Calon by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online Page B

precious metal of celebration?
    For Jamie, who debuted for Wales against Scotland during their Grand Slam campaign in 2008, his projection of that possible future is conjured upon the taste of experience. For three of the older players in the squad – Ryan Jones, Gethin Jenkins and Adam Jones – a win would mark their third Grand Slam each and see them join a select group of just three other Welsh players who’ve achieved the same. But for Jonathan and the majorityof this young squad this would be their first experience of a Grand Slam. The squad’s younger players are all in unfamiliar territory, on the brink of realising a childhood dream which none of them, until these last few days, had dared to think could ever come true.
    Now just twenty-three, Jonathan was a spectator in the stands at Wales’s last two Grand Slams, in 2005 and 2008. When he was growing up in west Wales, he remembers it being an ‘unwritten rule’ that every Welsh boy would try to play rugby at some point in their life. Jonathan was just five years old when he answered that national stipulation, picking up his first rugby ball at Bancyfelin Primary School, the same school where Mike Phillips, Wales’s scrum-half today, began his playing days. Jonathan played as a junior for St Clears, then, when the side disbanded, for Whitland, before, at the age of fifteen , moving on to the Scarlets academy. It was, though, a summer of fitness training with the father of one of his brother’s friends, Jeff Stephenson, that Jonathan cites as the crucial turning point of his teenage years. Training with Jeff over those summer weeks turned him from a ‘chubby kid’ into what he describes as ‘more of a physical presence’. As he got bigger, so his position altered, moving down the line from scrum-half, to outside-half, to centre.
    Throughout his youth Jonathan always considered himself as one of the bigger backs in the game, and he’d have been right to think so. Just listening to his voicewithout seeing him is enough to give you an idea of his size. Assured and gravelled it seems to rise from a deep Welsh quarry, resonant with his sixteen stone three pounds of weight. But size is relative, and in this current Welsh team Jonathan has come to think of himself as being on the smaller side. Of the six other men in the Welsh backline today three are taller and heavier than him, including his room-mate in the bed next to him this morning, Jamie Roberts, who at six foot four and seventeen stone four pounds still isn’t the biggest back in the squad.
    There was a time when the positions in a rugby-union team catered for a broad spectrum of body shapes: from the full-sail bellies of the props and the tall, cross- beam-shouldered locks, to the shorter, terrier-like scrum-halves and the more slender full-backs and wings. In Wales particularly this pattern resonated with an echo of the country’s class and economic hierarchy: the claustrophobic, bowed, scrummaging forwards working at the coalface of a match to win possession for the more individually minded backs, who using their greater freedom of movement and expression would exploit the forwards’ efforts, cashing in with a profit of tries and conversions.
    In Wales these backline entrepreneurs were traditionally the smaller men on the pitch, quick and visionary with game-changing side-steps and tackle-defying low centres of gravity. Their body shapes were those of the Welsh soldiers observed by Wilfred Owen in the trenchesof the First World War, the ‘stocky mountain men’ of his ancestry whose same attributes of quickness and shorter stature made them, in the eyes of the poet, good infantrymen as well as good backs.
    Though written into the game as early as the 1900s, this Welsh signature of backline play became epitomised in the great teams of the 1970s, in the form of Barry John, Gareth Edwards, J. P. R. Williams, Phil Bennett and Gerald Davies. Of these it was perhaps Gerald Davies who made the most from