Someone to write home about Welsh

IN his team training kit, Owen Sheers - young, fit, strong and broad-shouldered - looks like any other member of the Welsh national rugby team.

Welsh writer Owen Sheers is the writer-in-residence travelling with the Welsh rugby team on their tour of Australia.

IN his team training kit, Owen Sheers - young, fit, strong and broad-shouldered - looks like any other member of the Welsh national rugby team.

There's only one thing that gives him away: a red, leatherbound pocketbook.

Sheers is the Welsh Rugby Union's first-ever writer-in-residence, and when his national team strides on to Sydney's Allianz Stadium today to take on the Wallabies, the poet, playwright and novelist will be a quiet, ever-watchful, presence in the players' tunnel.

"I take this (book) with me everywhere," he says. "I'm still in that stage of absorbing everything. I take lots of notes."

Sheers, 37, took up his post as Welsh Rugby Union's writer-in-residence, a joint initiative between the WRU and the Welsh Arts Council, at the beginning of the year. The writer's 12-month contract will be the first of three yearly residences across different artistic mediums with the national team.

"Rugby is by it nature a very theatrical sport," he says. "Rugby can actually be more dramatic than theatre - in theatre the script it written, but in rugby anything can happen."

That drama was apparent in last week's second Test in Melbourne, when the Welsh - eyeing their first win against the Wallabies since 1969 - had their hopes dashed after the siren by replacement goalkicker Mike Harris.

"That was a real heart-breaker," he says.

Sheers, himself a former county-level scrum-half, travels with the squad, stays in team hotels and attends training sessions - yesterday he was kicking balls back to world-class fullback Leigh Halfpenny - and is charged with documenting the side's triumphs (the Welsh were crowned Six Nations champions earlier this year) and failures (last week's heartbreak is more grist for his mill).

"Ultimately, this is about bringing a rugby audience back towards the arts, and also to bring an arts audience to rugby," he says.

It's a philosophy he tries to put into practice within the team. On Thursday night, Sheers chaperoned 110kg hooker Ken Owens and some playing staff to the Sydney Opera House to see Sydney Theatre Company's "fabulous" production of Under Milk Wood, starring Jack Thompson.

As part of the residency, Sheers, a well know literary figure in Wales, has been commissioned to write a book about his travels with the team. He has also written poetry, published in the official team program earlier this year following Wales's Six Nations win, and is in talks with the Welsh National Theatre about writing a play based on the team's 2012 season.

For now, though, Sheers is happy to observe. "For me, to do this is a great privilege," he says. "It's extraordinary to experience that crowd reaction from the players' perspective. To go from the very quiet sobriety of the changing room into the crucible of the stadium is something that is very difficult to describe."

But describe he will. And should the Welsh, smarting over two close losses in as many weeks, break their 43-year hoodoo over the Wallabies today, the affable Sheers will really have something to write home about.