Free Calon by Owen Sheers Page A

but more intense, when under the stiletto-pressure of a match-day kick that coalface of practice is converted into a few diamond seconds under the eyes of millions. When a stadium and two stalled teams all wait upon the strike of your boot to tell them how, this time, the script will be written.
    Over the years of their relationship the experience Leigh shares with Jenks has been deepened with inheritance . As with all the youngsters with whom he works, along with general skills advice Jenks has also passed onspecifics of his own technique to Leigh. It’s a lineage of knowledge that lies at the heart of Jenks’s coaching philosophy , an ongoing attempt to undo one of the central paradoxes of rugby: that a player’s knowledge will always progress in inverse proportion to the ability of their bodies . As a young player improves mentally, emotionally and technically, as he learns to read the game and himself better, so his body will slow and weaken with age and the violence of the sport.
    Jenks reached the peak of his own playing knowledge towards the end of his career, when he had just a handful of games left. In coaching the lessons he’s learnt to younger players now, Jenks hopes to shortcut them to that peak earlier in their own careers, and so increase the number of games in which their mental and technical skills are on a par with their physical ones. This is why he prefers to work with players like those kicking today – Rhys Priestland, James Hook and Leigh – from as early as fifteen or sixteen years old. Bad habits ruin more kickers than good habits make them. At eighteen or nineteen it’s often too late; those bad habits are already stitched into a player’s style. But at fifteen, sixteen Jenks knows he can build upon a player’s skills without first having to unpick existing faults.
    Although Jenks hasn’t taken the field himself for almost a decade, his coaching work means a part of him still runs out with young players onto grounds across Wales every weekend. And a part of him still faces up to the posts onthose grounds for the kicks at goal too. Every young kicker with whom he’s worked eventually develops their own method, their own stance, approach and follow-through. But until they do they’ll first glean what they can from the DNA of Jenks’s kicking style. When the young Hunter S. Thompson decided to be a writer, he typed out the entire manuscript of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
, just so he could ‘feel’ what writing a great novel might be like; its rhythms, pace and style. In a similar way young kickers working with Jenks will imitate the handwriting of his technique before creating their own, so they too can ‘feel’ how it might be to kick like one of the greatest in their game, before attempting to be so themselves.
    The most important technique Jenks passed on to Leigh as a young player was psychological rather than physical. Wherever Jenks was kicking for goal, be it at the Arms Park in Cardiff, Kings Park in Durban or the Stade de France in Paris, as far as he was concerned he was never inside those stadia, but many miles away instead, on Cae Fardre, a field near his childhood home in Pentre’r Eglwys. With each of those kicks, as Jenks stepped back from the ball he also stepped back onto Cae Fardre, the place where he’d spent thousands of hours practising alone as a kid; where he’d kicked for fun and where things had always been easy.
    Future visualisation is key in sport: the marksman sees the bullet penetrate the bull’s eye before he shoots; the sprinter sees himself breast the line before he starts; andthe goal-kicker sees the ball sailing through the posts before he makes the kick. But when Jenks was taking place kicks for Wales or the British Lions, his visualisation always projected two ways: forwards and backwards. Forwards to the successful kick, and backwards to those hours kicking alone on Cae Fardre. For Jenks, each place kick was also a kick about