Calon (18 page)

To keep himself together George finds one point in the stands as he sings, and keeps his eyes fixed upon it. Sam, although always ‘singing out loud in my head’, usually remains silent. But this time even he, his hand on Daisy’s shoulder, sings, albeit in a subdued manner, as if, like in that letter by Ted Hughes, he’s doing all he can not to spill something brimming at his edge. Adam Jones, his eyebrows Vaselined against the abrasion to come, sings with a concerned frown of care. Jamie Roberts, with his eyes shut. Alun Wyn Jones, meanwhile, uses the anthem to take him to the next stage of his day’s preparations. With the sinews in his neck straining and the veins over his temples rising, Alun Wyn screams out the anthem’s final lines, his eyes reddening and his head tipped back.

The anthem ends in a torrent of applause, cheers and, as the players unbind, the breaking of the team’s chain. Alun Wyn looks as if he’s received terrible news, as if he wants to do someone harm in revenge.

Within seconds, as the field is cleared of banners, bands and choirs, the players are already preparing for kick-off. The French sprint and jog, swinging their arms,
performing final stretches. Wales, however, have tipped to the far end of their territory, where the team engages in Adam’s last few seconds of stolen time. In short,
concentrated
waves, they perform ‘bag hits’, running at Dan Baugh and the subs to smash into the tackle shields they hold before them. With each hit the shield-bearer is shunted a few feet back towards the dead-ball line, before reasserting their position for the next player and the next hit.

Behind them France are beginning to string out along the halfway line, so, turning from their final hits, the Welsh players also walk into position, scattering deeply through their half. Gethin Jenkins, the veteran prop, blows out a deep breath. Adam Jones calls instructions to the other forwards. Craig Joubert, the referee, raises his arm and blows his whistle. A fanfare sounds on the PA system and the crowd responds with a cheer as Yachvili, signalling to his teammates, drop-kicks the ball high and deep into Welsh territory.

The match has begun.

Toby, who wears Mervyn’s number-eight jersey today, and whose own father’s playing days brought him from Tonga to Wales as a child, catches the ball and drops his shoulder to meet what it will bring. A sudden blue wave rolls him and his teammates backwards, breaking over them as they form a ruck and Toby lays the ball back. Mike clears, making the first of the six kicks to
punctuate
this opening minute of the match. The fifth is made by Rhys, searching behind the French line. Alex, with a sprinting style reminiscent of Michael Johnson, comes steaming after it, pressurising Poitrenaud to punt into touch and making Wales the winners of the first kicking exchange.

The two packs come together to form the first set piece of the match, the forwards lining up in domino formation behind each other and next to their opposing numbers. The previous week the Welsh line-out seemed lacking, so for the past few days Rob McBryde has put in extra
sessions
working on their calls and moves. Unlike the scrum, the line-out is a set piece of moving parts: a thrower, two lifters, dummy runners and a jumper. If a call is to be
successful
, each of these parts must work off and with each other like the intimate mechanics of a watch. For Alun Wyn, lining up at the centre of the Welsh formation, it’s as much about rhythm as memory. ‘A good line-out’, he says, ‘will flow. It’s more art than science.’

If that rhythm is right, then the line-out is also a brief pause button in a match, a slow-motion ballet with the jumper, which Alun Wyn is now, lifted to twice his height and suspended there for a second, held aloft by Adam and Gethin below him.

Catching the ball cleanly, Alun Wyn drops it to Mike at scrum-half, as if throwing it down from a first-floor window. At the same time as his rising, like the un doing of a combination lock both flankers, Sam and Dan, have popped out of the line. Taking a few paces back they both pause, each with one foot cocked, a mirror of each other, ready to spring forward.

It isn’t them, though, who come onto the ball but Alex, charging in to take Mike’s pass in his arms,
clutching
the ball to his chest as if cradling a child. Hitting the French defence, he sucks in two defenders before going to ground.

Mike digs in the bodies and spins the ball free,
releasing
a chained pattern of breaks, stoppages and passes that revolves through three phases before ending in another French clearance to touch.

