Shane Williams
I’m still backing Wayne but this performance was just so poor
THAT was not good enough from a Welsh rugby team. It’s now five defeats in a row for Wayne Pivac’s side and there will be a lot of pressure on the new head coach after such a poor run of results.
This is Welsh rugby and we all know patience is in short supply. Wayne, Alun Wyn Jones and the rest of the players will be all too aware they have fallen well below the standards expected.
There were problems all over the field against Scotland who fully deserved to win. I’ll come back to Scotland in a bit, but it’s Wales I want to analyse first.
From start to finish in Llanelli, Wales looked flat. They made countless errors and got blitzed at the breakdown. So, where do Wales go from here?
There will be a small minority, no doubt, who will already have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and want Wayne gone. What rubbish.
Wayne must be given time. Wales have not become a bad team overnight and neither has he lost his coaching strengths.
The one thing I am struggling with though is the breakdown area and what Wales’ game plan is on the whole. Against Scotland, Wales were second best in all aspects of the game.
The breakdown area needs to be addressed immediately because it had been an area of concern since the Six Nations started this year.
Some people might be confused as to how a Wales side with so many of the same players which reached the World Cup semi-finals and won a Six Nations Grand Slam last year can now be struggling so badly.
Here’s my take on the contact area.
With the ball, Wales are struggling to support the ball carrier and they are getting turned over on a regular basis. We also looked very lost against Scotland whenever we got to keep the ball over five phases which wasn’t very often. There has been no real direction in the last two games or options in attack.
Without the ball we get dominated by the opposition and give penalties away.
You are never going to win a Test match if you concede 16 penalties over 80 minutes. I have watched Wales twice in succession now and I still don’t know what our game plan is with ball in hand. I don’t want to be too negative, but I am really struggling to find any positives! It was brilliant for Alun Wyn, left, to break the world caps record and I thought James Davies and new boy Shane Lewis-Hughes did alright in the back row. Apart from that, the only other thing
I could look forward to was my Indian takeaway last night! So, what happens next? Wales will now be up against it and it’s Ireland next in the Autumn Nations Cup. That will be far from easy and the biggest thing for me is the breakdown. We have to get that sorted.
The late withdrawal of Justin Tipuric from the Scotland game was a big blow. Coaches Gethin Jenkins and Byron Hayward have to find a way in the next two weeks of getting Wales competitive in that area.
I can’t see Wayne making drastic changes for Ireland.
Wales have good players and they have to start showing that now. From Alun Wyn’s perspective, this was not the game or performance he deserved.
I interviewed Al after the match and it was a little bit awkward because you could tell he was in a bad mood from the result. That is totally understandable as he is the ultimate team man.
However, it would be remiss of me not to use this column to herald his achievement of becoming world rugby’s most capped player. It is incredible. I am not sure it will ever be beaten, either.
I played so much of my rugby career with Al and I am proud as punch to be able to call him a former teammate and also a friend. The latter is far more important.
As a country, Wales has punched above its weight for so long now and to have one of our own as the highest Test appearance maker is a phenomenal achievement.
In time Al will look back on his career with a huge amount of pride, but one thing is for sure and that is he will not be a happy man this weekend.
Wales have a tough run of fixtures coming up with Ireland and England in their Autumn Nations Cup pool. They should beat Georgia, but it is not a given.
As for Scotland, they can be pleased with their afternoon’s work. After all, they hadn’t won in Wales for 18 years. That bodes well for them and I thought their back row of Jamie Ritchie and Hamish Watson had a very good game.
What is most frustrating from a Wales point of view though is that if they had played to their best, what Scotland did would have been irrelevant. I don’t mean that in an arrogant or disparaging way.
As a rugby neutral it was pleasing to see the mercurial talents of Stuart Hogg and Finn Russell back in the Scottish blue, but I have to keep on coming back to Wales.
The Welsh problems were all up front and it meant there was very little action behind the scrum. The conditions of a stiff wind and heavy rain also made things difficult.
When you don’t retain possession and give away lots of penalties, you’re never going to be able to give your backs a shot at making an impact.
I can’t remember Liam Williams, Jonathan Davies, Josh Adams or Leigh Halfpenny doing any real attacking of any note.
As a former wing that was a huge disappointment.
So now it’s a week off before Ireland in Dublin.
Wales will find it hard to win there and a sixth straight defeat will only see the pressure on Wayne go up even further.
He is still the man for me as head coach and I am unequivocal in that, but there is also no doubt Wales have to get better and they have to do it quickly.
This Scotland game simply wasn’t good enough.