It’s high time someone at the WRU apologised
No matter how often they fail against the big three, Team Wales never fail to trot out the same trite excuses. No matter how grim the defeat, they keep playing the same tired old tune.
All the clichés came pouring out in the wake of the walloping from the Wallabies: Wales are habitually slow starters, the more they play teams like Australia, the more they supposedly learn. It was “a kick up the backside, a wake-up call, a bad day at the office”.
No wonder some fans took to social media demanding their money back. How many boots in the posterior, alarm calls and bad days can one team reasonably endure before they lose credibility?
At least this time the management stopped short of dusting down another of their excuses, that the Pro12 does not prepare players properly for Test rugby. If so, how come Ireland could take a full complement of 23 from the same Pro12 and beat the All Blacks?
There comes a point when the fans have had enough, when all the kneejerk reactions to another lousy performance count for nothing because they’ve heard them ad nauseum.
They go back to the creation of the Warren Gatland regime in January 2008, in tandem with Rob Howley as his right-hand man-cum-attack coach. The promises about learning lessons and so forth have been airing every year for eight years and counting.
How many more bad days at the office must they inflict on the paying public? There is already evidence that an increasing number of supporters have had enough, that they are no longer willing to fork out more and more to see less and less. The law of diminishing returns could be counted last week in the number of empty seats, not that it was ever going to be a sell-out given the WRU’s refusal to recognise the counter-productive effect of charging top dollar instead of dropping admission charges.
There were enough empty seats to prompt the WRU into camouflage mode, unfurling the world’s largest Welsh flag across the emptiness of the North End.
Sometimes in sport a team under-performs to such a degree that those responsible can only apologise. Neither the interim head coach, Howley, nor the captain, Gethin Jenkins, felt the need to go that far.
Howley spoke about Australia taking “every possible advantage”. Had they done so Wales would have lost by 50. Jenkins proffered the bewildering opinion that Wales were “comfortable with the intensity” but that they just made “silly mistakes”. Silly mistakes are the last refuge for every losing team. The worse they are, the more they make.
All the pre-match talk about securing a top-four ranking for the World Cup draw next May, made the abject poverty of the non-performance all the more unacceptable. Did anyone from Team Wales say so publicly?
Shaun Edwards came closest, not surprisingly as defence coach of a team leaking tries at the rate of five-a-game. “I’ll hold my hands up,’’ he said, acknowledging the statistics screaming out the startling one-sided nature of the first-half. “I’m not happy with my own performance. Their attack coach, Stephen Larkham, got the better of me.’’
Wales keep saying they are their own biggest critics, a claim which rings hollow every now and then when they take umbrage at something someone has dared to write or say. In that respect, it is relevant to draw attention to a table which, from a Welsh perspective, is the most unacceptable of all.
Over the last eight years none of the Six Nations has played Australia, New Zealand and South Africa more often than Wales. None has lost more often – 32 times out of 34.
“There is already evidence that an increasing number of supporters have had enough”