Calon (22 page)

Beyond the changing room the stadium itself is
beginning
to empty, the crowds spilling into a city already fevered with jubilation. At Gate 3, where ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ rings out from the bars around Cardiff Athletic Club, everything seems transfigured by the win. In the dying light the boarded Inland Revenue building, the old Queen’s Royal Garage, the County Club are all lent a more majestic air by the grandeur of the occasion. Even the strip lights of the NCP car park, burning
magnesium
white, seem to shine in tribute to what has just happened.

The tide of people who washed up this entranceway before the match are now flowing back down its incline, thousands of them ebbing from the stadium, taking their shared experience of the last eighty minutes into the city and across the country. Rising above them once more is the statue of Sir Tasker Watkins, his hands behind his back, looking out over the filling streets and alleys. On the plinth on which he stands his words are written on a plaque:

Sir Tasker’s words remain unread by the thousands streaming past him, the spirit of celebration keeping their heads up, not down. All their energies, which for the last two hours have so charged the stadium behind them, are now directed outwards. Like returning
travellers
rushing down a ship’s gangway, they are eager to leave and tell of their adventures. For many this will be the sweetest moment of their country’s victory: when what was so powerfully hoped for has been secured, and when the purity of that second when the clock turned red and the whistle was blown is still vibrant within them. Because already, even as they flow onto Westgate Street and St Mary’s, it is fading. As the stadium empties and its crowds disperse, so too does the essence of that winning moment. As Yeats says,
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold
. Within hours the stadium’s crowd will be unravelled throughout the city, their celebrations often a perverted inversion of everything which brought about the source of their revelry. Bodies will lie in the streets, too much will be drunk, and the honour and
cymeriad
– character – of Wales’s victory will be blurred under beer and kebab boxes.

But it will still be there, held by the stadium itself and in the collective memory of those who watched and those who played. Like Warren told the team before the match, ‘You win a Grand Slam and it’s yours. No one can take it away from you.’ As the fans crowd at the bars and the players change into their black ties, this is true for both
of them. However brief the lap of victory, however
diffused
in drink Wales’s win may become tonight, however unread Sir Tasker’s words, they are all still there, and will remain so, quietly resonant at the heart of this evening at the end of this day.

A winter sunlight washes amber over the Sydney
coastline
as the Wales bus pulls away from the lawns, cafes and broad sands of Bronte Beach. Inside, the squad sit in their familiar formation, their red hoodies and
training
tops pressing against the windows on either side. The cuts and grazes of those who played in yesterday’s test are still stinging from the salt water of the beach’s ocean pool. The swim was brief but, together with the winter chill in the air, enough to have left all of them with a sea
tightness
to their skin, an ocean cold lingering in the bone. Which is exactly what Adam Beard wanted: a recovery swim for their bodies; a cold dip to promote healing and reduce swelling. But he also wanted it to be more than that: to be a different kind of recovery session, one that would help heal another kind of hurt. Which is why he brought the squad here, to Bronte Beach, to swim in the saltwater pool at its southern tip, to take in the rocky and residential cliffs and to watch the surfers ride the riffs of white-tipped breakers.

The bus reaches the top of an incline, pauses, then turns right to drive on through the suburbs of Bondi, heading
north towards the harbour and the Intercontinental, the team’s hotel. As the driver steers with one hand he puts on the tour playlist with his other, a collection of songs compiled from two choices by each player and member of staff. As the boys look out of their windows at the easy-going evening of a Sunday in Sydney, Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’ begins to play through the bus’s speakers.

Yesterday, on a pitch marooned in the middle of an Australian Rules stadium in Melbourne, Wales lost their second test against Australia. It was an intense, tight game. As Robbie Deans, the Australia coach, said at the post-match press conference, ‘We had to win the game three times, because we lost it twice.’ Within four
minutes
of kick-off George had scored under the posts and Wales were already 7–0 up. The Welsh forwards
dominated
the Australian scrum in what Ken Owens called ‘the old-fashioned way’. For the last ten minutes of the game Australia fought desperately against a Welsh lead of 23–22. At full time that scoreline remained unchanged. And yet Australia still won, with a penalty kicked at eighty minutes forty-three seconds by Michael Harris, a substitute who’d taken the field just minutes before.

