Wales need to make sure this summer tour doesn’t go the way of Japan jaunt

THE five uncapped rookies handed Wales jerseys to start Friday’s pre-tour training match against RGC 1404 will scarcely need reminding that, as far as the big international breakthrough is concerned, the Champagne stays on ice.

There will be no cap to clutch hold of come the post-match rigmarole, even if there may well be one or two photos with proud parents and girlfriends.

So how meaningful was yesterday’s team announcement? How meaningful will this summer tour be given that the party is shorn of a sizeable contingent of front-line players otherwise engaged with the Lions in New Zealand?

Well, even accounting for the players’ responsibility to impress through their own talent and application, it’s as meaningful as the squad management choose to make it. And that includes Warren Gatland and Rob Howley, currently away enjoying a third Lions sabbatical while Robin McBryde and Shaun Edwards hold the Wales fort.

And making it meaningful means not repeating the pointless escapade that was the 2013 tour to Japan.

McBryde led that jaunt as well given that it was Lions year, and with the benefit of four years hindsight it is plain to see how little Wales got out of it.

They travelled to the Land of the Rising Sun with a 27-strong squad made up largely of young hopefuls seeking to prove to Gatland that he had a deeper reserve of ability at his disposal than he perhaps believed, and that the conveyor belt of potential Test stars was fully operational.

Yet of that squad, just two – Dan Biggar and Liam Williams – went on to become established first choice Wales players.

Others, Scott Baldwin and Bradley Davies for example, have been in and out of Gatland’s team in the intervening period.

But the vast majority of the Japan tourists either disappeared without trace from the Wales set-up or, at best, flitted around the periphery.

Why? Was it that they were never good enough in the first place? Have they not been developed properly? Or were they better than Gatland and his cohorts believed and thus the victims of selection injustice? Four players involved on Friday, and who will tour with Wales in the coming weeks, also went to Japan – hooker Scott Baldwin, back row Josh Navidi, prop Rhodri Jones and flyhalf Rhys Patchell. Since facing the Cherry Blossoms, Baldwin has accumulated 33 caps but fallen down Gatland’s pecking order since being number one in his position during the 2016 Six Nations. But the contribution of the other three has been negligible. Jones has started four games, Patchell has played just twice – against New Zealand last summer – and Navidi, ludicrously, hasn’t featured at all since being part of the Wales side that lost 23-8 to the Japanese in the second Test in Tokyo.

It must be tough for the Blues stalwart having to wait for a Lions year to get the nod from Wales.

Navidi must be on tenterhooks waiting for the publication of the 2021 fixtures.

There is of course a heavy development feel about this summer’s tour to play Tonga in Auckland and Samoa in Apia.

More casual Welsh rugby followers may not even have heard of some of the more unheralded names in McBryde’s squad when it was revealed a fortnight ago.

And the sending for of Ospreys prop Gareth Thomas to replace the injured Rob Evans over the weekend seemed to further underlined the theme.

And yet little, in essence, is different about this present group and the one that went to Japan.

The uncapped contingent runs to double figures in both. More experienced players are included to provide some ballast this year, as they were in 2013,

The average age of the current squad – 24 – is actually a year older than that of 2013, and the cap tally of