OWENS: WE ALL SHARE BLAME
KEN Owens insists Wales’s players have to take some responsibility for Wayne Pivac losing his job following a wretched 12 months.
Wales’s poor form this year, winning just three out of 12 Test matches which includes home defeats to Italy and Georgia, resulted in Pivac getting the sack last week with Warren Gatland making a dramatic comeback as his replacement.
Carmarthen product Owens isn’t absolving Pivac of blame, but believes the players need to take a look at themselves.
“It was obviously disappointing to see how Wayne’s tenure finished,” said the 35-year-old Scarlets, Wales and Lions man.
“There’ll be a lot of reasons, but results speak for themselves and as Wayne always said, the buck stops with him.
“Players probably need to take a bit of responsibility as well because we weren’t great at times, which added to those sort of results.
“It’s disappointing how it’s finished with Wayne. Somebody has lost their job and it is disappointin, but the union have acted quickly in making an appointment.
“Gats coming in, he will know the challenge that’s ahead but he’s got a lot of experience of Welsh rugby.
“As players we’ve got to back him and really kick on because we’ve got a short time before the Six Nations and the World Cup coming up.”
Gatland has a difficult job on his hands and has once again been called upon to turn Wales from also-rans to World Cup contenders.
With the Six Nations just weeks away, Gatland doesn’t have much time to fix all of Wales’s issues ahead of their clash with world rugby’s topranked team Ireland.
Owens believes the first thing Gatland needs to address is the team’s inconsistency, which was the main issue during the Pivac era.
“We were very inconsistent under Wayne,” said Owens. “It was a boomor-bust culture. We’d have a great win one week and a hugely disappointing defeat the week after.
“We won in South Africa and we won a championship so it has been a bit helter-skelter.
“Over the next 10 months it’s about getting that consistency back in performance and away from the rollercoaster we’ve been on.”