Calon by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online Page A

expectation and aspiration are volatile fuels, essential but combustible. Given too much of an airing they’ll easily explode the very potency that brings a team success. Privately, though, the thought of winning a Grand Slam has never been far from the thoughts of the Welsh squad. From the moment Wales lost to France in the World Cup, Sam, not usually a superstitious man, acknowledged a strong intuition that Wales ‘deserved something good to happen’ in the coming Six Nations. After another rehab and conditioning week of cold-weather training at Gdansk in Poland, the squad entered the tournament with the belief that they were just too good to fail. But they were also realistic. Sport can be cruel, and rugby more cruel than most. Key World Cup players such as Alun Wyn Jones and Gethin Jenkins were still injured, as was the hooker and former captain Matthew Rees. Nothing could be taken for granted. Which is why, as with each win Grand Slam fever infected more and more of Wales, the Welsh camp itself has remained an island of calm within the country.
    Over the course of the tournament the players and coaches training at the Vale have been subjected to an ever-tightening focus of attention. Since last week’s victory over Italy, today’s match against France has dominated the national conversation. At service stations as you fuel your car, in cafes, pubs, restaurants, staffrooms andoffices, schools and hospitals, wherever you’ll have gone in Wales for the past week you will have heard aspects of the coming match being endlessly dissected and examined . Anticipation is the lifeblood of the sports fan. This morning, on the brink of a possible third Grand Slam in eight years, there are few in Wales who have not been anticipating today’s match and, for this week at least, not become fans.
    And yet despite this overheated cauldron of obsession, the Welsh camp at the Vale – the Castle training pitch, the gyms, the team room, the Barn – has somehow managed to maintain its lower operating temperature. For the last two months, on entering its environment players and coaches alike have felt a palpable expansion of the chest and mind, as if it’s here, at the very eye of the storm, where they can think and breathe most clearly, where they can feel most at home.
    Until this week. Over the last six days the seal on the Vale’s vacuum has begun to leak. The press conferences have continued to grow, with journalists arriving from France, Italy, Argentina. At each session a forest of camera tripods jostle for position, the Dictaphones on the top table multiplying like cells dividing.
    The public have followed the press too, with fans, families and sponsors all converging on the Vale in the hope of meeting, or just seeing, one of Wales’s prospective Grand Slam champions. The players are the same men who started this campaign just six weeks ago, butalready success has gilded each of them with the blessing and the curse of being ‘a child o’ the time’.
    Like many of the squad, Jonathan Davies has attempted to escape the mounting pressure and protect his time away from training. He’s begun using the service elevators and back entrances of the hotel, and hasn’t read or listened to any of the press coverage of the match. The atmosphere at the Vale, he says, has become ‘surreal’. But at the same time it’s been impossible to avoid the thought of what a win against France today would mean. Over the last few days, as he and Jamie have discussed game plans and tactics in their room, they’ve also allowed themselves, for the first time, to speak those two words openly – ‘Grand Slam’. Not as an inevitability, but as a whispered possibility. With the other four matches of the campaign successfully behind them, they’ve begun to imagine what the wake of a fifth victory might look like. What would Wales look like if, through the alchemy of today’s match, they could transfigure the current ore of expectation into the