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falls directly onto the halfway line. Despite a forecast of rain, the French coach, Philippe Saint-André, has asked for the retractable roof to be opened. Warren Gatland, who would rather itstayed closed, joked at a press conference a few days earlier that perhaps when they tried to open it, the mechanism would fail and the roof would have to remain shut. This morning, when staff began opening the roof, the mechanism broke, leaving just this hairline of light falling onto the pitch.
    Michael stands at the north-east corner and sips his tea. When he was younger, it was football, not rugby, that was his game. In his twenties he even won a couple of Welsh caps. After his playing days were over, he got a job as a groundsman at a cricket club, and while he was there cricket became his focus. Having retired from the club, he was working as a gardener at a hotel in Cardiff when, six years ago, Lee’s predecessor asked him if he’d like to come and help out at the Millennium Stadium. Ever since, rugby and this stadium have occupied Michael’s interest.
    Holding his mug in both hands, Michael looks out over the pitch. The grass is patterned in even rectangles of pale green and deep emerald. It has been cut, cleared of feathers from the young birds moulting in the roof, then cut again. The whitewash of the touchlines, trylines, twenty-two-metre, ten-metre, dead-ball and halfway lines has been replenished. Michael himself has trimmed the grass round each set of posts with a pair of scissors. The pitch is ready.
    Michael takes a deep breath and begins to feel the sensation he always feels when he comes in this early on amatch day welling in his chest: ‘A deep fucking sadness.’ He gives the pitch a nod – part approval, part acceptance – then takes another sip of tea before starting his customary lap of the stadium. As he walks, the sadness continues to grow through him, like a blush of melancholy. ‘I don’t knows why,’ he says when asked about it. ‘It just does. There’s not another soul in the place, but I just feels so fucking sad. ’Cos it’s all over, I suppose. Until we start again.’
    No one else spends as much time on the grass of the national pitch as Lee, Craig and Michael. Everyone feels ownership over it: Roger Lewis, the chief executive of the WRU; the members of the WRU board; Gerry, the stadium manager; the fans; and, of course, the Wales coaches and players. But if ownership were measured in time, then Michael, Lee and Craig could make a better claim than most. Every time Lee and Craig double-cut the grass it’s a twelve-mile walk if working on their own, or six miles each if working together. Between them they’ve seen hundreds of players pass across the turf. Their days start early, around 7 a.m., and on the eve of a match they’ll often be giving the pitch its final cut well into the night. As they work, pushing the mowers under the floodlights at a determined, steady pace, they both listen to Radio 2 on their headphones. Sometimes they’ll text in a request – ‘for the groundsmen working on the Millennium Stadium’. If the song is played, they’ll raise a silent fist to each other across the empty pitch, beforedropping their eyes to the turf again to continue their mowing, making sure to only ever ‘walk down the light and never the dark’, so as not to disturb their patterns of pale-and deep-green grass.
    Michael pauses at the southern end of the pitch, the part of the stadium Lee and Craig call the ‘Bat-Cave’. Whatever the time of year, from row four back this portion of the ground never gets any sunlight. This is the turf that needs the most attention and the greatest amount of time under the growing lights. A succession of wheeling scrums in this part of the pitch can cause Lee and Craig, and therefore their wives, sleepless nights.
    Facing Michael at the other end of the stadium is an Under Armour advertising banner. As long as several buses, it hangs from the roof behind the