Wayne Pivac has given an insight into how he would have redrawn the map of Welsh professional rugby.
The New Zealander coached Wales for three years before being relieved of his position last December. He had previously enjoyed a successful spell with the Scarlets which saw them win the PRO 12 title in 2017 and reach a Heineken Champions Cup semi-final a year later.
But talk of revisiting the regional settlement in Wales has been in the air for a long time as the Welsh game tries to make the figures add up, and Pivac admitted to having had his own view on the way forward, involving two well-funded teams, covering Cardiff and a merged entity further west, and two other sides, the Dragons and a team in north Wales, feeding into them.
He said an offshoot could be to emulate the model in other countries of successful teams feeding into the national side.
“Back in around 2017, there was talk of amalgamation,” he said in discussion with former Scotland lock Jim Hamilton on the Big Jim Show. “Initially, I think it was the Blues [Cardiff] and the Ospreys; it fell over.
“I was coaching the Scarlets at the time and we were pretty successful.
“I looked at it from a rugby point of view and said: ‘How can we sustain what we are doing at the Scarlets when we know what’s round the corner?’ Funding was an issue for us.
“I did a paper exercise and looked at the Scarlets combined with the Ospreys. That team could compete with anyone in Europe.
“You put that then Ospreys and Scarlets team, when all those good internationals were in their late 20s and around the 30 mark, and it would have been successful, I believe, for quite a number of years.
“For me it was a rejig.
“The capital city always has to be there — that’s the Blues or Cardiff Rugby, as they are now.
“To me, the Dragons unearth so many good young players. A lot of them stick to the Dragons, but a lot of them move on as well. There are so many good young players coming out of there.
“You have north Wales, which is untapped.
“My view of the world was ‘let’s go put funding into two teams. Let’s get the capital city up and running and with the Dragons being a development team, if you like, at the time.’
“And north Wales kicking it off. Put a few of the older, senior players up there, get the marketing right because there’s a bit of money up in north Wales that could have got thrown into it.
“That gives you four teams, but two teams with the bulk of the money and two feeding in.
“Over time you do a Connacht. They went on to win the championship in 2016, the year before we won it. So it can be done. The model’s there.
“But, again, no-one wants to be that team that gets less money and for a number of years have to hit certain targets to build up.
“There were certainly discussions about that at the time.
“But it’s really, really difficult with the system we have in Wales whereby you have to get a certain number of votes around the table. It’s not that easy to get something pushed through, as we’ve seen.”
Welsh rugby is trying to find a way through despite a crippling financial situation that's seeing slashed budgets, wages cut and potential job losses. There was even talk of a merger between Ealing Trailfinders and the Ospreys until the Welsh region’s Y11 owners addressed the matter this week, saying it was not happening.
An extraordinary general meeting of the Welsh Rugby Union is being held on March 26 when there will be a key vote on governance aimed at dragging the game in Wales into the modern world and out of the mess it finds itself in.
Those plans include proposals that the union board’s next chair should be an appointed Independent non-executive director (INED) rather than someone elected by clubs, that its composition should include at least five women out of the 12 members and that its skill-set should be significantly more diverse. You can read the details of the plan that will go to a do-or-die vote on March 26, here.
Pivac said the appointment of an independent chair would be “a step in the right direction”.
There were, he said, some very good people in Wales and very good people who had been involved in Welsh rugby and moved on, like the brilliant Sunday Times business person of the year Amanda Blanc, who restructured Aviva insurance and in the process returned billions to shareholders.
Pivac called the likes of Blanc moving on “a shame because I think if we get the blend of talent right and the number of clubs right — whether that’s three, four, however that’s going to look — and over time the funding improves, then there’s a lot of talent comes through in Wales".
He added: “There’s a lot of pieces to this puzzle and it hasn’t quite been put together yet, but I think there is hope out there that some of these moves will be put into place in the near future.
“I would like to see some of those changes happen.”
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