Already Matthew, Sam and Jon Davies have all tested the French line, with Jon breaking through it, only to be dragged down by Fofana, clinging to his back like a cheetah jumping on its prey.

‘But a line-out’, Alun Wyn also says, ‘is about possession quality, not just percentage.’ As Matthew throws in, the ball is tapped down to Mike, who, having to scramble for it, is enveloped by French shirts. Adam stands in at scrum-half, but the slower ball has given the French time to prepare, so as Matthew receives his pass, he too is hit to the ground.

Just as there’s a kinetic chain in each of the players’ movements, so there is a chain of reaction through every period of play. Mike is back in position, pointing
instructions
, sending Toby back off a ruck. But the disrupted flow of that line-out is now in the rhythm of the Welsh game too. As Alun Wyn carries the ball into another phase he knocks it on and loses possession.

The French scrum-half, Yachvili, kicks downfield, and Craig Joubert announces, ‘Advantage over.’ Just as
line-outs
have rhythm, so do matches, and it is the referee, as much as the players, who conducts that rhythm. With this announcement Joubert is setting out his stall: in the interest of the flow of the match he’ll be moving on from advantages quickly, trying to keep the flame of the game alight.

Leigh receives Yachvili’s kick and returns a high,
mortared
ball back to the French. Yet another kick comes back, into touch in the Welsh half. This time it’s Ianto, already over two metres tall, who rises even higher from the line-out to drop the ball to Mike, who spins it to Rhys, who puts yet another high, hanging kick into the air.

Last night Rhys went to the cinema with Jon, Mike and Jamie. They knew the roof of the stadium would be open today, and they’d seen the forecast for rain. Jon asked Rhys what was the highest number of kicks he’d ever made in a game. Rhys said he couldn’t be sure – maybe forty? ‘Well,’ Jon said, ‘I reckon you could be kicking all day tomorrow.’

And so far Jon’s been proved right. The rhythm of the match is being set on the boot, not through the hands.
‘Play in their half’ – this is the Welsh policy. Kick and put them under pressure, no silly mistakes. It’s a good policy for a match like this, in which France are trying to slow down the play. But sometimes for Rhys, wearing the iconic number ten on his back means that ‘good’ policy isn’t always seen as the right policy by fans in Wales. Such is their expectation of a ‘national’ style that he’s had
complaints
about him not ‘playing in a Welsh way’. But the quietly spoken Rhys is a reader and a strategist of the game. Part of his role is to look for space on the field, to test their opponents’ pressure points. And today, with a greasy pitch and a wet ball, this is how he’ll be doing that – by skying kicks that send everyone’s heads tilting back, and that give his backs time to chase and harry upfield.

Another Welsh knock-on sees the setting of the first scrum, the two packs kneeling and binding in preparation to knit together at the referee’s command.

The etymology of the word ‘scrum’ has violence at its every root. Derived from ‘scrimmage’, itself a
corruption
of ‘skirmish’, its origins lie in the old High German ‘
skirmen
’ – ‘to protect, defend’ – and the Middle English ‘
skirmysshen
’ – ‘to brandish a weapon’.

Where once the scrum was the most basic of
territorial
contests on a pitch, in the modern game it has, in Rob McBryde’s words, ‘become more of a hitting contest than a shoving contest’. Changes in the rules, and the relaxing of others such as feeding, mean the scrum, for all its base qualities of weight, power and aggression, is now also a subtle tactical arena of sleight of hand and one-upmanship. Where once a scrum was used to win the ball, they’re now frequently used to win a free kick or penalty instead.

The two packs, loaded with the potential kinetic
tension
of their combined force, crouch and face each other. Gethin holds his free hand in a fist; Adam holds his open. The heads of the opposing props and hookers are inches apart, ready to mesh into the spaces between each other’s necks, hitting shoulder against shoulder, driven together by the full weight of the packs behind them. The force of that collision is around 14.8 kilonewtons, 150
kilogrammes
per 0.09 square metres, the equivalent of
dropping
a cow onto a person’s shoulders from a metre’s height and enough total force to uproot a small oak. For Adam’s wife, Nicole, this is the hardest part of the game to watch, both because of that force and because she knows this is when Adam, at tight head, although unseen, has to perform the dark arts of the front row, when he has to dominate and pressurise his opposite number.

