At the beginning of this Six Nations campaign, Wales head coach Warren Gatland spoke of his team being in a position to surprise people. A comeback which fell just short against Scotland, and an unprecedentedly good Six Nations-era start at Twickenham which again wasn’t quite enough, offered some promise. Too far behind too early in Dublin, there was a rally and Ireland didn’t put the game to bed until the last 10 minutes or so, but it was still a 24-point defeat. Against France, the heavy opposition pack were moved around to good effect in the first 50 minutes until Wales were overpowered, a backs-to-the-wall effort capitulating in the final quarter for a record defeat in Cardiff.
Today’s defeat against Italy – a defeat which secured, if that’s the word, a first Wooden Spoon and whitewash since 2003 – was abject. There seemed to be little structure to anything Wales attempted. The lineout was broadly fine, but the scrum was under severe pressure, and the sight of players appearing to be surprised to receive the ball, and having no real plan about what to do next, was dispiriting. The notion that this team is building towards something is more uncertain today than at any point since Gatland’s return.
For the first time in the head coach’s two stints with Wales, the man himself is under the microscope. His previous stint contained plenty of episodes which didn’t endear him to those who were paying attention, but Wales, for the most part, were broadly successful. Spending two thirds of the year away from Wales, taking long sabbaticals to allow him to take on the Lions job, milking the after-dinner circuit, throwing players under the bus when things went wrong… all of these were ignored while the championships and Grand Slams and World Cup semi-finals were semi-regular features of the Welsh Test calendar.
His return for the 2023 Six Nations – record defeats against Ireland and Scotland, with the solitary win coming in Rome – was underwhelming enough. It was a time for experimentation, we were told. Caps were handed out with a profligacy which would have made even Wayne Pivac blush. A spate of sudden mass retirements in the spring raised eyebrows, but the Rugby World Cup was, on the whole, positive. Good wins against Fiji and Australia, before the wheels fell off against a fairly poor Argentina. And yet the narrative again focused around the 2024 Six Nations being a free hit for Wales. Last year’s Six Nations rebuild, and then summer rebuild, were forgotten for yet another.
The result? One Six Nations win in ten. Apparently confused selection, with the team chopping and changing from week to week. Last week, North and Tompkins were left out for Watkin and Roberts, who played satisfactorily enough. This week, they were back, but looked as though they had barely met, and had no idea who Sam Costelow was at all. When Harri O’Connor eventually ran on after 70 minutes (and it is instructive that the extraordinarily callow front row replacements were sent on only when the game was finally lost), he became the fifth tighthead Wales had fielded during the tournament. Very few ball-carrying options, and yet a gameplan which seemed to revolve around very basic one-up carrying. A continual cry that the team were playing in the wrong areas, but then the selection of fly-halves whose strengths do not lie with their kicking game.
One thing which could always be said about Gatland’s teams was that they had an identity. This edition has none.
And amidst all of this, the excuses flowed. Lack of accuracy, lack of composure, playing in the wrong areas, the players weren’t fit enough, the regions were sub-standard. Always somebody else’s fault, never his. His apparently conciliatory comments post-World Cup – in which he appeared to recognise that the success of his national team was intrinsically linked with the health of the professional game – gone. He wasn’t seen at the festive derbies, despite the opportunity afforded to watch many of the players in contention for the national team in direct competition. Three days before the Wales-France game, he was at a corporate do for an Irish Bank in the City of London. His Telegraph column continued during tournaments, an extremely unusual practice for a current national coach.
None of this is to lay the blame for the endless problems of Welsh rugby at the door of Gatland alone. We have long written that the game in Wales has been fundamentally mismanaged for decades. The decision of the WRU hierarchy in 2009 – and again in 2020 – to starve the professional tier for the sake of the national team was always going to end here. Professional clubs bouncing along at the foot of the URC, uncompetitive in Europe, interest dwindling, and the inevitable impact on the preparedness of players for the Test arena.
But a coach who appears to be half-interested, who is content to roll out a line about endless rebuilds and experiments, who has his mind mid-tournament on corporate events (which have nothing to do with Wales or the WRU) and a newspaper column, does not inspire confidence that he is the man to lead that rebuild.
It was reported that Gatland had, in the changing room in the immediate aftermath of today’s defeat, asked WRU Chief Executive Abi Tierney if she wanted him to resign. Gatland apparently secured, and then immediately told the assembled media, a response in the negative.
‘Like hell, that’s the last thing I want, that’s what I’m really afraid of’, was – according to Gatland, Tierney’s response.
If this is true, it is alarming. When Gatland was reappointed at the end of 2022, he had a contract to the end of last year’s Rugby World Cup, with a further four years available if mutually agreed by both Gatland and the WRU. Nigel Walker, the WRU’s then CEO and now Executive Director of Rugby, was quoted as saying – before the World Cup – that he couldn’t foresee any circumstances in which the additional four years would not be taken up. Now, it seems, his successor has dismissed the possibility of Gatland’s departure without a moment’s thought.
Which is odd. Whatever the state of the game in Wales, national coaches don’t survive results such as these. Wales have previously suffered three Championship whitewashes. In 1990, coach John Ryan didn’t even survive to the end of the tournament, making way for Ron Waldron with two games still to go. In 1995, the previous year’s Championship Title was forgotten as Alan Davies was sacked. Steve Hansen had managed Gatland’s trick of persuading people to accept poor results in the short-term with the promise of goodies to come, but he went a year after the 2003 whitewash, returning to New Zealand. Just 18 months ago, Wayne Pivac was shown the door, again months before a World Cup, after home defeat to, yes, Italy and then Georgia. And yet Gatland is invulnerable.
It is probably the case that the WRU couldn’t afford to dispense with the Head Coach, even if they wanted to. Their Annual Report for 2022/23 showed that they had spent £2m on severance packages for officers (hello, Steve Phillips and his cool half-million) and Wayne Pivac and his coaching team. Gatland has three-and-a-half years left on a deal which, it is said, is worth around £600,000 for about 100 days work a year.
Changing the head coach now would no more be a silver bullet than every other occasion on which the WRU has tried it (save for 2008…). Neither will other quick fixes which would obviously work because it just stands to reason. Somehow closing down four independent clubs and then entirely funding a number of centrally-owned regions with no grounds, players or support base isn’t it. ‘True’ regions, whatever they are, isn’t it. Doing away with the 25-cap rule – which currently affects Joe Hawkins and…er…Aled Davies and…um…that’s it – isn’t it either.
We know what can work. Properly financed professional teams with the resources to field teams which are competitive. Which Welsh players want to play for because they can win matches and tournaments. Which the best overseas players want to join. Teams which are fed by pathways which churn out players in the way they once did in the 2000s and early 2010s.
But that takes money. There may no longer be the money in the game in Wales to manage this for four teams. Restructuring might work, but only if whatever comes next is, yes, properly resourced. Simply plonking a team in Colwyn Bay, or taking games on the road, will not work without a significant increase in the money available to fund them.
The game in Wales is in a mess, and there are no simple answers. The WRU have quite a job ahead of them in pulling together a strategy which somehow turns all of this around. They have said that nothing is off the table (although tonight’s dressing room discussion suggests that at least one item certainly is). But what we do need – as a comparatively poor rugby nation who are in the mire – is to ensure that every arm of our game is pulling in the same direction.
Gwladrugby 