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Is there any cause for optimism in the ashes of Wales’ annus horribilis?
Sat in the bowels of the Principality Stadium on Sunday afternoon, Warren Gatland wore the demeanour of a man searching for answers as he attempted to digest Wales’ latest loss.
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Defeat to Fiji was his side’s 10th in a row, dating back to their Rugby World Cup 2023 quarter-final exit against Argentina and equalled an unwanted Welsh record.
Amid a difficult period for the team on the pitch, this was supposed to be a bright spot that gave Gatland and his players a platform from which to attack Australia and South Africa. They are now staring down the barrel of a winless calendar year for the first time in almost 90 years.
Still, Gatland insisted there was reason for optimism in the way the team started the match and when a question arrived on his own future, he pointed to the youth, inexperience and potential of the players at his disposal.
“We’ve said for the last 12 months since the World Cup, with the number of players and experience that we’ve lost, we were going to invest in a group of youngsters that we felt we could build with and take us on,” Gatland said.
“We’ve seen development from those youngsters. We’ve said we need some patience and time.
“But I understand Test match rugby is about performing and winning. You [the media] control the narrative and write what you want. I’ll see what happens there.”
So, where do Wales currently stand? Are they a young team that needs a bit of luck or do their problems run much deeper?
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With help from our friends at Opta, we took a look at the numbers underpinning their performances in a bid to answer that question.
Are Wales playing badly?
Let’s face it, you do not lose 10 matches in a row if you are playing well and Wales are currently experiencing issues in several key areas of the game.
In attack, they are making almost as many carries per match than in the final year of Gatland’s first spell in charge (118 in 2024 so far as opposed to 121 in 2019) but are making fewer metres (308 compared to 358) and line breaks (3.6/6.1) while not beating as many defenders (16.8/18.1).
Moreover, while their gainline success percentage is up from five years ago (49.6/41.6), that is significantly down on the previous two years (54.1 in 2022 and 57.2 last year).
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Perhaps as a result, the team is finding it difficult to turn attacking territory into points. Despite spending more time in the opposition 22 than in the final year of Wayne Pivac’s reign, Wales are scoring fewer points per visit (2.1 from 8.4 per match, compared to 2.2 from 6.8 in 2022).
In defence, meanwhile, the team is leaking tries at an increasing rate. When the team swept to a Six Nations Grand Slam and World Cup semi-final five years ago, they conceded only 2.2 per match.
That figure increased to 2.5 in Pivac’s final year and 2.9 in Gatland’s first back in Wales. In nine matches in 2024 so far, the team has conceded 3.3 tries per match, which is making it difficult for them to get results over the line despite scoring tries at the same rate as in 2019 (2.4 per match).
At the heart of their defensive struggles is the kind of ill-discipline that was on display against Fiji on Sunday when they shipped 12 penalties.
The team is being asked to make more tackles per match than in 2019 (148 compared to 137), albeit fewer than in the previous two years (150 and 155) and although their success rate is a respectable 87.1 per cent (up from 86.1 per cent in 2019), that effort is coming at a cost.
Wales are winning almost two fewer turnovers per game than five years ago (4.3 compared to 6.1) and are conceding more penalties (10.2/8.9).
Things are even more alarming at the set piece, where lineout success is down from 88.6 per cent in 2019 to 85.7 per cent this year and scrum success has flatlined, to 82.5 per cent from 93.2 per cent.
And for all of Gatland’s talk about trying to play a more expansive game against Fiji, across the year as a whole the team is much narrower than it was two years ago. Only 24.4 per cent of phases have moved beyond the first receiver in 2024, down from 31.8 per cent in Pivac’s final year.
Is it a young squad?
There are reasons behind these stats, of course, and Gatland is right when he says that he has needed to bring through a younger, less experienced crop of players.
Whether he realised that would be the case when he accepted the WRU’s offer of a return is perhaps open to debate but he has cast his net wide in terms of selection since then.
Last year, as he piloted the team through the Six Nations and World Cup in France, Gatland used 59 players, the average age of whom were 27 years and 341 days.
That tinkering has continued into 2024 in which he has used 53 across nine matches. However, the average age of those selected has fallen by almost two years, to 26 years and 12 days.
In the same period, Gatland has had to say goodbye to a number of key lieutenants.
Of the team that started the World Cup quarter-final defeat to Argentina in Marseille 13 months ago, Gareth Davies, Dan Biggar and George North have retired from the Test game, Tomas Francis is concentrating on club rugby in France and Louis Rees-Zammit is chasing his NFL dream in the USA.
