Horses can’t see orange fences, study reveals

Wales have been transformed since their head coach took charge 10 years ago, but his final challenge might be his greatest yet, writes Ben Coles

Racing is considering a radical change to one of its established traditions after a safety study discovered horses were unable to see orange – the colour that is used to paint the cross-bars and take-off boards of fences and hurdles. The aim now is to find the colour which stands out best to horses.

Warren Gatland started as he meant to go on with Wales. It is now 10 years since the New Zealander took charge of the country for the first time, for a Six Nations match at Twickenham, where at the time Wales had not won for 20 years. The Welsh crop of 2008 had recently been knocked out of the World Cup in the group stages by Fiji and were given little hope of upsetting their great rivals.

Tom Shanklin was on the bench. Marytn Williams had come out of retirement. Jamie Roberts, one week away from his first Wales cap, was the water boy.

Eighty minutes later, Wales had overturned a 13-point deficit after 45 minutes to win 26-19 and put themselves on course for a Grand Slam. The tone had been set for the Gatland era. “If you look back over the last 10 years, Warren just has this knack of winning big games when Wales seem to have no chance,” explains Williams. “We had a crazy five minutes where we scored two tries [through Lee Byrne and Mike Phillips] and the momentum and belief built from that game.

“That was his magic, he made us feel 10 feet tall. Even after that first half, he gave you belief. We were fitter and stronger than anyone else.”

The winning formula was a combination of Gatland’s work ethic and direct approach with his players. Williams had retired after the 2007 World Cup but knew what was coming when a voicemail was left on his phone in January the following year.

“I guessed what it was about. It was a couple of days before the squad was going to be announced,” he recalls. “Warren didn’t dress anything up. Straight as a die he said: ‘Look mate, I think you still have a fair bit to offer this team and I would like you to come back for the Six Nations’. And that was it.”

“He is a very honest man, Warren, there is no doubt about that,” Roberts notes. “He will tell you when you have played well and poorly as well. He is not afraid to front up and be an honest bloke, which is what you want as a player.”

The graft that went into training was unlike anything the national side had experienced before. Shanklin and Williams had been tipped off by friends at Wasps, Gatland’s previous role, about what was coming.

“I think for a lot of us it was a shock,” Shanklin remembers. “We were not used to working so hard in training, pushing ourselves so hard, these gruelling sessions.

“All of a sudden we were training

‘Warren would turn to someone like Gavin Henson and ask how long he wanted to train’

harder than ever before, but we believed we were training harder than any other side as well. And we’re getting through those sessions. And there was instant success as well, against England.”

Williams agrees. “When Warren came in, we had never experienced anything like it as a Welsh group. We had never trained that hard and with that much intensity.

“What we loved about it was they were short, sharp sessions. At the start of each session he would make us laugh; he would turn to someone like Gavin Henson and ask how long we wanted to train for. If Gav had said 15 minutes, we would have trained for 15 minutes. He put the onus on us.

“Some days we would turn up ready to train and Warren would tell us: ‘We don’t need to train today, we have done enough’. Little things like that work wonders. There are no shortcuts. His philosophy is you work hard and there are no grey areas.”

For Roberts, the link between those gruelling days in January and lifting silverware in March is crystal clear.

“When I look back over the last 10 years with Wales, the years we have won things are the years we have worked the hardest. There’s no secret to that, whether it was those training camps in Poland before the Slam in 2012 or the fitness stuff in 2008.

“Warren looks for lads who are ready to graft, push their bodies to the limit and to take them to places where they haven’t been. That’s what is required to win Test matches.”

Should Gatland leave Wales after the 2019 World Cup as expected, then Wales’s visit to Twickenham this month will be his last in charge.

Three Six Nations titles in six years between 2018 and 2013, including two Grand Slams, plus a World Cup semi-final appearance in 2011 have cemented his status as the most successful Wales coach of all time.

Those achievements, more wrongly than rightly, have been recently overshadowed by criticism of Wales’s struggling attack and failure to defeat Australia, New Zealand and, until recently, South Africa. Yet compare where Wales stand now compared with January 2008 and Gatland has executed a phenomenal transformation.

“We’re a strange bunch in Wales. He has been the most successful coach, hands down,” Williams declares. “I think he said at his first meeting: ‘From the outside Wales look a bit boom or bust. I want to be competitive consistently’. I think he’s done that.”

“It’s not all gone to plan,” adds Shanklin. “But there’s a clear change of philosophy in terms of how he wants to play. If you look back, that maybe should have happened three years ago. Wales did become a bit stagnant and then a little bit predictable. The highs, however, massively outweigh the lows.”