by Owen Sheers
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:
At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality.
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.
For all these men, as the bus carries them closer to the stadium and today’s match, the child is not so much standing behind them as living within them, still breathing and feeling, just under their skin. Still playing.
*
A few seats down from where George is listening to dance tunes, the pace of the music providing a disjointed soundtrack to the slow progression of shops outside his window, Adam Jones and Ryan Jones are both texting their respective wives. For these men, approaching a possible third Grand Slam each, their years of experience mean coping with the kind of questions that face the younger players has become habitual. Becoming fathers has also given them a new perspective on their professional lives. As Ray Gravell once said on the birth of his own daughter, Manon, ‘Rugby has been wonderful to me, but this is life.’
In one respect having children makes it harder for a player. Without any hesitation all the fathers on this bus cite being away from their families as the most difficult part of their job; missing first steps, birthdays, bank holidays. And yet the influence of their children also makes some elements of modern rugby easier. That crucial off switch that other players have to manufacture is there, an intrinsic part of your life. As Ryan says, ‘I can’t get psyched up for a game from Wednesday now because I’ve got two children, I’ve got other stuff on my plate.’ For Adam, meanwhile, having a daughter, Isla, has given him something else to play for too. ‘I want to make her proud,’ he says. ‘And she’s another reason to keep going. I want her to see me play and to remember it.’
Adam has been discussing all week with his wife, Nicole, whether they should bring Isla to the match today. In the end they’ve decided she’s too young (and, as Adam puts it, ‘too wiggly’) and this time she should stay at home in Merthyr instead. For the World Cup, however, when the squad were away for eight and a half weeks, she and her mother made the trip out to New Zealand to spend time with Adam. But then after the Samoa game they returned to Wales, and it would be weeks until Adam would see Isla again, which, as he says, ‘nearly killed me’.
Ryan’s three-year-old son, Jacob, is already in the stadium with his grandfather, Steve. There’s no guarantee, however, he’ll get to see his father play today. Having started for the injured Dan Lydiate in Dublin, Ryan has only started again for Wales once, against Scotland. He did, however, play and make an impact in both the other matches too, having been called off the bench to fill in at both number four and number eight. Today against France he’s on the bench once more, although within a few hours, unknown to Ryan, Warren will approach him across the changing room as the team catch their breaths at half-time and ask him to step up again, this time at seven for an injured Sam Warburton.
With sixty-three caps and eight years playing for Wales, Ryan has begun to perceive his international career from an increasingly reflective distance. It is as if, in sensing an end to his Wales playing days, he’s found himself thinking deeper on what his role as a player is about, as much as how it should be fulfilled. His advice to younger players, which Ryan gives in an easy, expansive manner, is to make sure they take time to step back, to consider what it is they’ve achieved and what they’re experiencing. ‘Otherwise’, he says, with a slow Newport lilt, ‘you just get caught up in it. It all feels like a natural progression. Without knowing it you’ve done five, six years, you’ve got fifty caps, and then it’s over.’
A veteran of the various losses involved in being a winner at international rugby – of time, privacy and independence – in 2007 Ryan thought he’d lost the sport itself for good. When he woke in a hospital bed after a routine shoulder operation, the doctors told him he may never play again. The surgeon had removed a huge amount of damaged cartilage from his joint, in which he’d also made multiple micro-fractures to stimulate repair. It was a rare condition, and for a long time there was no clear path to recovery. The following months were dark for Ryan, and involved what he describes as ‘a lot of turmoil’. It was, though, a turmoil that brought with it a positive resonance, the sudden disturbance in his career making Ryan a more nuanced player on and off the pitch, and more philosophical about the sport’s rewards and sacrifices too.
On a day like today Ryan’s reward, if he gets the chance to play and Wales win, will be to share that experience with his parents, wife and son. Much of what he achieves now Ryan sees in this light, as an opportunity to repay the investment his family have made in him from the very start. And in this respect he’s far from alone on the bus. Some of today’s players will have had to make their own way from the beginning of their careers. But others, like Ryan, will also have parents whose efforts over the years have contributed to them taking their seat today. Mothers and fathers who drove them across the country to matches, training and trials; who paid out for kit and supplements; who supported them financially and emotionally in the early days of their careers.
As the Wales bus continues its progress down Cowbridge Road, gathering a growing haul of applause, cheers and car horns in its wake, this familial investment is another entry on the manifest of past experience it carries with the squad. Along with the influence of coaches, the thousands of rehab sessions, the countless pitches and the years of training, these efforts of grandfathers, uncles and parents completes the bus’s cargo of hinterland as, slowing at the junction with Cathedral Road, it drives on towards the River Taff, where from behind Castlebridge House the Millennium Stadium begins slipping into view.
