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whistle
    when now becomes then. The moment,
    whichever way it falls, cast forever,
    and theirs to carry for the rest of their lives
    until, like those who’ve passed through
    this crucible before, they too will join
    the soil, the
tir
, the
pridd
of this land
    they were prepared to suffer for.

GAME DAY
    Wales vs France, 17 March 2012
6 a.m.
    Michael, a wiry seventy-five-year-old from Barry Island, gives Gwyn a wave as he enters the stadium. Gwyn doesn’t need to check his pass. Michael, white-haired, bespectacled, has been working as a volunteer with the ground staff here for years. And every match day he does this, walking in on his own at 6 a.m.
    Gwyn follows Michael on the CCTV monitor as he makes his way past the players’ entrance and round a corner towards the service areas. Michael is the only person on Gwyn’s quartered screen, his small body marooned in an expanse of angled, unpainted concrete, as if he’s walking through an architecture built for a species more gigantic than human.
    Following the coach-wide passageway, two storeys high, Michael passes through the groundsman’s storage supplies. Piles of fertiliser and nutrients, Kioti tractors , frames for the growing lights, spools of orange rope all crowd and gather at the walls. Three racing-green Dennis pedestrian cylinder mowers are parked in a row, clumps of grass like chewed cud collected in their barrels.Everything around Michael is on a massive scale, like the sound stage of a film studio stacked with the sets of an epic.
    As Michael enters a room on his left, however, everything is suddenly more intimate. With the single swing of a door, the stadium’s vocabulary of event is translated into a more domestic dialect. A round wooden table at the centre of the room is scattered with newspapers, four chairs around it: three plastic uprights and one double-sized ox-blood leather Chesterfield. Against the wall another, smaller table is crowded with mugs, teabags, coffee jars, a kettle and a small fridge. Apart from one life-size poster of Katherine Jenkins wearing a sequinned dress, the walls are covered exclusively with A4 photographs of the stadium’s pitch, each of them labelled with a year and the name of Wales’s opponents on that day:
    2007 – Ireland
    2009 – England
    2011 – Argentina
    In each photograph the pattern mown into the grass is different: checkered, long and short rectangles, stripes, diamonds in the dead-ball area.
    This is the groundsman’s office, which Michael shares with Lee, the head groundsman, and Craig, his assistant from John O’Groats. Lee and Craig call the photographs on the walls their ‘pitch porn’: a record of every patternthey’ve ever cut into the grass of the national ground, each one the result of considered discussion around the wooden table, sketches on envelopes, the laying of miles and miles of orange guide string and a strict regime of cutting and double cutting.
    ‘I doubt no one else ever notices,’ Craig once told Michael in his Scottish accent. ‘’Cept for us. And our wives, when they see it on tha telly.’
    The high-backed ox-blood Chesterfield belongs to Craig, the two gentle depressions in its seat marking the outline of his buttocks. He bought the chair via fatfingers. com, a website that lists misspellings on eBay. He wanted it for his home in Cardiff, only realising it was double-sized when he went to collect it. Stadium-sized.
    ‘My wife was’na havin’ it in the house,’ he explained to Lee when he turned up with it at the groundsman’s office. ‘So I thaw I’d bring it here instead.’
    Under the unblinking smile of Katherine Jenkins, Michael makes a cup of tea, stirring in a spoonful of sugar before taking his mug back out into the passageway and up into the stadium’s bowl. He enters pitch-side via the ‘Dragon’s Mouth’, a hydraulic ramp that opens and closes like a set of massive jaws.
    The stadium’s roof is open, but only by a metre. A slim line of early daylight