Wales, after putting their all into the match, thought they’d finally won a southern scalp on southern soil. They thought, with the clock turned red, that they’d kept the final outcome of the three-test series alive; that
perhaps
, having beaten Australia at home for the first time
in forty-three years, they might yet go on to be the first European team to win a southern-hemisphere test series. But they were wrong. When Wales were penalised for collapsing a maul in the final play of the game, Harris, on to replace Berrick Barnes, stretched his kicking leg, held his nerve and slotted the penalty to win the match. Australia 25 – Wales 23. It was the most painful of losses, summed up by Rob Howley in a single comment over breakfast this morning: ‘It’s a cruel sport.’

So this is the other hurt that Adam hoped the beach swim might help heal: the slow, enduring bruise of loss. The oppressive ache of defeat that has settled on the squad ever since Harris’s kick and the final whistle that followed it. In the wake of that whistle Adam Jones stood in the middle of the pitch, looking both devastated and perplexed. Sam also stood motionless, his gumshield protruding from his mouth, his hands on his head. The team’s belief was instantly transformed into disbelief. More than one of the players cried in the changing rooms afterwards. They knew they could beat Australia, but for a fourth time in nine months – at the World Cup
play-offs
, at home and now twice here – the eighty minutes of each match had proved them wrong. They’d come south to take the next step in their development, to once again make a little bit of history. But they’d faltered in that step, and now the three-test series was lost, the final match next Saturday an opportunity to salvage pride rather than go for the kill.

The bus drives on up Carrington Road, the squad quiet and distant, looking out of their windows in private thought. As they do, Eric Clapton sings over them:

Along the length of the bus the players silently begin to sing along with him. Mouthing the lyrics, they watch Sydney pass them by, their faces ghosted in the glass through which they look. No one talks. The bus drives on, the song plays, and the players sing,

Just less than two weeks ago it had all seemed so possible. As the Welsh squad prepared for the first test in Brisbane, the same voltage of belief that had driven them through the Six Nations was still charging the touring party.

Wales had arrived in Australia in two stages. While one half of the squad flew on ahead to begin their preparations, the other half stayed on in Wales to play and beat the
Barbarians
. This meant that, as well as fielding the largest tour party ever – a total of thirty-four players
– Wales operated for their first week in Australia like a twin-engined airplane, with each engine running at
different
speeds. As half the squad recovered from jet lag and the Barbarians game, the other half trained. When this half went for recovery, the newly arrived players went for training.

Even without this added complication this tour is already a significant logistical challenge. J.R. has
transported
sixty-seven boxes of equipment from Cardiff. Thumper had already visited every hotel, training ground and stadium months before the squad arrived. In each hotel they occupy, the Wales camp takes over entire floors to recreate the components of their team room in the Vale. Within hours of arriving, the Wales staff will have utilised ballrooms and conference suites to set up a dining area, treatment room, laundry system, banks of laptops for analysis, leisure area with table tennis and a dart board, a press room and a briefing area complete with projection screen and whiteboards.

The injection of a touring party into the life of a hotel can make for a strangely integrated yet divided experience. As other guests travelled in the glass lifts of the Brisbane Hilton, their cars rising and falling in the tubular shafts like bubbles in spirit levels, they
witnessed
the hotel’s interior suddenly infected with a rash of red. While the squad had a briefing session before their first test, a Sinatra impersonator warmed up in the lobby below them with a rendition of ‘Moon River’. As
an aircrew checked in at reception, the uniformed group was strangely echoed by a cluster of players having
coffee
, all wearing identical kit and compression tights. As holiday shoppers returned laden with branded bags, they were met by the sight of the Wales squad in shorts and flip-flops, setting out for a walk along the river.

When the hotel’s Tongan night porter realised Toby Faletau was in the same building, he left him a note hoping, just for a moment, to draw him away from the squad’s regime:

However daunting the logistics and the matches ahead, from the moment Wales landed in Australia their tour was fuelled by a positive sense of expectation and potential. Much of this was imposed by the Australian and Welsh media, but in the two weeks before the Melbourne test it was also genuinely felt at the heart of the touring
party itself. As Shaun Edwards said at a press
conference
, ‘Usually at this time of year the boys would be in bits. But they’re not, they’re in good shape.’ At the first full-squad training session at Ballymore, in the north of Brisbane, the tantalising possibility of winning this series, of beating Australia on their home ground was palpable in the atmosphere. The stadium and pitch is used by the Queensland Reds as a training facility, so Wales trained at night, under floodlights, when they could have the ground to themselves.

