Calon (23 page)

Three days later the air of expectation felt at that training session in Ballymore was still tangible as Queensland rugby fans streamed into the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane for an 8 p.m. kick-off. Welsh supporters took their seats among the Australian crowd with memories of the Grand Slam still fresh in their minds, as if they held a secret of which their hosts were ignorant. Up in the commentary box Gwyn Jones, whose broken neck had brought Dan Baugh to Wales and Rob Howley into his captaincy, was also hoping his debut match as S4C’s ‘first voice’ would be a historic Welsh win down under.

The day before Gwyn had dropped in on the
kickers’
practice, the shiver of his injury still evident in his gait as he’d walked alongside the pitch watching their form. A shrewd commentator on the game, Gwyn knows this squad well, and what he saw at that practice session bolstered his hopes for their success. The kickers and
coaches all broadcasted the same calm steadiness that had seen them through their Six Nations campaign. Australia, meanwhile, were still fending off home
criticism
after their 6–9 loss to Scotland in hurricane
conditions
at Newcastle just four days earlier. So as he settled his headphones over his ears, with swallows and moths flying through the beams of the floodlights, Gwyn was confident about the Welsh potential in the match ahead. He was, however, also aware of their weaknesses.

This would be the first match Rhys had played at ten without the injured Jamie Roberts on his shoulder. The big centre had always been his fall-back position on a flat option throughout the Six Nations, so it remained to be seen what he’d do without him there. Similarly, the two centres who’d been paired in his absence, Jonathan Davies and Ashley Beck, hadn’t played top-flight rugby for two months. Despite the Scottish defeat, Australia were still number two in the world, and would be eager to answer their critics in the media. Wales would have to slow Australia down. If they didn’t, they’d be sucked into a fast game, and that alone could be enough to spell defeat.

That night after the match the treatment room of the Wales camp at the Brisbane Hilton resembled a casualty clearing station. Several players lay prone on the
treatment
beds, while others were on the floor, propped up against the wall. Scott Williams was still in hospital having his mouth stitched after a clash of heads with
Tatafu Polota-Nau; George North was receiving
treatment
for a dead leg; and Leigh was having a large piece of gauze strapped to his back. For many of the Welsh players the match had been the fastest they’d ever
experienced
. Intense, and with a high ball-in-play time, it had also been relentless. Luke Charteris said he’d wanted ‘the pause button pressed’ when it was still the first half. Unlike their opponents, who’d just been through the Tri-Nations tournament, many of the Welsh players had had a break from top-flight rugby, and it had showed. At the end of the match Wales looked exhausted. They were also, despite a comeback in the second half, soundly beaten, losing 27–19 to their hosts. They’d lost, and they’d deserved to.

But this second defeat they’d just suffered in Melbourne last night was different. Against all the odds and the
historical
trend of an opening match setting the tone for a series, Wales had come out fighting and, for much of the game, had been on top. So this time the defeat didn’t feel like a loss, but more like a win that had been stolen from them. And that’s why, as the team bus begins to drop past the botanical gardens and towards their hotel, the beaked dome of the Opera House cresting above the trees beyond, the atmosphere inside is still so leaden. Despite the swim in the ocean pool, and almost twenty-four hours since the final whistle, the hurt is still there, inlaid throughout the squad: in their expressions, their postures
and in the heaviness of their tread as they disembark from the bus and file into the lobby of the Intercontinental.

Two months before Wales left for this tour Warren Gatland fell ten feet while cleaning windows at his Waihi beach house in New Zealand. He landed on concrete, shattering his right heel bone and fracturing his left. There was no way he would recover in time, so for once it was a coach, not a player, who was ruled out of a tour through injury. Rob Howley, Warren’s assistant coach, stepped up to take over the squad. Although Rob has remained in close contact with Warren since, and despite him working with Wales since 2007, this was a seismic shift in his role. The final decisions – in selection, policy and training – were now his. With the change of a single word in his job title – from assistant coach to caretaker coach – his own words instantly gathered more weight, and with that weight, consequence.

