Calon by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online

raked seating of the North Stand. The torsos and arms of five Welsh players fill its canvas, their red, three-feathered shirts stretched tight across their chests and biceps. At one time the banner used to show the players’ heads too, but now it’s been cropped, cutting them off at the neck. The turn-over in the squad became too rapid and the scale of the image too expensive to recreate.
    A team is both eternal and ephemeral, its members forever changing. As Warren Gatland often reminds his young squad, they’re only borrowing the red shirt of Wales. Injury or another player rising through the ranks can be just around the corner. So the shirt is only borrowing them too. And that’s what the cropped bannerseems to say. You will borrow the shirt, and the shirt will borrow you, but only the shirt and the team will remain. You who fill out both are just passing through.
Yesterday
, as the banner in the Barn never lets the squad forget,
is in the past.

6.30 a.m.
    The eighty minutes of today’s match, though, are still in the future, and as Michael completes his lap of the stadium, this is what the men who’ll wear those red shirts today are thinking about as they wake up. It is still early, but as Michael leaves the stadium’s bowl by the Dragon’s Mouth, as he takes his growing sadness back to Barry, thinking, ‘Sod this, I’m off home for some breakfast,’ the Welsh players, twelve miles west in their shared rooms at the Vale Resort in Pontyclun, are already stirring. Their minds will have woken before their bodies, occupied with thinking about the day’s events. Their stomachs are light with nerves. Those who asked Prof. John, the team doctor, for a sleeping pill to get them through the night are still asleep. But those who didn’t are already waking and, therefore, from the second they open their eyes, preparing.
    Their captain, Sam Warburton, wakes up thinking of food. Not the taste of it, but the value of it. Food as fuel. This will be his main concern for the rest of the day until he boards the team bus for the journey into the city centre . How to make sure his body has the calories it needs for the exertion ahead? As he lies in his bed he visualises his body as an empty tank, filling through the day’s three meals before the match so that, at kick-off, he will be ready. But to be ready he has to keep that food inside hissystem, and on a match day that can be a challenge in itself. Sam wants the food, needs the food, but his nerves often kill his appetite and make his stomach unpredictable . More than once he’s coughed in the shower before a game only to find himself following through and vomiting up the pre-match meal. If that happens, Sam, panicked , will make straight for the team room to drink a protein shake and eat a banana. Although he doesn’t want solids inside him at kick-off, just their nutritional resonance, he knows he needs the fuel. And so he will eat, to give his body and the team he captains the best chance of coming through those eighty minutes on top.
    Down the corridor from the room Sam shares with Dan Lydiate, his playing partner at blindside flanker, the team’s centres, Jonathan Davies and Jamie Roberts, are also rooming together. On international days, other than when eating Jonathan would usually sleep and nap through the hours in the build-up to a match. But today is no ordinary match and the prospect of what lies ahead will keep him awake for the rest of the morning and afternoon.
    For the last two months the words ‘Grand Slam’ have rarely been spoken in the Welsh camp, although journalists at the ever-growing press conferences have been using the phrase with increasing regularity. The Welsh news papers, with typical enthusiasm, began seeding the phrase in their articles after the team’s first win over Ireland. But the Welsh players and coaches have alwaysremained focused on the next game in the competition, rather than the potential prize at its end. For a squad in camp,