Wales have been here before, with just a few games remaining in the season and staring down the possibility of going an entire calendar year without an international victory for the first time, outside of the war, since 1937.
For Fiji in Cardiff on Sunday, read Argentina – also in the capital – in 1991. That was the last time Wales faced a potentially winless season. As Mark Ring recalls, the stakes were rather higher then and although Wales came through courtesy of the maverick playmaker’s right boot, he still experienced abuse that forced him into early retirement.
“Yeah, it was the World Cup and we were joint hosts and despite having won the wooden spoon in that year’s Five Nations [in which they actually drew with Ireland] and having lost so many of our best players to rugby league, there was still expectation,” he tells Telegraph Sport. “We lost our first pool match to Western Samoa, in what probably was our most infamous defeat and we heard it all afterwards.
“Nobody had heard of the Samoans then and so was ‘good job you didn’t play the whole of Samoa’ and all that. There wasn’t social media, but they still got hold of my landline and left some stinking messages. That’s not on, whatever, but remember we were not getting paid in those days and I’d turned down three offers to go north just so I could carry on playing for Wales, which was always my dream
“That was the end for me. I had to protect my family and my mental health, so after the Australia match [the last pool game in which they were beaten 38-3] I hung up my Welsh jersey.”
Ring – one of the sport’s great entertainers with Cardiff and Pontypool who went on to become a successful coach, taking West Hartlepool to the Premiership and, astonishingly, Caerphilly to the final of the European Shield – acknowledges certain parallels between then and now.
“I suppose Wales is a small country with a limited pool of talent and both teams have struggled to cope with seeing so many top players depart the scene,” says Ring, the 62-year-old who works as a teaching assistant and still conducts private training sessions in the evenings. “But the difference is it happened overnight in our case, with little warning.
“So from that 1988 Triple Crown team, the likes of Jiffy [Jonathan Davies], Adrian Hadley and Paul Moriarty quickly switched codes and then others followed like Dai Young, [John] Devereux, [Alan] Bateman. You’re talking the bulk of a very good squad. The same has happened now with all the retirements, but we knew they were going to happen and we didn’t bring the next generation through. We are paying for that now. I worry about Fiji, because they should have beaten us in last year’s World Cup. This is a match we are desperate to win.”
Tom Shanklin concurs. The centre was a member of the team in the early Noughties that set a Wales record by losing 10 matches in succession. Defeat to the Pacific Islanders will see Warren Gatland’s men equal that run of losses and with Australia and South Africa to follow, the gloom might deepen to previously unseen levels.
“What I would say is that, like we were back then in 2002 and 2003, this a very young squad and it was somewhat inevitable that we were going to go through this,” Shanklin says. “When you are a young player, you don’t get too down, because you are simply thinking of getting your own performance right and going from week to week improving and winning more caps.
“We had Steve Hansen as our coach [who went on to lead New Zealand to victory in the 2015 World Cup] and he kept us shielded and stressed that performance was the key and to stick on the path we were going down. We stopped the rot, beating Romania in Wrexham and then Scotland in a few World Cup warm-ups and then surprised a lot of people in that tournament, itself, in that amazing game against the All Blacks and only narrowly losing to England in the quarters.
“That all built towards 2005, when we won the Grand Slam and since then there has been the occasional low, but there have been three other Grand Slams and other Six Nations titles. It’s not guaranteed that this will happen with this squad, and I do believe that the performance of the national team under Gats did mask the cracks in the Welsh domestic structure.
“He’s said that we have to go through some pain as the new talent comes through and gets used to Test rugby. They came close to beating both England and Scotland in the Six Nations and it is about learning how to win and that can take time. But these lads could really do with beating Fiji and then taking the self-belief that would bring to facing up to the Wallabies. I’m going with my kids on Sunday and am confident. But also a little concerned.”