*
The crowds have thickened now, down both sides of the road and along the central reservation too, their cheers and applause washing against the bus as it passes like a slow whale along the street. Up ahead the four motorcycles have been joined by four mounted policemen, their fluorescent jackets bobbing i
n a line as their horses trot at the vanguard of the procession.
For James Hook, listening to the Stereophonics’ ‘Is Yesterday, Tomorrow, Today?’, this is the moment he used to dream of when he was younger. Like several of today’s players, he was out there for the 2005 Grand Slam, in the crowd, watching the team bus drive past, wanting desperately to be a part of it. The squad on that bus had seemed so distant to him, unreachable, and yet within a year players such as Gethin, Adam and Ryan were his teammates, his elusive, gliding running style having won him a place in the national squad at the age of twenty-one. Warren’s policy of trusting youth with selection means that as James looks out over the crowd, listening to Kelly Jones sing Write down all the things that you’d like to be, write down all the places you’d like to see, the chances are that somewhere among those thousands of faces a future teammate is looking back. A young player who in a year or two will be sitting where he is now, watching a crowd gravitate towards the bus, in which, somewhere, yet another future player for Wales will be watching and dreaming, Is yesterday, tomorrow, today?
As the bus moves onto the bridge, the players begin to remove their headphones, releasing a brief wave of music across the seats before leaving the vehicle in silence again. They want to hear as well as see what is happening. To hear the thousands of cheers, the wishes of good luck, the slow pulse of ‘Waaales, Waaales, Waaales’ that follows the bus as it crests the bridge and bears down upon the end of Westgate Street. As it does, the front windscreen fills with people, hundreds and thousands of them, most of them wearing red and all of them waving flags, scarves, hats at the bus and the players inside. Women blow kisses, men punch the air. A French supporter in a beret steps from the crowd and salutes with a baguette, held aloft like a triumphant spear.
Inside the bus it remains silent. Even those who have played in previous Grand Slams cannot believe what they are seeing. Adam Beard, who has worked with team GB at the Olympics, in Australian Rules football and in rugby league, has never seen anything like it before. He feels as if they are going to war, not a rugby game.
Warren, at the front of the bus, also looks out at the waiting crowds. Their smiles and their waves make it seem as if the match is already won. But it isn’t, and if it still isn’t at the end of the day, he knows he will be accountable. All of them will be accountable. He and the squad, as ever, will go to work with millions watching, and millions commenting on their performance. Because on match day everyone in Wales is a coach. The display of support still buoys Warren though, and he’s hugely grateful for it too, knowing as he does that for the young squad behind him, what they are seeing at this moment is worth a hundred extra training sessions.
As a Kiwi, Warren is no stranger to obsessive rugby fans, and even the nature of Welsh support is familiar to him. Like Wales, New Zealand is a small country with a strongly working-class foundation to its rugby. Through the game’s Maori associations there is also a sense of the sport representing and defending an ancient culture. But despite these aspects of familiarity Wales and the Welsh remain something of an enigma to Warren. With all the country’s top-flight rugby crammed along the southern M4 corridor, to work in rugby in Wales is to work in a narrow fishbowl between Newport and Carmarthen. Warren has always felt that if he’s honest with the fans, then they’ll allow him the odd dip, a defeat here and there. But he also knows that, for some reason, the Welsh fans love the agony of their support as much as the ecstasy; that after the pleasure they seem to crave the pain. And that is why his biggest fear is still the thought that one day, as this bus drives into town, the crowd spread through the streets before them might turn. That one day, as they make this slow drive in towards the stadium, it might not be cheers that fill the air, but boos.
For now, though, as the bus makes its turn into Westgate Street, cheers are all Warren can hear, cheers and jubilation, as if the bus wasn’t carrying a squad of young rugby players, but liberators rescuing the city after months of painful siege.
*
Matthew Rees looks out at the crowds below and knows that when his international days are done, this – this exact moment – is what he will miss.
*
In a similar vein, Ryan, too, wonders what he’ll replace this with when he’s no longer playing. This hit, like a drug, of playing for his country. The adrenalin as they run out of the tunnel. The noise and roar of the stadium’s crowd crashing over them like a tidal wave. To have those thousands at your back as you bind with your teammates to sing the anthem. At thirty-one this already worries him, the life of aftermath on the other side of his retirement. ‘I don’t look forward to that wet Tuesday in Tesco’s’, he once said, looking out over a Captain’s Run training session in London, ‘when someone stops me and says, “Didn’t you used to play for Wales?”’
