LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO Away Days

      It’s a strange thing about being a professional rugby player that I find it a lot more difficult to sleep the night of a big game than the night before. On the eve of the match I rarely feel nervous. I’m usually quite calm. I have my routines and once I’ve gone through those then I can normally nod off without too much of a problem. But the night of the game itself is a different matter altogether. It can take me hours and hours to get to sleep and even then it’s quite normal for me to need a sleeping tablet from the team doctor. I normally lay in bed and go through the entire game minute by minute, replaying every move and every tackle. I’ll analyse what I did during the 80 minutes and think about any mistakes I might have made and what I would like to do differently next time. Sometimes I can go over the whole game again and again. I think it must be some sort of combination of my own character in searching for the perfect game and all the energy drinks we take in during the course of a match day. The result is that long after most people who attend a game have forgotten all about it and are sound asleep, my brain is working like a video player on automatic rewind.

      That Saturday night of 5 February 2005, the sensible thing to have done might have been to celebrate like three million other people. A good few beers alongside friends who are all in celebratory mood is normally more than enough for ordinary people to sleep well into Sunday morning.

      Whenever Wales beat England there is cause to celebrate. Had Cardiff not been so manic that night then I might have partied for longer, but, like the rest of the boys, I was very aware that this was only the first match of the championship. We were still in camp at our Vale of Glamorgan base just outside Cardiff and our second game – a trip to Rome to play Italy – meant we would be flying out in just five days’ time. I also think we were far too excited about our rugby, about what we were now capable of achieving on the pitch, to waste much more time toasting one victory. You could feel the confidence of the group. Everyone looked relaxed but very determined to keep things going on the course we had set for ourselves. We were a young bunch of players who had only been together for two or three years. I had come in at the end of that period but most of the others had been through some really bad times when they had been absolutely slated by people in the street as well as the media. I know that during the 10-game losing sequence suffered under Steve Hansen a lot of the players used to dread stepping out of their houses.

      We now had three away matches – against Italy, France and Scotland – followed by the last match of the championship at home to Ireland. The Irish game always looked the big one to me. Before the tournament began I felt we would beat England, have enough to win in Rome and Edinburgh, but maybe come unstuck in Paris. Even if we lost to the French, though, I felt the Ireland game would still be the critical one, the match where the championship would be decided. As it turned out, I was wrong about France and that, for me, was the game of the championship – the day we came of age.

      Bur first stop was Rome, where Wales had lost 30–22 under Hansen two years before and a game I had watched on TV during the time when I was very much out of favour. That defeat was a real low point for Wales as they went on to suffer a Six Nations whitewash and Colin Charvis lost the captaincy. I was viewing it from the outside but the team of 2003 seemed to lack all the things we now had in bucket-loads – self-belief, confidence, faith in all the systems drilled on training fields and a general level of contentment throughout the squad.

      We all felt we could beat the Italians this time but recognised they were a physical team who played with a lot of commitment, as they had shown the week before when they had run Ireland very close. I felt the important thing for us was to play with the same freedom and fluency that we had shown in those opening 15 minutes against England. If we did that, I felt sure that our skills would be too much for the Italians and we’d score plenty of tries.

      The first thing that struck me at the Stadio Flaminio was the number of Welsh supporters who had made the trip. Rome can’t be a bad place to spend the weekend, even when the weather’s not great, but the victory over England appeared to have given more impetus to the numbers who had made it over. When we ran out before the kick-off there were Welsh flags everywhere and red jerseys seemed to be outnumbering blue ones in every part of the ground. Maybe that gave us a feeling we wanted to put on a show because we soon got into our stride and played some lovely stuff. Shane Williams was as lively as he had been against England and within five minutes his run allowed Tom Shanklin to create the position from where Michael Owen put Jonathan Thomas in for the first try.

      The Italians were unable to get near us. We were all over them. In fact, we should have scored two more tries before my mistake gave them a way back into the game. I took a pass and drifted wide past a couple of players but I was running out of space. I decided to try and chip the ball over Luciano Orquera, the Italian No. 10, but he got his hands to it. Suddenly, instead of creating something that might have given us a try, I was watching Orquera run back from where I’d just come and he kept going all the way to the line. If it had come off then I think I would have been more or less clear to the Italian try-line and either scored myself or put someone else in. But Orquera jumped early and snatched the ball out of the air. Maybe I should have dummied to kick at the last moment and run around him, just like Joe Rokocoko did to us in the previous November when New Zealand beat us by a point in Cardiff. I suppose it was a bit careless on my part, but sometimes these things will happen when you try and take risks and that was always the style that Mike Ruddock and the other coaches had encouraged. So, although I was annoyed with myself for not lifting the ball over Orquera, I wasn’t down on myself for trying. If people criticise my game because I like to take chances then I don’t really care. That’s just the type of player I am and that’s the way I think rugby should be played. From the point of view of Wales, our rugby is high speed and high risk, but as Mike always stresses, it’s also high reward. And I knew our reward would come later in the game.

      By half-time Italy hadn’t added to their five points, while we were up to 19. We had them pinned back

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