SCHADENFREUDE? NEVER MIND THE GERMANS!
So far, no matter how close*. Isn’t that how it felt in the immediate aftermath of the match at Etihad Stadium in Melbourne? Like how Charlton Heston felt at the end of Planet of the Apes when he realized he’d been on Earth the whole time. Massively gutted. Worse still, the already-sharpened knives were at hand to burst Wales’s considerable bubble by those who had tired of our Six Nations heroics; those who felt that Wales couldn’t be Europe’s vanguard of the sport, surely.
In a comedy of errors worthy of a Larry David scene, I watched the first test in the company of some English friends (how does he get himself into these comical situations? you chuckle to yourselves, with a shake of the head). The stick was considerable as the Wallabies dominated most facets of the game. When I assured one of my tormentors that England wouldn’t fare much better against the Springboks than Wales just had against Australia, he answered that there was a caveat to my guarantee: nobody was expecting England to do well. Wales, on the other hand, were being talked up (rightly or wrongly – I still believe the former) as contenders. “And it’s your national sport,” he added, as if I didn’t feel bad enough already.
Alan Hansen once said: ‘You can’t win anything with kids’. Many of Wales’s players are, in rugby terms, kids. Their youthfulness didn’t stop them winning the Grand Slam this year (an accolade that could turn into an albatross around their necks should they fail to progress from there), and they came reasonably close to upsetting Australia’s restoration of self-respect in the first test –the Wallabies having lost to the Scots earlier in the week– while pushing them even harder in the second. Obviously it is to their misfortune that they didn’t.
From the outset, I’ve been adamant that Wales should get at least one win during this series. It would have been less taxing on us all if they had done so in one of the first two tests, but the Wallabies aren’t known for giving easy rides. The euphoria of the Six Nations has given way to a heaviness of the soul, such is the emotional investment put in by fans. One I spoke to told me he couldn’t eat for hours after the game and, I must admit, my usually reliable penchant for ‘big eats’ deserted me in the aftermath of that Melbourne disaster.
If we as spectators feel so thoroughly despondent in the comfort of our own homes after watching our team lose, imagine how bad the players themselves feel. It’s therefore unlikely that they need the extra criticism heaped on them from those Scarlets centre Gareth Maule described on Twitter as “’Brave’ individuals who sit behind your social networking device abusing players. Embarrassing #chumps”. Chumps indeed, Gareth. Chumps indeed.
I’ve heard it said that a victory for Wales in this series wouldn’t do them any good in the long run, and there’s something to be said for that assessment. Are we a team that is ready to crack the Big Three on a consistent basis? On the last two showings, the answer is a bit of a fence-sitter: yes and no. Wales will leave Australia, regardless of the result on Saturday, knowing that certain aspects of their game need fine-tuning. First and foremost should be the faulty line-outs, which have been the cause of so much frustration.
That Wales’s loss in the last test is widely being put down to the final minute is unfair on the players concerned — if they were much the better team in that game, they wouldn’t have been just a solitary point ahead of the Australians with one minute to go. As it stands, the relief on the faces of the Wallabies as Mike Harris’ penalty sealed the victory for them said it all: it was a game they came within an inch of losing.
It is easy to forget that our playmaker, Rhys Priestland, has been the incumbent fly-half for less than a year. Berrick Barnes, his opposite ten, has played some superb rugby that has served to overshadow much of Wales’s output. 26-year-old Barnes is just a year older than Priestland, but where the Scarlet only came of age during last year’s World Cup, the Waratah was tearing Wales to pieces at the Millennium Stadium on only his second cap four years earlier.
Rob Howley’s selection of an unchanged lineup for this weekend means his faith in the fly-half from Ysgol Bro Myrddin is complete. Those who not so long ago were bellowing for James Hook never to so much as look at the number ten jersey again now appear to be crying for his reinstatement — they’ve crossed the floor more times than Winston Churchill on the matter**.
There has also been clamour for Rob Howley to select Justin Tipuric at openside, despite captain Sam Warburton occupying that lighted spot. It must be said, the lack of game time for Tipuric in this test series is slightly bewildering, and I am a big supporter of his (as I am of his Ospreys teammate, centre Ashley Beck, who had a relatively quiet debut last weekend). The players once again selected for Saturday’s test at the SFS will have no excuses should things go wrong for a third time. Three victories for Australia in the series –not to mention seven on the trot against Wales, should they win on Saturday– is pretty definitive.
Whatever the outcome, this trip to Australia will be seen as a crucial lesson in the learning curve of this team. A win would be nice though.
FROM JAZZ AGE TO RAZZ AGE
While the quality of his Welsh rugby side was being deconstructed with glee in most quarters, Gatland was brooding. Holed up in his New Zealand manor, Australia might as well have been on the other side of the world (I looked on the map: it’s not). Some said he could occasionally be spotted of an evening, gazing wistfully across the Tasman…
Of course Wales would miss Gatland. If they could do the job without him, why would he be there in the first place? His return to the Wales camp would certainly have had an effect on how the team performed in the second test, which isn’t to take anything away from Rob Howley (likely Wales’s next head coach when Gatland takes up his role with the All Blacks after Rugby World Cup 2015). In transforming Wales from the fickle performers of yesteryear to the steely challengers we will see fighting for a rare victory in Australia this weekend, Gatland has done for the nation what he did with London Wasps and Waikato not so long ago. In years to come, we might refer to these transitional stages as Pre- and Post-Gatland.
Reading Jake White’s autobiography ‘In Black and White’ this week, a certain passage caused me to me jolt as if awakened from a particularly bad dream. In it, the former Springboks and World Cup-winning coach describes the Welsh tour to South Africa in 1998:
“[When] Wales arrived at Loftus, we ran them ragged, winning by a record score of 96-13. Wales had already lost to the Emerging Boks, Border, Natal and the Falcons, so by the time they met the Boks, they were completely shattered. It was a great win, but I felt an underlying sense of sadness that Welsh rugby, once the best in the world, had become so poor.”
I then recalled a brilliant after-dinner speech given by Garin Jenkins, the Welsh hooker on that tour, at Cowbridge Rugby Club a couple of years ago. He painted a vivid and hilarious portrait of the mindset of Welsh rugby players of that era with regard to touring the ruthless rugby republic that is South Africa. “Loads of players pulled out at the last minute,” said Jenkins. “I remember [omitted name of famous Welsh forward] said he couldn’t make the tour because his cat was sick.”
Come the day of infamy in Pretoria, which is widely regarded as a game in which Wales were fortunate not to concede a century of points, Jenkins, on the bench for the match, described his fellow replacements as taking an age to take off their tracksuits when told to warm up, so reticent were they to be a part of the drubbing. When it came time for Jenkins to take to the field, he remembered the man he replaced coming off the field “running faster than he’d run all day.”
Fast-forward eleven years, and a Welsh-filled Lions troupe under the guidance of Warren Gatland came agonizingly close to levelling the series against the Springboks at the very same Loftus Versfeld Stadium. Against the southern hemisphere nations, it has been a string of nearlys and what ifs for Wales’s head coach, but he has ensured that none of his players ever feels fear in even the most boiling of cauldron-like stadia. It means that it’s more a matter of when, rather than if, Wales will claim a big scalp.
Could it be this Saturday?
*Yes, this is a Metallica reference.
**Yes, an obscure reference to the fact that loveable rogue Winston Churchill “crossed the floor” in the House of Commons twice, from the Conservatives to the Liberals and then later back again.
The Rugby City 