relished returning to their clubs from the Welsh camp. This was often because they were returning from an impersonal environment into more of a family set-up. Now he hopes the Welsh coaching team have reversed that process. ‘I know the guys can’t wait to get back into camp, get back together. And that’s great, because the closer we become, the better we become.’

  But Dan’s morning handshakes and hugs are as much for him as they are for the players. Compared to the monitoring computers, he personally finds the French method a more comprehensive barometer of a player’s well-being, especially as the squad near game day.

  ‘People are much more comfortable saying to you socially that they didn’t sleep well, and I mean, there’s nowhere on that monitoring thing to say your wife told you to fuck off or that something bad has happened. All the touchy-feely stuff that doesn’t go on the computers you can talk about, clear the air. Then, when selection comes into this, all of a sudden on the monitoring kit everyone feels great, all of a sudden everyone slept well, all of a sudden the ratings say, “I’m ready, pick me!” So I shake their hands instead, get some eye contact.’

  It was a more robust kind of contact that first brought Dan into rugby at the age of sixteen. He was involved in judo and wrestling since he was four, so physical, combative sport had always been a defining principle in his life. One day, though, in a period when he was playing a lot of Canadian football, some friends asked if he’d join them at rugby training. After just one session Dan knew he’d discovered his calling. As rugby took over, his other sports soon began falling away.

  ‘I just loved the fact there were no pads, that I could hit people, and at the time there were no red or yellow cards so I could get into fights. It was a man’s game, y’know? I was a kid, but I was being treated like a man.’

  Within a year of picking up a rugby ball Dan represented Canada at under-16s. He went on to represent his country at every age group, playing against Wales at Fletcher’s Fields in 1997. His physical style of play caught the eye of some of the Cardiff players in the side, so when, a year later, the Welsh captain and Cardiff flanker Gwyn Jones broke his neck, it was Dan who Cardiff called. As is so often the case in rugby, an opportunity came his way through another man’s injury and at the cost of another player’s career.

  Under the alias of Dan Brown, Dan was asked to trial for Gwyn’s place in the Blues. He made the trip across the Atlantic and, after impressing his new bosses on the pitch, never went back, going on to play for Cardiff for another seven years. He soon became a popular player with the Cardiff fans, infamous for the physicality of his tackles and his running game, until eventually his style of play took its toll and a broken foot retired him into coaching. Gwyn’s injury opened the door for Dan into European rugby and, at just thirty, another injury closed it again.

  But only as a player. Six years later, having joined the Welsh set-up full-time in the summer, Dan has spent this morning at the Vale following his usual strict match-day routine. For once he didn’t greet the players over breakfast, and he didn’t look them in the eye and ask them how they’re feeling. He knows he can be intense on game day, and that the last thing a player needs is ‘some super-psyched-up guy sitting in the corner with big eyes’. So he’s kept his distance and is focusing on his match-day roles instead: running the primers and preparing for his pre-match warm-up with the team and the subs in the stadium.

  Dan has brought many principles from his Canadian sporting days into his work with the Wales squad. In the ‘Red Room’, a padded area at the end of the gym, he regularly works on the close-quarters strength players need in rucks and mauls, drawing upon his experience in judo, wrestling and grappling. His training technique of functional blocks owes more than a nod to his past in Canadian football, while the ‘play-off’ facial hair he grows for every tournament is a tradition inherited from Canadian ice hockey.

  For this Six Nations Dan chose an Amish-style beard with no moustache or sideburns, which now, on the morning of Wales’s final game, after six weeks of competition, has grown as far as the collar of his tracksuit. He has no idea how the dice will fall today. He’s seen how hard the squad have worked, and knows how hard he and Adam Beard pushed them once again in Poland. He also knows this is a squad who are close, who will fight for each other as much as for themselves. But the French have come to Cardiff to win, and have a history of spoiling the party for the best teams in the world. So, as ever, there is no certainty, no foreknowledge, other than that this evening, whichever way the scoreline falls, Dan will be able to shave.