Added to the departure of Alun Wyn Jones, Leigh Halfpenny and Justin Tipuric, not to mention the absence of Taulupe Faletau, Josh Adams and, until the weekend, Jac Morgan due to injury and it has clearly been a time of flux.
Gatland would undoubtedly be much happier were he able to select from a more settled squad.
On the road to the 2019 Grand Slam and World Cup semi-finals, he used only 42 players (who had an average age of 27 years and 108 days).
Against Fiji on Sunday, the starting XV contained just 337 caps – 164 of which had been won by only three players, Tomos Williams, Adam Beard and Aaron Wainwright. The other 12 players averaged fewer than 15 caps each.
Those players will only get better with time on the pitch but with matches against Australia and the Springboks to come, things are not going to get any easier any time soon.
Is there any evidence things could get better?
Actually, yes. As previously mentioned, Wales are scoring tries with the same frequency as they did in the final year of Gatland’s first reign, and they are making more entries into their opponents’ 22.
Should they become more composed in those situations while tightening up defensively, then maybe a few of the closer defeats will turn into victories.
Moreover, despite returning to the mean on Sunday, Wales have been more disciplined in 2024 than they were in either of the previous two years, their average penalty count down from 11.9 in both 2022 and 2023 to 10.2.
Wales are also enoying more ruck success year on year and their attacking stats have not quite sunk to the nadir of Pivac’s beleaguered final 12 months at the helm.
Obviously, that isn’t much to cling to when you are on such a poor run of results, but it does hint that better times could be around the corner.
Any other reasons for optimism?
We will never know what would have happened had Tommy Reffell got lower or Mason Grady not been forced off through injury but there were promising signs in the opening quarter against Fiji.
Not least in the move that led to Blair Murray’s opening try as Grady linked with Ben Thomas to devastating effect before Cam Winnett played in the debutant to score in the left corner.
Murray momentarily thought he had scored a second try early in the second half and although he was brushed aside by Josua Tuisova for the decisive try, he is far from alone in feeling the force of the Fijian centre.
The Scarlets man looks like a Test winger in the making and there is growing excitement around a backline that includes the considerable talents of Grady, Winnett, Ben Thomas and Max Llewellyn even if concerns remain at half-back.
Add in captain Dewi Lake, the returning Morgan and emerging Taine Plumtree and there is some evidence to suggest there could be some light at the end of this dark and gloomy tunnel.
Whether it’s enough to return Wales to previous glories, however, only time will tell.
Louis Rees-Zammit joins Jim Hamilton for the latest episode of Walk the Talk to discuss his move to the NFL. Watch now on RugbyPass TV
Grow a pair and get rid of your kiwi coaches Wales.
There is nothing Welsh about you. You're a hollow shell of your former proud selves.
You're pathetic. Most other countries have woken up to the fact that they were being coached by kiwi coaches to be cannon fodder for the All Blacks.
Where is your identity ? You have none.
Warren Gatland is the most Welsh person on the planet, despite being from NZ
There isn’t, really. They keep losing games, that are winnable for them, they keep cutting their own hamstrings with inopportune ball drops, lack of patience, etc.
Certain players (Will Rowlands, pointing directly at you) need to learn not to rush forward unsupported to get easily turned over, which he’s done twice. He should have waited in both cases, there was no need to rush, no directive from the ref to play it.
This degree of tactical inaneness from a wizened head will have detrimental effect on the younger players.
At times, Wales were their own worst enemy, and that doesn’t bode well for the future. A team, that’s lesser than a sum of its constituent parts, and that’s anathema to the great Welsh teams of the past, of those the opposite was true.
Anscombe is in his 30’s and Costelow has proven time and again, that he isn’t the answer.
Standouts like Tomos Williams, Dewi Lake, Adam Beard, or Jac Morgan cannot salvage the whole enterprise with all the discontinuities and missing links.
They’re not going to beat Australia, and they’re not going to beat the Springboks. It’s going to be a 0-13 for the year. Goodness gracious. To think I’d ever see the once mighty Wales in such disrepair… it’s just sad beyond belief.
There are good players in the squad. Tommy Reffell is a good player but he's been asked to do something at attacking rucks by Welsh coaches he isn't at Leicester. The coaches decided against a 5/3 split. Now you talk to any Welsh rugby fan and every single one of them said why do we have an out and out 10 as the 23rd man. If he had put a Rodgers or James we would of had the cover. Then to say the wrong player gets sent on when Grady went on thats a coaching problem.
I don't think things are going to get better until you look at the route causes. In 2023/24 the regions average point difference was -9.5 Wales average point difference for that season -10. This season so far the point difference is -4.5 and how many points did we loose at the weekend by -5.
We are the sum of our parts.