Craig Joubert, standing over the two packs, gives them their instructions.

‘Crouch. Touch.’

The props flick their free hands forward to lightly tap the shoulder of their opposite number.

‘Pause. Engage.’

Earlier this week, as they packed down against a scrummaging machine on a mist-covered Castle pitch at the
Vale, the Welsh forwards heard these exact instructions, spoken in the same rhythm by the same voice. Craig Joubert was not at that training session, but his voice was, emitted from an iPod dock held by one of Rhys Long’s analysts crouching beside the pack. Such are the margins in modern rugby that a referee’s intonation, the length of his pause, the rhythm of his speech can be enough to turn a game. Which is why all through that session in the mist the Welsh pack scrummaged with Joubert’s voice in their ears, timing the wave of their drive, from Toby’s first nudge to the impact of the front row, against that single repeated phrase, fuzzy but consistent in their ears.

And now, as the two packs engage at the Millennium Stadium, as they hit shoulders and sixteen pairs of legs brace and flex against the pitch, the timing laid into the muscle memories of the Welsh pays off. The scrum caves in and the French are penalised for early engagement.

Mike immediately goes searching for the ball, finds the mark, then taps and spins to Toby, who once again launches himself at the waiting French.

Wales move through the phases, but with France barely committing to the rucks, their defensive wall remains strong. Gaining possession, Beauxis, their number ten, kicks upfield. Leigh returns with another high, lingering kick. Dan gathers the ball when it goes loose, the Welsh move finishing with Rhys grubber-kicking into space. A French drop-out from their twenty-two is returned with another high kick from Rhys, Jon’s prediction of last night becoming more true with every unfolding minute of the game.

When Rhys’s kick lands, it’s Welsh hands that collect it. Sam, dropping his shoulder, drives into the French line, with Alun Wyn lending his weight in support. But when he fails to keep that weight on his feet, France win a free kick, and then the line-out after it.

With the echo of that iPod in their ears, the Welsh pack win another free kick from a scrum. This time Mike taps and goes himself, skirting round the still bound front row and piling into the French defenders.

Unlike his attack coach, Rob Howley, who had to fight for his position at scrum-half against those who thought he was too small, Mike had to fight for his against those who thought he was too big. Scrum-half is a position rich with association, those two words conjuring the image of a shorter, stocky man, terrier-like at the heels of the bigger forwards. A mini-general, commanding the game, who probes and darts at the gaps in an opponent’s armour. For years scrum-halves have had their positions guessed by strangers in bars, simply by sizing them up in comparison to the other rugby players they know.

Until he was fourteen Mike fitted this idea. But then he grew, eventually reaching six foot three. Aware of his own size, it wasn’t a Welsh scrum-half Mike admired when he was playing for Whitland and St Clears, but the tall South African, Joost van der Westhuizen. People telling him to change his position was just fuel to the fire, convincing Mike he had to prove them wrong and remain a scrum-half.

Mike displays a similar dogged quality now, as he
drives on into the French defence and is brought down, only to get to his feet and continue again, barging into the bulk of French lock Maestri.

There is a feral quality to Mike’s play, and to Mike too, off the pitch. This has been mostly to Wales’s benefit, providing Warren with a dangerous player big enough to be a third flanker, yet still possessed of that scrum-half guile and tenacity. But the modern game is about balance too, something Mike acknowledges as one of its biggest challenges. ‘I’ve tried different stuff,’ he says about his preparations for a game. ‘To work myself up, or to chill myself down. But that’s what makes rugby so hard. You have to be on the edge; you have to smash someone twice your body weight, then next minute you have to be
composed
, think about what’s best for the team.’

The whistle blows. This time Mike got the balance wrong by half a second, not releasing the ball when he was brought down briefly. France are awarded a penalty, and the Welsh retreat to await the French kick for touch.