Free Calon by Owen Sheers Page B

place: about using one location to protect himself from another, about drawing upon his memories of Cae Fardre so as to isolate himself from the pressures of the place in which he stood at that moment, facing up to the posts inside the crucible of a stadium.
    It’s this other dimension to ‘place’ kicking that Jenks has passed on to Leigh, so that now, when Leigh lines up a kick for Wales, it’s another corner of the country that’s conjured into stadia around the world: the pitch in Gorseinon where he and his grandfather first went to practise, and where they still go together whenever they can. Just as Cae Fardre used to insulate Jenks at the moment of a kick, so an image of Gorseinon, its trees and houses spreading through the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, insulated Leigh in Dublin that day from the gathering noise and whistles of the crowd as he quickened his steps towards the ball and, with just fifteen seconds left on the clock, struck it with all the power he could muster.
     
    Keep upright.
                
Make good contact.
                          
Follow through.
     
    The ball was still in the air when Leigh turned his back on that kick, and he was already running back to his teammates when the linesmen raised their flags. He knew the kick had been successful, and he knew that Wales had won. After the match, when he’d finished his interviews and his signings for fans and sponsors, Leigh found his grandfather and gave him the pair of boots with which he’d just kicked Wales to victory. The Irish match had begun with a try for one grandfather, and it was finished with a kick for another. In more ways than one Wales’s first fixture in the Six Nations had been a game about starting points, foundations.
In my beginning,
as Eliot says,
is my end
.

10.30 a.m.
    Having taken just eight kicks at goal this morning Leigh and Jenks collect the balls and begin to make their way back to the team room up at the Vale. Eight kicks are all Leigh needs. These pre-match hours, for all the players , are a negotiation between preparation and freshness. About sharpening the blade without blunting it through overuse; about keeping as much in reserve as possible for the eighty minutes of the match ahead.
    As they walk up towards the seventeenth-century turrets of Hensol Castle, which gives the training pitch its name, Leigh confides to Jenks that he’s feeling more nervous than usual today, and for some reason he can’t seem to shake it off.
    ‘Enjoy it, butt,’ Jenks tells him, giving him a pat on the shoulder. ‘Give it your all.’
    *
    ‘All’ is what rugby is to Jenks, and his all is what he’s given the game. Which is why he knows about nerves. Within the squad he’s as well known for his pre-match anxiety as he is for his kicking. Whether it’s a fixture against Tenby or the All Blacks, whether playing or coaching, the run-up to every match will often see Jenks, wracked with nerves, retching in the changing rooms.
    Jenks is also known within Welsh rugby for his encyclopedic knowledge of the game; for being able to tellyou not only which team won on a certain date, but by how much and who scored when. If current players are still inheriting their aspirations from Jenks, then he in turn was first inspired by the players of the 1970s. When he was seven years old, he saw one of those Cardiff games in which Gerald Davies touched the ball four times and scored four tries. Ever since, fuelled by his rugby-playing uncles, he’s been obsessed by the sport,
feeling
it even more than he knows it. During a match he lives every kick, break and tackle made by the players he coaches. Afterwards he’ll absorb himself in analysing the patterns and plays. At the meal after the Irish match, as the two squads and their guests mingled around the tables talking and drinking, Jenks stood alone in a corner of the room, one hand in the pocket of his suit, the other holding a pint, looking up at a TV screen playing the match