In the very temple of delight veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine. So said Keats. And so, in this moment of adoration and thrill, several of the older players, just as they feel their blood race at the sight and sound of it, also feel at the edge of their emotions the tinge of its passing. As the fear of defeat lies at the heart of victory, so the prospect of loss is at the heart of gain.
But all of this, now, is still not yet earned, not yet won. This support from the crowd is the cheering of hope and idolatry. Those other cheers, of celebration and thanks, are still waiting on the other side of eighty minutes, if they’ll be allowed to exist at all.
*
Ken Owens, at the back of the bus, and the man for whom Matthew’s torn calf muscle opened the door of selection, looks out of the rear window. Behind them the crowd that had been kept apart by the mounted police and the outriders is closing. ‘Like the Red Sea,’ Ken will say later. ‘It was like the Red Sea, closing behind us.’
Matthew’s injury, and then another to Wales’s other veteran hooker, Huw Bennett, meant it was Ken who pulled on the Wales number-two shirt in the Twickenham changing room that February afternoon three weeks earlier. And it was Ken who read the commands on the tip sheet he found under his towel – ‘ASSAULT THEIR ATTACK. BE RELENTLESS.’
Prior to that game Ken had only played one full eighty minutes of test rugby, against Namibia in the World Cup. He’d come on as a blood replacement against Scotland too, but then was off again before he knew it. In that changing room in Twickenham Ken was nervous, and found himself changed and ready well before the team warm-up. Unsure of what to do, he sat on his bench, his forearms on his thighs, his head bowed.
‘Look up.’
The voice came from above him, soft and northern. Ken did what it said and saw Shaun standing over him.
‘Lift your head,’ Shaun said, advising, not commanding. ‘You’re a man now. Walk around with your chest out, like you own this place.’
Two hours later Wales, with Ken playing at hooker, had won the Triple Crown. In the stands Ken’s parents, having watched their son win his third cap, remained in their seats to watch his sister, playing for Wales women, run out for her seventh.
As he looks out at the crowd closing behind the bus Ken sees a couple of his mates from back home in Carmarthen. He has been hanging around the local club there, Carmarthen Athletic, since he was seven, so it’s well known in the town that he’s playing today. In doing so, like all the team, he’ll be representing them, Carmarthen, his home club, as well as Wales. When he was back in the town on Wednesday, the owner of the local cafe wouldn’t take Ken’s money for his slice of cake. ‘You can pay for it’, he told Ken, ‘by winning that match on Saturday.’
*
The crowds deepen as the bus takes the corner into Westgate Street. Women wear daffodil hoods, men are draped in flags and nearly everyone is wearing some version of a Welsh rugby shirt. Along with the running applause and the general cheers, more pulses of ‘Waaales, Waaales’ continue to follow the bus as the police horses and motorcycles carve a path for it to make its final turn off the street and down the incline at Gate 4 into the stadium. As it does, Jonathan Davies, sitting halfway up
on the left-hand side, sees, among the thousands of faces, his mother, waving and cheering with the rest of the crowd. The sight of her catches him unawares, and for a moment he feels his eyes welling up as the bus drives on down towards the stadium’s underground entrance, past the four mounted policemen, past an ambulance and on into the darkness.
Almost immediately the sounds of the crowd fade behind them. Suddenly, after that brief exposure, the squad are isolated again. The bus enters carefully, as if boarding a ferry. Giant ventilation ducts run along the unpainted concrete walls; frames of folded growing lights are lined up along another. Making one last turn past Gwyn’s security lodge, the bus finally comes to a halt outside the set of double doors leading into the changing rooms. Parked ahead of it, already here, is the blue bus of France.
Stewards in orange fluorescent jackets, ground staff and five members of the Royal Welsh Regiment, along with their regimental goat, William Windsor 25142301, look on in silence as the Welsh team disembark. Filing through the double doors, their headphones back on, the squad take the stairs up past the silver dragon and turn left towards the rooms that J.R., singing along to ‘More Than a Woman’, began preparing for them this morning.
*
From the moment the squad step off the bus, the machinery of the day steps up a gear. The next hour, with every minute accounted for, unfolds with a gathering momentum. The time of the kick-off is set at 2.45 p.m., and it will not move. At that moment the preparations will come to an end and the match will begin.