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 pattern they'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 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 it stayed 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 a match 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, before dropping 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 raked seating of the North Stand. The torsos and arms of five Welsh players fill its canvas, their red, three-feathered shirts stretched tight across their chests and biceps. At one time the banner used to show the players' heads too, but now it's been cropped, cutting them off at the neck. The turn-over in the squad became too rapid and the scale of the image too expensive to recreate.

A team is both eternal and ephemeral, its members forever changing. As Warren Gatland often reminds his young squad, they're only borrowing the red shirt of Wales. Injury or another player rising through the ranks can be just around the corner. So the shirt is only borrowing them too. And that's what the cropped banner seems to say. You will borrow the shirt, and the shirt will borrow you, but only the shirt and the team will remain. You who fill out both are just passing through. Yesterday, as the banner in the Barn never lets the squad forget, is in the past.

6.30 a.m.

The eighty minutes of today's match, though, are still in the future, and as Michael completes his lap of the stadium, this is what the men who'll wear those red shirts today are thinking about as they wake up. It is still early, but as Michael leaves the stadium's bowl by the Dragon's Mouth, as he takes his growing sadness back to Barry, thinking, 'Sod this, I'm off home for some breakfast,' the Welsh players, twelve miles west in their shared rooms at the Vale Resort in Pontyclun, are already stirring. Their minds will have woken before their bodies, occupied with thinking about the day's events. Their stomachs are light with nerves. Those who asked Prof. John, the team doctor, for a sleeping pill to get them through the night are still...