If you select a side that is quite obviously not your strongest available, as Wayne Pivac did against Italy on Saturday, you are always flirting with danger, and Pivac duly paid the price with a shock defeat.
It is highly unlikely that Pivac will also pay for it with his job, as last year’s title success, albeit with its attendant fortune, probably affords him just enough credit, but this is undoubtedly going to be a tricky period for him to negotiate, especially with a three-Test trip to South Africa to come this summer.
Wales’s two previous defeats by Italy did not go down well. In 2007 the coach Gareth Jenkins was gone by the autumn after a calamitous World Cup. In 2003 the captain, Colin Charvis, supposedly caught smiling on camera, was ridiculously voted the second-most hated man in Wales after Saddam Hussein. And those two defeats were in Rome, not Cardiff.
Pivac was ready for the critics on Saturday afternoon, and for the questions about his post. “They’re entitled to their view,” he said. “Today is a backward step, there is no hiding from that.
“There are people in positions higher up than me who make the decisions. I’m not bothered by that, it is about doing what we think is right for this group. Today we believed in the squad we put there, we didn’t play to our potential, so we need to find out why that was. There was enough in this poor performance to have won the match.”
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That it was not enough was down to a try from the heavens from the last play of the game, as the baby-faced full back Ange Capuozzo danced his way to the line to feed the wing Edoardo Padovani, who had the presence of mind to ensure he went round and touched down near the posts. After 36 straight defeats in the tournament, it was a hugely significant victory for Italy that was rightly celebrated wildly. “There was a lot of emotion,” Kieran Crowley, the Italy head coach, said. “Marius Goosen, our defence coach, has been here six years but hadn’t won a Six Nations game, but now he’s won one. You’d think we’d won the World Cup but they’ve got to enjoy this because they are a young crew. They’ve got to learn how to win and they should enjoy this.”
The emotion in the Wales camp was, of course, very different. “It is probably the lowest point in most of the players’ careers,” Pivac said. Dan Biggar, the captain, whose 100th cap for his country had turned sour, gave a suitably downbeat interview afterwards, saying: “That’s probably the last chance for a lot of players.”
The likes of Johnny McNicholl, Willis Halaholo and Dillon Lewis may be in the firing line, but Wales’s player pool is rarely deep enough to discard anyone totally. It was, though, a point taken up by Alun Wyn Jones, whose swift return for a 150th cap had been the subject of so much debate.
At 36, Jones is contracted by the Welsh Rugby Union and Ospreys until the World Cup and he intimated that he is keen to tour South Africa, even if that had not been the plan before being injured last autumn.
“It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the summer,” he said. “Wayne’s been pretty candid up to this point with the amount of changes he’s made. We suffered a bit of pain with results and we have today again, but I’m sure he’s going to draw a line in the sand moving forward and select a squad he’s going to build into the World Cup.”
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This was a woeful Welsh performance to bookend the tournament alongside the horror show in Dublin in the opening round, which again raised questions about the regional game and its ability to prepare players for the international level. Even under Warren Gatland it always took at least one game to get up to speed and matters appear even worse now at the level below.
Although Wales scored three tries to Italy’s one, it is their attacking play under Pivac that is causing most concern, especially as this was supposed to be his point of difference when he was appointed. There was a period in the second half against England at Twickenham when it looked sharp, but otherwise it has been lacking in punch. Pivac’s constant tinkering with selection has not helped nor has some of his rather wishful thinking around the attack. “I don’t know that it struggled,” he said. “I know we didn’t finish a lot of opportunities we created. If we weren’t creating opportunities, I’d be a lot more concerned.”
Injuries have played their part as always, with the likes of George North, Ken Owens and Justin Tipuric to come back, and it has to be said that Wales troubled the grand-slammers France more than any other side in this year’s tournament, but, as Biggar and Jones alluded to, Pivac really does now need to settle on his chosen side. The centres and back row are still full of ever- moving parts.
South Africa will provide a monumental challenge at home.
“I’m hoping we take a step forward against the world champions in their back yard,” said Pivac. “We go there with an idea of how far we are from them 12 months out from a World Cup.
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“We’re not going to lose focus on what the big goal is here and the big picture is. Yes, today is a bitter pill to swallow for everybody. We have to learn from the performance and get better. If we go to the World Cup and get through to the quarter-finals, win a quarter-final and get through to the semi-final, everyone will be happy.”
But, at fifth place in the Six Nations for the second time in three years, that seems nothing more than a pipe dream at the moment.
