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Two years, four months, and a lifetime ago, a Wales team not so very different from the one that will be on the field on Saturday beat the Springboks 13-12 in Bloemfontein. A lot of good Welsh sides have tried and failed to win in South Africa in the 60 years they’ve been touring. That team, coached by Wayne Pivac, and captained by Dan Biggar, were the first and only one to do it. They might even have won the series except the ifs and buts went against them in the first Test at Loftus Versfeld the previous week, when they lost 32-29 after Damian Willemse kicked a penalty in the final minute.
Wales have fallen a long way in very little time. This time last autumn, or near enough, they were 10-6 up against Argentina at half-time in the quarter-finals of the World Cup. They lost 29-17, and haven’t won a Test since bar an-end-of-season match against the Barbarians. That’s 11 straight defeats. Almost everyone reckons it will be 12 by the time of the final whistle in their match against South Africa on Saturday. A couple of bookmakers have the Springboks at 100-1 on, which is a consequence of the funereal gloom that surrounds Welsh rugby now.
Gatland has seemed like a sacked man working, if not a dead man walking, ever since he said he was willing to resign if it was in “the best interests of the Welsh game” after they were beaten 52-20 by Australia last Sunday. He’s not convinced it is in their best interest yet, and argues that his team are as good as they could be given the state Welsh rugby is in. He says that the success of the national team has always papered over the cracks in the national game. They were, for the large part of the last decade, the fifth, and most successful Welsh region. Their victories were achieved in spite of the Welsh system, rather than because of it.
There is truth in that. In the three years since South Africa’s clubs joined the URC, only one Welsh team have ever finished in the top half of the table, when the Ospreys came in eighth last year. The financial uncertainty around the game has caused a player drain at all levels. It’s one thing to lose a player like Ross Moriarty, a 30-year-old with 54 caps, who is now playing in the French second division, another to lose a player like Rhys Carré, a 26-year-old with 20 caps who has joined Saracens. Wales have a 25-cap rule (“a rubbish rule”, says Moriarty) which means Carré isn’t eligible for selection any more.
But most worrying of all is losing someone like Kane James, a talented 20-year-old back row who was born and raised in Haverfordwest. James took a scholarship to Sedburgh, was signed by Exeter, who agreed to sponsor him through university on the condition that he made himself available for England, who have picked him for their under-20 team. He’s not the only one. Welsh centre Gethin O’Callaghan and hooker Kepu Tuipulotu are in the England Under-20 squad too.
So Gatland is right when he says “we need to look at the pathways and the structures”. Everyone is looking to the union to provide the substance to the strategy they set out in June, when the chief executive, Abi Tierney, said it was their ambition to be “consistently ranked” in the world’s top five. So far, they’ve been silent on exactly how they hope to achieve it. They still seem to be recovering from the series of recent scandals, including the independent report that found a previous regime at the WRU allowed a “sexist, misogynist, racist, and homophobic” culture to go unchallenged, and a more recent row about the drawn-out contract negotiations for their female players.
The sense is that Gatland has climbed back behind the wheel of a car that’s falling apart. But you can still ask whether he’s the right man for the long drive ahead, if, at 61, he still has the instincts, the energy, and understanding to make the best of the team. His complaint that there aren’t any better players out there is an odd one, given that there are at least seven players who were in the squad for that 2022 tour of South Africa who could be playing this weekend, but who haven’t been included in his XV. Tommy Reffell and Ryan Elias are on the bench, but Gareth Anscombe, Kieran Hardy, Nick Tompkins, Owen Watkin and Liam Williams have all been omitted.
There are others: Dillon Lewis and Wyn Jones, who are both playing for Quins (the 48-cap Jones has said he still wants to be playing for Wales), Taine Basham and Carré, who says that the reason he moved to England was because he felt Wales didn’t want him. They’re all available. They may not be world beaters, but alongside the three who played in Bloemfontein and will again this weekend, Dewi Lake, Gareth Thomas and Will Rowlands, and the best of the current side, there’s the stiff spine of a better Welsh team there. And that’s before you get to the exiled players, like Moriarty and Tomas Francis.
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Gatland’s best argument is a bad argument. He says it would be a step backwards to start again under someone else, and even then it’s not clear that you’d be any more likely to have any success given that sacking him wouldn’t do anything to fix the WRU. It’s often said that they can’t afford to get rid of him anyway, given that they’d need to buy him out of his contract, but if things carry on like this they won’t be able to afford to keep him, given that the attendances at the Principality are shrinking. The WRU used to pay Gatland the big money because he delivered. Now it feels as if they’re doing it because he’s taking a beating on their behalf.
He’s a good man, and was a great coach. It’s beginning to feel like his last act of service to the Welsh game will be to take the blame for their failings, and, by doing so, force them to finally confront the state they are in.
