Gatland should ignore O’brien attack and prepare Wales to beat the Irish

Commentary Allan Massie

Idoubt if we should pay much attention to Sean O’brien’s claim that the Lions would have won all three Tests against the All Blacks if they had been better coached. Most of us thought that the Lions did better than expected in drawing the series, though apparently the prop Mako Vunipola has said that the Lions would have won if Eddie Jones had been the coach; perhaps, perhaps not. Of course, coaches, like football managers, are held responsible for failure, which is fair enough if only because they are given credit for success. But it’s not coaches who miss tackles or drop passes, just as they don’t score tries or kick penalties. Still one now reads that Gatland is going to “confront” O’brien. He might do better just to shrug his shoulders and prepare Wales to beat Ireland in the Six Nations.

There were, however, two more interesting off-the-field matters this week. The RFU came up with a proposal to satisfy, or at least appease, the English Premiership clubs who resent losing players to international duty. Conscious that the earlier suggestion that the Six Nations be squeezed into five weeks with no fallow weekends hasn’t found favour – to put it mildly – with other Unions, they now propose that England and France should sit out the first weekend and play each other on the first of the fallow ones. This would mean a six week tournament for them rather than the present seven week one. Consequently, clubs would have their players for one week more. It’s a compromise which might bite back on them, since having only one weekend off during the tournament might well result in more injuries, and, of course, less time to recover.

The French view of the plan hasn’t yet been reported, so far as I know, but I daresay club owners there might be just as enthusiastic as their English counterparts. I don’t know whether Eddie Jones has been consulted. I wouldn’t have thought that either he or Guy Noves would be wildly keen. The best that can be said for the idea is that it’s a lot better, and considerably less arrogant, than one floated a dozen or so years ago; that would have had the England-france match always played on the last day of the tournament on the grounds that it would be the title decider. Since then, of course, Wales and Ireland have won more titles than England and France.

More interesting was a SRU

“It’s nice to see imaginative thinking from the SRU, a change from when one SRU president said, ‘First, we say no [to a new idea]. Then we think about it and say no again’.”