I’ve had enough of the team playing well but coming up a bit short, which has happened all too often in the past couple of seasons, and I’ve also had enough of people accepting that a little too easily. With the changing of the guard has to come a change in attitude too. After this match there are only three more warm-up matches before the World Cup. If we fancy ourselves to do well in the World Cup, and we do, we have to win this one.
We don’t.
Oh, we should do. We’re nine points up with nine minutes to go, and from a position like that we ought to be home and hosed. Just keep the ball tight and work it through the phases, running down the clock as we do so. But we’re not ruthless enough. Mathieu Bastareaud scores a try to bring them to within a score, and then with a minute to go they run it from deep, Willie Mason offloads out of the tackle to Isa Nacewa, and Nacewa beats four players in a 65-metre run to touch down. The conversion makes it 31–28 to them, and that’s that.
I try to rationalise it. They were a good team, they had nothing to lose. We were missing a few players. That’s how it goes. But whichever way I look at it, we shouldn’t have lost.
July. Spala, Poland. You can’t win a match you’ve just lost, but you can win the next one. The only way to atone for the Barbarians defeat is to do well at the World Cup. The only way to do well at the World Cup is to be the fittest team there. The only way to be the fittest team at the World Cup is to push ourselves further than ever before.
Hence Spala.
It was built in the 1950s and still looks like the kind of place where they’d have trained Soviet cosmonauts. It’s spartan, in every way. No frills, no fripperies, no distractions. No TV, no PlayStation or Xbox, and no alcohol, not for anybody; drier than a backwoods county in the Bible Belt of the Deep South. Oak forests all around, swaddling us away from the outside world.
You’re hard men who’ve lived soft lives, they tell us. Not any more, not while you’re here at any rate. You’re going to push yourselves and each other harder and harder, to be quicker and stronger and more durable than you ever thought possible; a hundred and fifty per cent harder than ever before, our strength and conditioning coach Adam Beard says. Take the maximum you’ve known and add on another half of that again.
This is not a joke. This is not a figure of speech. A hundred and fifty per cent. Add on another half again.
And the pain. Always the pain. We hurt. We hurt together.
We’re split into three groups: front five, back row and half-backs, centres and back three. We have three hour-long sessions a day. The sessions are staggered, so we wait our turn while the group before us is being beasted. We wait in silence, readying ourselves for the pain. As we go out to start a session, we pass the guys before us coming back in. They have the glassy-eyed look of a convicts’ road gang. They’re all dripping with sweat. Quite a few are splattered with vomit.
Weight vests on, stiff with the sweat of whoever used them last. Standing in a sandpit lifting heavy bags from ground to head and back. Pushing weighted sleds. Tyre flips. Bear crawls. Down and up, sprint, down and up, sprint.
Throw up? Good. Better out than in. Keep going. Trying to suck in the air. Shattered. Don’t show it. Don’t put your hands on your knees. That’s Rule One. Never put your hands on your knees.
Thank God that’s over.
‘One more circuit.’
Wrestling, one-on-one with Jonathan Thomas. He’s three inches taller and a stone and a half heavier than me. Money passing between Gats and Rob Howley as they watch. ‘A tenner says JT.’ I look up long enough to snarl at them, which is exactly the response they want.
Tug-of-war, one-on-one with Bradley Davies: six inches taller, three stone heavier, and a real athlete. Gats doesn’t care. ‘Fancy yourself up there with McCaw, Warby? Bradley’s making you his bitch.’
I set myself and pull harder. Every muscle screaming in agony. I can take it.
The management watching us like hawks the whole time. Who’s going to crack? Who’s going to break? Who’s going to whinge? Do any of those and you aren’t going to the World Cup. You keep going because the next guy does, and the next guy keeps going because you do. If you break that chain then you have no place here.
Into the cryotherapy chambers. Shorts, socks, gloves, face mask, headband and wooden clogs. The first chamber is at -50°C, but that’s just a warm-up, if you like, for the second chamber. The second chamber is -150°C: a whiteout where you can’t see the guy standing right next to you, where you keep talking and moving for fear that if you don’t you’ll just stop and die. Even the tiniest drop of sweat left over stings as it freezes hard on your skin.
This kind of cold is a living thing: something that scours, something that sears. It’s not just that it helps repair damaged tissues quicker, allowing us to train harder. It’s a mental thing too, a purging. The cold strips away everything but the essentials. Cleanse yourself. Punish yourself. You want to win? This is what it takes.
This is the kind of thing that bonds teams together, so that in the last few minutes of a tight match you can look at each other and know what everyone’s thinking without needing to say it.
Remember Spala.
Remember Spala, and know that you have what it takes to close out the win. We’ve lost too many of those kind of matches. Not anymore.
Remember Spala.
Smiler’s suffering from a neck injury, so I keep the captaincy for the two warm-up matches against England in August, first at Twickenham, then a week later in Cardiff.
Andy helps me develop a leadership compass: four attributes that will make me a better captain.
Professional attitude
Positive attitude
My own performance, and leading by example
Develop personal relationships with the players
The first three come easily to me, the fourth less so, simply because I’m quite introverted and shy. Work on that one more than the others, Andy says. Sometimes you have to work on your weaknesses rather than your strengths, at least to get them to the point where they’re no longer a weakness.
Saturday, 6 August. Twickenham. I write reams and reams on the hotel notepad before the first England match, pacing up and down the room, practising what I’m going to say. But when it comes to giving the team talk, it all comes out as just a bunch of mumbled irrelevant crap. It would be bad enough as it is, but much worse that I’ve spent so much time and energy on it for so little reward.
We lose the match 23–19, though the result pales into insignificance compared with the horrific injury that Morgan Stoddart suffers early in the second half. He wasn’t even supposed to be on the pitch so soon, but Stephen had pulled up with a calf injury in the warm-up, forcing us to switch Rhys Priestland to 10 and bring Morgan in at 15.
Morgan’s tackled from behind by Delon Armitage, and his left leg goes two different ways at once. Danny Care, fair play to him, instantly sees the trouble Morgan’s in and frantically calls the ref to blow up so Morgan can get treatment. He’s snapped both his tibia and fibula, and he’s screaming in pain. It’s a break so horrific that they don’t even show it on the TV replay, and it’s a reminder to everyone that there but for the grace of God go us all. It wasn’t a foul or a dirty tackle, just a tragic accident.
Morgan’s out of the World Cup, that much is immediately obvious. What we don’t know at the time is that he’ll never play for Wales again.
Saturday, 13 August. Millennium. I don’t use any notes or prepare a speech this time. I just speak