Wayne Pivac has not slept properly in over three months, but he will sleep soundly on Saturday night if his Wales side create history and topple the Springboks in South Africa.
The tourists have been widely written off ahead of the Test series, which kicks off in Pretoria tomorrow. It comes after they concluded their Six Nations campaign with a defeat to Italy, which created history for all the wrong reasons.
It was a low point in the careers of everyone involved and the Wales boss was deadly serious when he told reporters in Johannesburg that he has not been able to rest.
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Asked what it would mean for his side to become the first Wales team to win against the Boks in their own backyard, he said: “Well, I’ll probably get my first decent night’s sleep since the end of the Six Nations. And that’s a fact.
“It just doesn’t go away. The thing with coaches and players is you’re not happy until you get your next win under your belt.
“It’s been a long time between drinks and of course there is that memory. If you finish on winning the Six Nations then it’s quite a nice memory but losing to Italy has been challenging in terms of the pressure you put on yourself as opposed to the pressure others put on you.”
Yesterday, skipper Dan Biggar said he was hoping to 'stick two fingers up' to the critics and those who are emphatically dismissing Wales' chances of any success on the Highveld or in the coming weeks.
Pivac, though, admitted he understood why his side were being written off and, like Biggar, urged his players to respond on the pitch.
Asked if he was sick of being written off, Pivac added: “Yeah but it’s understandable. You’ve got to look at where the two teams are coming from. They’re the world champions, in their own backyard, at altitude. It’s a tough place for anyone to go and from the outside looking in, from our last performance, you would write us off.
“The main thing is that we haven’t written ourselves off. Some of the players look at it, a lot of them are on social media all the time. It’s a fact of the game. I don’t mind it at all because it is just people reporting on the facts.
“If you want to argue, play a bit better. That’s where we’ve got to do our arguing and say that we are better than that, don’t write us off and then bang."
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