Put down your drinks, shut up that piano, and snap your head towards the saloon door. Warren Gatland’s back. Watching him work the Six Nations launch, you wondered if he had ever really left. He seems to have slipped back into his old role as Wales head coach as if he were sliding into a favourite seat at the bar. But then he left such a big impression on the Welsh game first time around that the job still fits like it was moulded to him. His trusted players are a little older, he doesn’t know the younger ones so well, but otherwise the place hasn’t changed so very much during the three years he was away.
It was supposed to. Wayne Pivac promised to get Wales playing an entirely new style of running rugby. It didn’t work out that way. The longer he went on, the more they lost, and the more they lost, the more obvious it was that it was Gatland who had held Welsh rugby together for the last decade. The current chaos at the WRU is nothing new to a man who has spent as long around the game there as Gatland has. You can be sure he will deal with it the same way he always did, by closing it out and concentrating on building the tightest, toughest team he can in the time he has available.
Which isn’t long, but then he doesn’t need it to be. When Gatland started in 2008, he had 85 days before Wales’s first game, away against an England team who had just finished as runners-up in the World Cup. A decade later, he would pick that first match as his favourite Six Nations game. Wales were ranked 10th in the world at the time, had not won at Twickenham in 20 years, and trailed by 10 points at half-time.
Gatland remembers that Shaun Edwards, who had turned down a role at the RFU to take up the job of Wales’s defence coach, was staring at him as if he was wondering: “Why the hell did I let Gats talk me into coming here?” Then Wales started to play and ended up winning 26-19. Six weeks later, they were grand slam champions.
This time, Gatland has had 61 days. Again, he’s taking over a Wales team who finished fifth in the championship, just like they did in 2007, who are well down the world rankings, ninth this time, and whose last coach was drummed out of the job after a humiliating defeat against a team the Welsh expected to beat. You can be sure that Gatland’s thinking now is pretty similar to what he once said it was back when the WRU first offered him the job in 2008. “When I looked at the standard of the players, there was no good reason why these people should be struggling for results.” The biggest difference may be this time he’s sure of it.
In those first few weeks with the team, Gatland turned them around by laying down the principles that would shape Welsh rugby for the next decade. He also put together the coaching unit that would be with him right through that time, too, with Edwards, Robin McBryde, Rob Howley and Neil Jenkins. Jenkins is still there, Howley would be too if the WRU had let Gatland bring him back. While the others have moved on, he has, in Mike Forshaw, a man with more than a little bit of Edwards in him. “We’ve got a bit of history with people from Wigan who have backgrounds in rugby league,” Gatland says. “They’re always a little bit mad, in a good way.”
They will be working the players harder than Pivac did. “The great thing about Welsh players is they never question you in terms of how hard they work,” Gatland says. “If you ask them to run through a brick wall the question they have is: ‘What do you want us to do when we get to the other side?’” It’s a simple formula. The fitter you are, the harder you are to beat, and the harder you are to beat, the more confident you become. In 2008, Gatland said he imagined he would “break” some of the players in training. “More,” he told them. “Give us more. Do you think England are working this hard? Of course not. No one is. So give us more.”
That first team selection, like this one, was expedient. Gatland didn’t have time to overthink it, so he picked plenty of experienced men. His squad included five players who had won more than 50 caps already, and a sixth, Martyn Williams, who he persuaded out of retirement. His starting XV for that first Test against England featured 13 players from Ospreys, who had won the league the previous season. It was the first time Wales had picked a team with so many starting players from the one club. If you don’t have time to build team spirit, borrow it.
He has pulled a similar trick this time. His team to play Ireland is a mix of old hands, including a couple who probably imagined they had already played their last Tests but who he believes he can count on, and in-form players. Again, the key combinations play together for Ospreys, who have won five of their last six, including one away against Leicester and a double over Montpellier. Gatland has picked 12 of their players in his matchday squad.
The big question is whether these methods will work as well as they did for him in 2008, or if those players are just a little too long in the tooth, or this Ireland team just a little too good.
