Pressure of our wooden-spoon showdown will speed up rebuild

I had a good chat with Martyn Williams and Jonathan Humphreys this week and both were recalling Wales’s Six Nations campaign in 2003, when they finished up with the wooden spoon.

Both had been involved as players and spoke about how tough it had been and how they had learnt from it. Two years later, Wales won the Grand Slam, the start of a pretty significant period of success to 2019.

There were echoes of their experience in what we are currently trying to achieve with this group. We are facing a wooden-spoon match against Italy in Cardiff today and, as a side, are embracing the pressure.

Pressure is where you find out about people. Some people shy away from it, for others it brings the best out of them. You want players who want to face challenges full on.

I get excited by it. It is a massive challenge and one of the reasons why you are involved in professional sport. We have not spoken about the wooden spoon.

It is about winning. It was the same when we were going for Grand Slams. We will just talk about ourselves, our process and how we get better and look at opportunities to put points on the board.

Scotland started well against Italy, but will no doubt look back at the game and think they got a bit loose and threw the ball around. Italy stayed in the fight and kept the scoreboard ticking over, scored a couple of tries from kicks through and ended up winning. If Scotland were playing Italy again this week, they would have a completely different approach to how they played the game after 20 or 30 minutes.

It is fantastic for the Six Nations. You want six teams all capable of beating each other and having jeopardy. There was a period where there was a lot of discussion about whether Georgia should replace Italy. But I think what we are seeing now is the result of some of the structures Italy have put in place over a number of years with their academies. Their under-20s side have improved massively.

With Wales, I am excited about the progress I am seeing. We have cast our net wide to find players who have the potential to be special on the Test stage but may have played only 20-odd games or less for their clubs.

It is a tough learning environment, given the pressure to deliver results at the same time and, despite what people think, you cannot cover every scenario in preparing the side. A player has to go through those experiences and sometimes they learn most in the review process afterwards. Game management is one of the things for us, as well as accuracy, where we have come up short so far, despite being competitive in all of our games.

I will give you one example of where we are. During this Six Nations, we have been overplaying or not being accurate enough in the middle

of the park and ending up making errors. The stats show we are forcing opposition teams to make exits from their 22 on average only twice in a game, whereas during the World Cup that figure was six.

That is the sort of pressure you put on teams when you get turnovers, which create opportunities to score and potentially control the scoreboard as well. Those are the learning processes we are going through, as well as game understanding.

Everyone talks about kicking and wanting to play, but it is about finding a balance. Sometimes applying pressure is not about running, it is about turning a team around by having two good contacts and then putting a little chip behind and put the opposition under the pump in terms of having to exit.

It is about waiting for those moments and players recognising that. We are talking about those scenarios, and I am excited about where the group are going.

Look at players such as Cam Winnett, Alex Mann and Mackenzie Martin. They all have big futures. Martin is 6ft 5in and unbelievably explosive, but has barely jumped in a line-out. He is going to be a fantastic line-out forward but he needs some work.

I know results have not gone our way during this campaign, but we are laying foundation stones for the future and I cannot criticise the players for their efforts. They have given me everything and are so keen to learn. Some people relish being negative. But what about appreciating what this group have been through and are trying to achieve?

We are going to keep going with these players through the summer tour. I do not see any point in bringing more experienced players who have not been available during the Six Nations.

These are the guys who are doing it in tough times and you cannot throw them out with the bath water. We are going to keep working with them and make them better players.