Today, in the wake of the Melbourne defeat, Rob is clear about what the squad should do. They will stop. For two days they’ll pause the tour’s relentless routine and briefly disperse. The players need space and
perspective
to process what happened last night in Melbourne. A loss like that leaves a residue of grief in a squad, an emotion which must be respected and given time to run its course. On Wednesday they will regroup, assess what went wrong and plan their strategy for the final match of the series. But for now, for the next two days, they will
no longer have to obey the kit instructions on Thumper’s day sheets, the training will pause and all the players, within the limits of their alcohol ban, will be free to do what they want.

The break is welcomed by the squad. They have only been in Australia for two weeks, but already the
twice-recycled
tour routine of train, play, travel is starting to feel attritional. Including a midweek game against the ACT Brumbies in Canberra they’ve now played three matches, passing endlessly from plane to bus to hotel to bus to training pitch to gym to hotel to bus to plane. Predictability and boredom have become daily challenges. Shaun has travelled with a biography of Vladimir Putin under his arm, Rob McBryde with Emma Donoghue’s novel
Room
, while Roger Lewis has been reading Bruce Chatwin’s hymn to the outback,
The Songlines
. But for most of the squad, apart from their online lives and computer games, there has been little distraction from the focus of the tour: rugby. The free time they’ve had so far has been brief and isolated, leaving many of the players looking more disorientated than relaxed. Dividing into smaller groups they’ve gone shopping or hung around in the hotels drinking
coffee
, their explosive bodies restless in the muzak of the gilded lobbies. At these times, out of kit, their own clothes bestow their ages upon them once more. Along with those clothes and that age some have also adopted a surly uncertainty, a vulnerability even. ‘You have to
remember,’ Ryan Jones says one day, ‘most of us are just ordinary Welsh boys who just happen to have been good at rugby. Then, suddenly, you’re playing for Wales,
travelling
in business class all over the world.’

Ryan himself, frustrated by years of ‘travelling
everywhere
but going nowhere’, encourages some of the other players to use one of their free days to join him on a walk across the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Ianto, Alun Wyn, Adam Jones, Gareth Delve and the squad’s sports scientist Ryan Chambers sign up. The following morning the group put on the BridgeClimb jumpsuits and walk through the girders and ladders of the bridge to crest its highest point on a bright afternoon. Several Australians recognise them as they climb. Many commiserate with them for the loss in Melbourne, and more than one even says they hope Wales win the final test on Saturday. ‘You was robbed, boys,’ one man shouts through the wind as he descends the opposite arc. When they get to the
bottom
, the woman running the BridgeClimb office turns out to be from Llangynidr. She gives them all an extra photo of their climb, telling them, ‘Just beat the Aussies on Saturday.’

Other members of the squad use the time off to visit Bondi and Manley beaches, which is where Thumper heads too, going snorkelling in the shallows. In the
evening
nearly all the squad go to a rugby-league match, also in Manley, and most take up the invitation to attend a Lady Gaga concert in her
Born This Way
tour. On the
bus on the way to the gig Gethin plays dance tunes from the playlist, while Roger is on the phone to Wales, setting up TV deals and discussing court cases. At the gig itself the squad enter backstage and are impressed, if not
animated
, by Gaga’s show, tapping their feet and nodding their heads as they stoically remain in their seats while the rest of the arena stands up and dances. The following night a smaller party – Shaun, Ken, Roger and WRU press officer Simon Rimmer – go to a performance of Dylan Thomas’s
Under Milk Wood
in the Sydney opera house. The next morning over breakfast Ken tells Dan, Sam and others about the show, describing the set, music and how the actress playing Mae-Rose Cottage had drawn red lipstick round her nipples.

