Fitter Wales learn from previous failures

Six Nations Championship: Wales's rise to the summit of the Six Nations championship after 11 fallow years has spawned romantic comparisons with their predecessors of the 1970s, who achieved three Grand Slams and Five Triple crowns, and many people put the transformation down to the fact that a Welshman is the national coach for the first time since 1998.

The New Zealanders Graham Henry and Steve Hansen were in charge between 1998 and last year, an era when Wales never had better than a 60 per cent record in the championship, but the notion that a reputedly dour Kiwi approach has been thrown out for a return to supposedly Welsh virtues of instinctive rugby does not bear much scrutiny.

The only team in the championship who bear any resemblance to the Wales of the 1970s are France, excepting their opening stutter against Scotland, because their game combines power and organisation among the forwards with a back division capable of creating and exploiting space.

Wales do not have a tight five to match that of France. They have utilised their Southern-Hemisphere-honed fitness, ball-handling skills and spatial awareness to telling effect and their organised defence has been overlooked. Far from a return to the more pragmatic 1970s, Ruddock has put the roof on the house Hansen built on foundations laid by Henry.

Towards the end of his reign, Henry devised a system for forwards in broken play. He organised them into pods of three or four: when one pod was committed to the breakdown, the other would fan out wide and vice versa. Henry wanted the pods to last for multiple phases, but at the time neither the fitness of the Wales players nor their skill levels were sufficiently high to make the system work. Ruddock still uses pods, but only for two or three phases, after which players are encouraged to rely on what they see. "Graham brought the system in because we lacked leaders and players were not taking responsibility," said the Wales manager Alan Phillips, whose term started at the end of the Henry era. "When Steve chose five captains for our 2002 tour to South Africa he was laughed at, but it was the right call. "We did not have a Martin Johnson figure who could do it all and needed to spread the leadership load. We are seeing the benefits of that now and the pod system, though we do not call it that, is working because the players are more aware.

"The notion that our success is down to a rediscovered Welshness does not take into account the work put in over the last few years, nor the presence of Scott Johnson (an Australian hired by Henry) and a New Zealander (Andrew Hore) on our coaching team."

The Wales flanker Martyn Williams played under Henry and Hansen. "We were not good enough to do the pods system justice under Graham," he said. "Now it is second nature to us.

"We play a lot of touch rugby in training but it is carefully structured, with Scott refereeing, and a lot of the handling movements between backs and forwards we have put together this championship is a consequence of that.

"It has nothing to do with Welshness. Mike has built on what Graham and Steve started and he has improved our set-pieces. We are not only fitter and more skilful now, we are more experienced, and Steve deserves a huge amount of credit for blooding young players three years ago and sticking with them."