Looking ahead to the 2025 Six Nations, I would not be inclined to retain any of the national coaches, including Warren Gatland, as they have all become associated with failure.
How you can become the Six Nations champions, and very nearly grand slam winners, in 2021 and slip to winning the wooden spoon in 2024 defeats me. Things do not have to be this bad and we don’t need to go through the pain of losing all the time, in my opinion.
We could have won three games in the last Six Nations tournament. We lost to Italy by three points, England by two points and Scotland by a single point.
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Whether or not we would have really deserved to win is irrelevant. After all, we can remember games that we should have won but had deserved victories snatched away from us in the dying moments of the game.
But on each day, the elimination of a single error would have been sufficient to have earned us a victory. I don’t just mean on the field, I’m talking about errors in selection when we fielded teams that unnecessarily weakened our performance. We were influenced to accept the short term pain as the consequence of the initial development process.
However, the introduction of too many inexperienced players and persevering with combinations that weren’t working for too long in the guise of giving many youngsters a development opportunity hasn’t been successful. I don’t believe that losing every test for over twelve months is short term pain for long-term gain. It benefits no one, including the players who have become conditioned to being second best.
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There are errors in making substitutions that effectively create weaknesses in the team which is what Gatland has been doing. Why persist with the 55 minute rule of thumb for substituting the front row?
Up until then our lineout tended to be secure with Dewi Lake throwing in. Ryan Elias, who seems short of confidence, came on and we lost a series of attacking lineouts and with it, potential scoring opportunities.
Wales could certainly have won some of these games in 2024 by being more pragmatic and selecting more experience alongside the youth. Just a few wins could have altered the whole complexion of the last 12 months and prevented the confidence-sapping losing habit becoming so embedded in this squad.
There is also the accident that was waiting to happen when Archie Griffin earned his wings. His opponent on Saturday and team mate at Bath, Thomas du Toit, certainly won the bragging rights and emphasised the pecking order at Bath.
I’ve stated a number of previous times in this column that Henry Thomas should have his opportunity to demonstrate his capabilities on the tighthead. Being third choice at Bath, Griffin’s opportunity of learning how to scrummage is mainly on the international field, where mistakes can be costly and have a tendency to be dealt with harshly. So it proved on Saturday with his first-half removal in front of a huge audience.
In terms of changing the coach, South Africa have experienced their own period in the doldrums, but they have now won two Rugby World Cup’s in a row under the guidance of Rassie Erasmus. Whether you like him or not, he has done a great job in turning around their fortunes by taking them back to the absolute basics of South African rugby, concentrating on their renowned dominant scrum and the driving lineout.
It wasn’t popular but, occasionally, he unashamedly used a seven/one split on the bench. Therefore, he had almost an entire pack of forwards to continue in the same vein where the others had left off. It is in their DNA and when they retire there will, no doubt, be others equally as good to take their place.
Erasmus and attack coach Tony Brown are now expanding their repertoire to include a high-speed off-loading game. Erasmus, consequently, used it as a practice game.
That is the way rugby is developing. However, in order to play that way it is still absolutely necessary to have at least an adequate grasp of the absolute basics. Unfortunately, the way things are, we cannot consistently achieve that.
We really need a visionary along the lines of a Ray Williams, who in the late sixties was appointed as the Welsh Rugby Union’s first coaching organiser, or in other words Director of Rugby.
Ray put us above the rest of the world in respect of coaching. By the time he firmly had his feet under the desk, as it were, Welsh rugby was flourishing. It set the groundwork for the almost continual success of the Welsh team during the seventies.
The whole structure was based on the natural way we played the game in Wales i.e. the ‘Welsh Way.’ He created the structure for his immediate successors to follow.
He was in demand all over the world, even in New Zealand, to lecture about what he was doing in Wales. Welsh coaches, during this time, were in demand all over the world.
Since then so many reports into the state of Welsh rugby have been left on the shelf to gather dust. It has a tendency to make one become cynical and believe that it is all influenced by self interest.
Let’s have the correct solution this time, otherwise it will be the coaches and players who become the victims. As they say, ‘If you don’t learn the lessons from the past, it doesn’t augur well for the future!’
But who is going to be our visionary now. WRU CEO Abi Tierney is in the position to create a lasting legacy that she was the one who put Welsh rugby back on the straight and narrow.
She has a huge responsibility on her shoulders but at the same time she has a huge opportunity. Despite all the pressure on Gatland, I get the feeling he will stay and take up a different position.