  Dan and Adam work closely together and share a similar vision. And yet in many ways the two men are the direct opposite of each other. Where Dan has a trucker’s bulk, Adam has the compact physique of a gymnast. Where Dan is loud and in your face, Adam is quieter and more attuned to subtler forms of persuasion. Where Adam is thorough, Dan’s preparations can verge on OCD. Where Dan, in his own words, is ‘very hands-on, a bit of a grunt, a grunt with a voice’, Adam is an academic. The relationship is not without its tensions – again, by Dan’s own admission he’s ‘a number two who sees himself as a number one’ – but without doubt it’s a combination that works.

  This pattern of complementary opposition is repeated across the Wales management. In contrast to the increased physical and temperamental uniformity of the modern player, the diversity of the Welsh coaching staff, in appearance and personality, still reflects how multi faceted a sport rugby is, and is a reminder of the huge range of qualities the game demands of its players. Within each area of the Wales set-up, men work cheek-by-jowl with colleagues who, like Adam and Dan, often appear to be polar opposites. But however mismatched the components may appear, the mechanism as a whole works smoothly again and again, not in spite, but because of these differences.

  At the physio tables in the team room Prav Mathema, the head of medical performance, works alongside Mark Davies, or ‘Carcass’, as he’s known within the squad. In contrast to Prav’s easy-going energy and default smile, Carcass, an ex-international himself, is the squad’s stoic, possessed of a granite-like stillness and a ‘wise man of the mountain’ air. Where Carcass is sparse of speech, Prav is talkative; where Carcass is tall, Prav is shorter. If Prav’s approachable manner and gelled hair are those of an affable TV presenter, then Carcass, with his thousand-yard touchline stare and motionless, broken-nosed profile, is more reminiscent of an Easter Island statue that’s done time in the ring.

  The differing personalities of the coaches who work alongside Jenks on the squad’s defence, attack and forward play are all rooted in their respective roles, with each man embodying the traits of his specialism. Rob Howley, the Wales attack coach and one of the country’s greatest-ever scrum-halves, is quick and involved, as alert to nuance and lateral vision in his coaching off the field as he was in his playing days on it. As he moves between the players on the training pitch or harries them through patterns of attack in the Barn, Rob’s natural expression is one of furrowed concern, betraying a restless mind always on the lookout for the unexplored strategy, the gap to exploit.

  As a player Rob had to punch above his weight from an early age, having been told on more than one occasion that he was too small or too slight to make it in international rugby. But the schoolboy who’d spent his weekends playing out his dreams of captaining Wales on the local park behind Priory Avenue in Bridgend was not going to be denied. Having made the Wales number-nine jersey his, he finally ran out to captain Wales against Italy in 1997. The circumstances, however, were not as Rob would have wished. His opportunity came, like Dan’s, in the wake of the previous captain, Gwyn Jones, breaking his neck. Unlike Dan, Rob knew Gwyn well and had spent much of the weeks b
efore that Italy game beside his hospital bed as his friend came to terms with being told that he may never walk again.

  Gwyn supported Rob’s appointment as captain, and Rob went on to lead Wales to their greatest number of successive victories ever. He was also, though, captain through some of the country’s most difficult periods, and it’s this mixed experience of success and failure that appears to drive Rob: the tenacity of the underdog coupled with the drive of a winner; the scent of success married with a heightened awareness of its fragility.

  On first meeting Shaun Edwards, the Wales defence coach, he can seem as impregnable as the strategies he’s woven into the fabric of the squad, his set pit-bull expression imprinted with the same ethos as his rugby – Thou shalt not pass. But those who get to know Shaun get to know the depths of the man, and with them, closer to his core, a certain warmth. Possessed of a strong sense of ‘code’, of what is and isn’t important in life, gained from his time as a rugby-league player for Wigan and Great Britain, Shaun is possibly the most decorated player in the country, his broken nose and the scars on his bald head testament to the extent to which he’s lived his learning. That he would live a life immersed in rugby was never in question. His father played professionally for Wigan, until, at the age of twenty-four, a spinal injury almost crippled him. Unable to play himself, Shaun says his father didn’t so much push him into the game ‘as kick me in’. As a young boy he’d sleep with a rugby ball in his bed, and every day he walked past Wigan’s ground at Central Park on his way to and from school. At the age of just seventeen, that ground became his new destination when the club signed the schoolboy Shaun for a record-breaking £35,000.