When the squad come together in the team room on Wednesday they are reanimated, fresher and ready to start again. The first briefing of the day will be an
assessment
and analysis of the match they lost in Melbourne. The atmosphere is akin to a sixth-form common room on exam results day. Music plays – Stereophonics’ ‘Local Boy in the Photograph’ and Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’, to which Dan silently sings as he reviews footage of the game’s line-outs on a laptop. Then, without warning, and with that osmosis-like communication of the day sheet, the squad gather in the chairs assembled before the projection screen linked up to Rhys Long’s laptop. As the players wait for the briefing to begin, Rhys’s baby
daughter, gigantic on his desktop wallpaper, stares down at the assembled squad from the screen above.

Shaun opens proceedings with a review of their defence. Speaking quietly he directs his comments at individuals. Those singled out nod in understanding and agreement with their own shortfalls. Decisions made instinctively at high speed, mid-game, are reviewed, slowed down on the screen and meticulously dissected. ‘We’re
assuming
’, Shaun tells the players by way of rounding off, ‘the tackles will be made. Don’t.’

Warren has been with the tour since Melbourne, but Rob Howley is the head coach now, so, as he has since he arrived, Warren stays quiet as Rob steps up to speak.

‘We’ve had two days to process last Saturday’s defeat,’ he tells the squad. ‘We’ve seen the sights of Sydney, now it’s time to go to work. We’ve jumped to fourth in the world rankings, and we should be proud of that. But now we need to stay there. We all know the game was ours on Saturday. We lost it because of
individual
decisions made by players
on their own
. As the coaches we can set the policies, but you have to play
within
these policies.’

Rob asks Sam if he has any words. Sam shakes his head, leaving it to Jenks to address the squad and announce the team. An almost imperceptible tremor of attention passes through the squad. One of Wales’s greatest strengths this last year has been the competition for places. Every
member
, including the senior players, has to compete for his
shirt. From this announcement onwards a subtle
division
will evolve through the following days’ preparations, between those chosen to play and be on the bench, and those not. Roles will be allocated accordingly in training, with increased attention for those selected from the
medical
and conditioning staff. The team, within the squad, will quietly define itself.

Jenks reads through the team sheet in his usual quick oscillating rhythms, matter-of-fact, down-to-earth. There is just one change – the hooker Ken Owens on the bench instead of Richard Hibbard. It was Hibbard who was penalised for collapsing the maul at the end of the match in Melbourne. Nothing else need be said. His punishment is in his omission; in not, on Saturday, being a part of Wales.

Before the squad disband for training, Warren, for the first time on this tour, stands from his chair and, leaning on his crutch, steps forward to address the players. He tells them just two things. Firstly, if they are to win, then they have to win ‘the battle of halfway’ first. They have to make sure they play their rugby in the Australian half, not theirs. ‘It is’, he tells them, ‘like a game of chess, a waiting game.’ In the first test, he points out, there were just six line breaks made by each side. In the second there were only two. The opportunities are few, he reminds them, so when they happen, make sure they happen ‘between the halfway line and
their
twenty-two, not ours.’

Warren’s second point is more incentive than advice. ‘There’s a big tour next year,’ he says dryly, referring to
the Lions tour of Australia, for which he’s tipped to be the coach. ‘So it’s time to put down a marker.’

The training after the team meeting, held between the 1930s stands of the North Sydney Oval, is rigorous, energetic and charged with enthusiasm. The squad look fresher for their time off. Having accepted they’ve lost the series, they’re now hungry for a win. A
seaplane
flies through the clear sky overhead and a flock of ibises stalk the ground as the Welsh players, harried by Rob and Jenks, hammer into tackle bags, practise miss passes and run through their moves. Warren,
sitting
in a plastic garden chair surrounded by scattered training equipment, looks on, one hand to his chin, thoughtful. Thumper strolls up beside him. Holding his phone, his glasses are still perched on the end of his nose after sending a text. ‘There’s some bewts,’ he says, nodding at James Hook and Mike Phillips. ‘Now they’re sweating.’

‘Remember what this feels like.’

This is what Rob Howley tells the Welsh team as they sit in their changing room at the Allianz Stadium having lost, once again, to Australia, 20–19.

In the second half Wales twice took the lead, only to lose it again in the seventy-fifth minute, when Berrick Barnes kicked a penalty.