Long-serving Gatland keeps on believing

RUGBY:WHAT'S THIS, no pre-match barbs? Warren Gatland normally enjoys a little pre-match gamesmanship. Witness his comments designed to focus attention on English hooker Dylan Hartley. That was partly in response to on-field incidents and comments involving the Northampton hooker and his Cardiff/Welsh counterpart Matthew Rees in a key January Heineken Cup tie, which he saw as a way of defending his player.

Gatland been as good as gold this week. Earlier this week, there was a repeated admittance his words had been ill-chosen when talking aloud of the rivalry between the Welsh and Irish players prior to the last meeting here two years ago. Although not officially on media duty at the squad’s base at the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel yesterday, Gatland was in a chipper mood, cracking jokes as he stood on the verge of becoming Wales’ longest-serving coach, tomorrow’s game being his 36th in charge. Asked about the Ireland team, he paused at length.

“Ireland? Experienced, professional and what makes Ireland so dangerous is they know how to win,” he says. “Under the pump against Italy, they went up there and won the game. They held on to win against Scotland and even got themselves into a position where they probably should have beaten France. And that’s what makes them so dangerous. They can be under the hammer for long periods, 20 minutes, but they keep their patience, they know they’re going to get an opportunity and normally when they do get an opportunity they’re quite clinical in taking it.”

Noting the tweeting controversy in Ireland, as an aside, it’s worth noting the Welsh players themselves have banned all tweeting during the Six Nations, with one player having incurred a £100 (€117) fine for doing so, albeit innocuously.

There was a time, in terms of games played, when Gatland was Ireland’s longest serving coach before Eddie O’Sullivan inherited that record. To become Wales’ longest-serving coach – with trophies galore in between times at Wasps and Waikato – suggests he must be doing something right.

“It’s harder in the professional game to be an international coach,” he said. “If you talk to Andy Robinson, Martin Johnson or Declan Kidney, you’re so reliant on luck – what players you have available, you don’t get a pre-season, you don’t have a chance to plan – that’s where you’ve got to keep believing in yourself.

“The thing about (coaching) club sides is you’ve got room for manoeuvre and fail while you’re trying to develop. In international rugby you don’t have that luxury. So you’ve just got to keep believing, and I’m confident if I went into a regional side or a club side I know I’d be successful because of having those opportunities to do that. But while it’s frustrating at international level, what’s exciting is we’re going to be playing in front of 74,500 people and the buzz; and that’s what you get out of bed in the morning for.”

It’s all a far cry from when he took his first steps as a player/coach with Galwegians in 1989 for five years, then returning to Ireland with Connacht in 1996. “The amount of analysis that goes on nowadays and the money that’s spent in the game is phenomenal. When we were coaching Connacht we had four full-time players and we were training in Athlone on a Tuesday and Thursday night, and we went on to do brilliantly.

“The game has also become so physical now that Sunday is a recovery, Monday is a recovery, players will train on a Tuesday, and they’ll have Wednesday off, then you train Thursday and there’s a light run on a Friday. So I joked it kinda reminds me of the amateur days. Can we not just train Tuesday and Thursday nights and you can go and work 40 hours a week like we did it in the amateur days?”

He also finds the media far heavier going nowadays. “It’s like a brick hammer just knocking a little piece off you all the time.” So no more grenades? “No, never any more. I don’t mind doing it as long as people take it in the right way, but people don’t.”

He abhors what he sees as black-or-white analysis of games, in which the winners are hailed and the losers castigated, and cites Wales’ 26-19 defeat to England as an example. Wales patiently opened up the English defence three times without reward in the first half, missed two three-pointers and were four points adrift when Craig Mitchell was sin binned; wrongly as the IRB have since admitted, or if not, then Chris Ashton should have been yellow-carded moments before for a near identical offence.

Having conceded 10 points in 10 minutes, they again got back to four points, and afterwards Johnson admitted to Gatland it had been “a bloody tough Test match”. Two wins have since followed. The bookies can hardly separate the teams yet so results driven has the Test environment become that Gatland laughs at the thought of what awaits himself or Kidney depending on tomorrow’s results.

The reduced Welsh win ratio under Gatland since his opening Grand Slam season and eight-match winless streak which he and Wales took into their last two matches is in part the result of playing the Southern Hemisphere big three more regularly. Playing the best, he is convinced, is simply the best means of improving. “That’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it? We still can’t beat them, but we try to play them,” Gatland noted dryly, in part self-mockingly.