semi-final defeat to France, this has been the question on the lips of Welsh supporters and, although unspoken, in the minds of the Welsh players too.
As I leave the stadium, nodding to Gwyn through the double plate glass of his security lodge, I know there’s no way of knowing the answer. Rugby’s script is written in the moment. Even the players in the squad do not know yet who will play in those five matches. Or which of them out celebrating tonight, as yet uncapped, might see their names added in gold leaf to those dark wooden boards. The only certainty is that those five matches will happen and that they will be won or not, each result leaving in its wake either a trail of disappointment or jubilation , celebration or mourning. ‘It’s either the wedding game or the funeral game with us,’ ‘Thumper’ Phillips,the Wales team manager, once said to me from behind his desk at the Vale. ‘Nothing in between.’
Two of those five matches will be played away, against Ireland in Dublin and England at Twickenham. The other three will be played here, on the meadow and rye grass of the Millennium Stadium. First against Scotland, then Italy, and then, in Wales’s last match of the tournament , on 17 March at 2.45 p.m., France. Whether or not that last game will also be a Grand Slam decider for Wales will depend on the balance of the scorelines of the preceding matches, each of them a challenge in its own right, in which the Welsh players will push their bodies to the limit in their attempts to tip the scales of those scorelines in their favour.
5 February
Ireland 21 – Wales 23
12 February
Wales 27 – Scotland 13
25 February
England 12 – Wales 19
10 March
Wales 24 – Italy 3
From BBC News, 16 March 2012
Former Wales captain Mervyn Davies has died following a battle with cancer. He was 65.
Known universally as ‘Merv the Swerve’ the number eight won a total of 38 caps for Wales and went on two victorious British and Irish Lions tours in 1971 and 1974.
Davies won two Grand Slams with Wales and three Triple Crowns. Davies was handed the captaincy of Wales in 1975 and skippered the side to the Five Nations Championship in the same year, and the Grand Slam the following season.
At 6ft 3in, Davies sometimes appeared ungainly on the field, but that belied his strength in the maul. He also had an uncanny sense of anticipation , allowing him to get to the breakdown first – and his height made him useful in the line-out.
In a poll of Welsh rugby fans in 2002, Davies was voted greatest Welsh captain and greatest Welsh number eight.
Now and Then
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’
There are moments in history
when a nation becomes a stadium.
When a country’s gaze and speech
tightens in one direction.
When a population leans, from sofas,
pub stools, in village halls, to watch.
Or strains to listen at the sides of roads,
or in tractor cabs in silent fields.
There are moments when the many,
through the few, become one.
A faithful but demanding tribe,
hungry for a win but also more.
For beauty as well as strength,
for art as well as war.
But romance, history, fervour,
are the privilege of watchers only.
For the men who must do,
though fuelled by the colour of the jersey,
the feathers on their chest, there can be no past
or future when, but only now.
For them those eighty tightening minutes
will be an ever-living present
composed of the angle of their runs,
the timing of cross kicks, the learned set piece
that fires the line to light the match.
It will be the focused practice
of what their bodies have learnt on the training pitch.
The thousands of hours of solitary pain,
the sacrifice that has led them,
and them alone, to this –
A nation sharing a pulse
as the clock counts up to the final