As the squad warmed up with Adam Beard in the middle of the field, one of Rhys Long’s analysts, Rod, set up his filming and monitoring equipment high at the back of a grandstand. Thumper, meanwhile, walked into the shadows beyond the floodlights’ glare to check for less welcome cameras spying on the session. A
photograph
taken of Wales training earlier in the week had already appeared in one of the papers. ‘The buggers always try it on,’ Thumper said, before heading off, his satchel across his shoulder, to walk the bounds of the pitch. Accompanied by the metallic tang in the winter air and the croaking of cane toads from the marshes at the ground’s edge, he walked beyond the floodlight’s island of light and on into the darkness. As he got further from the squad, they became increasingly diminished under the floodlights’ glare, until they were no more than a red seam between the green of the pitch and the black night sky; a thin red line moving as one between the posts.

The connotations of that phrase –
thin red line
– are, perhaps, suitable for a rugby squad on tour. Wales are isolated out here; on unfamiliar territory, without their usual support networks back home. As such, in relation to their alienation, their unity is further emphasised. Most of the squad have purchased pocket Wi-Fi devices, and all of them tweet, Facebook and email regularly. But there’s still a sense that all they have out here is each other. That on these pitches of southern soil on the other side of the world the
idea
of a team is somehow stronger; that like an invasion force the further from home they travel, the more they embody and represent the country in whose name they have arrived.

There is, though, also something of the Trojan Horse about the character of a touring party’s invasion. Everywhere Wales have been they have been welcomed. The Australian Rugby Union have hosted dinners and events for Roger and the other members of the WRU travelling with the squad. The local media have attended the press conferences and have, on the whole, been
generous
. The players are stopped for autographs and
photos
. And yet they are all here with a single intention: to cause damage to the national psyche of their hosts. To beat a country which prides itself on sporting prowess on its own doorstep.

At the end of the squad’s training in Ballymore the three kickers on the tour – Leigh Halfpenny, Rhys Priestland
and James Hook – stayed behind to practise. After the explosive defence and attack drills of the previous hour their session was, by comparison, a meditative caesura of calm focus. With just the three of them and Jenks on the pitch, the ground suddenly seemed larger under the floodlights; expansive and inviting. To a regular punch and thud of balls struck and landing, all three of them, working independently, once again went through their routines for place-kicking at goal.

The kickers are the snipers of a team; the individuals who, if on form, can single-handedly destroy an opposition, chipping away at their scoreline with penalties, drop goals and conversions. Even when not scoring points, a kicker who’s found the perfect weight of punt against that day’s wind and weather, who can read the spaces on the field will cruelly punish the other team. However
hard-fought
gaining their territory may have been, a series of kicks at the right time into the right space will have them repeatedly turning and sprinting back down the field, eating up the metres of their endeavour as they do.

Just as a sniper in a military company will stand apart, will train their eye alone, so the kickers in a rugby squad need their solitary moments, quiet codas at the end of a session in which to hone the destructive quality of their boot.

As the Wales kickers practise at Ballymore, they reveal, with each kick, the attributes of their styles, still visible within the architecture of Jenks’s teaching.

As Leigh settles himself after stepping back from the ball, he stutters the toe of each boot into the turf, giving his right toe one more tap than his left.

For James, at the same moment, it’s a downward brush of the right toe across the left calf.

Rhys, however, prefers to keep still, planting the toe of his kicking boot behind him like a horse resting a hoof.

The ball in front of Leigh is sharply angled on the tee towards the posts. James’s is more upright, while Rhys’s is the most upright of all.

Leigh’s first slow steps towards the ball are like that of a cat stalking its prey. As he begins to tip forward he flicks his eyes to the posts once more, as if looking up at the call of his name.

For James, it’s as if he’s descending the stairs, lowering himself with each step, pressing his aquiline features closer to the ball.

For Rhys, his first steps are like taking a stroll.

And then all three of them speed up. All three, in a sudden explosive moment, take their final strides quickly, plant their left foot beside the ball and strike through it with their right, their bodies scissoring with the effort.

For a split second, as the ball flies from the tee, they are also in the air, suspended, with neither boot touching the turf.

When they make contact again, for all three it is with their kicking boot, snapped to the ground like the closing of a predator’s jaw.

And then, with Jenks watching and commenting, a ball under each arm as he patrols the field, they do it again. And again. And again. With the cane toads
croaking
in the darkness and the temperature falling, Leigh, James and Rhys kick at those posts from their positions on the pitch, unsatisfied with anything other than the ball bisecting them as cleanly as possible. And then they start again, changing their positions, each man throwing his tee ahead of him like a gambling chip thrown to a casino’s baize.