Good start likely for Henry's heroes

Shirley bassey has cleared her throat, as have Catatonia, and the Prince of Wales is on hand to officially begin the ceremonies. The World Cup begins here, in the splendid Millennium Stadium, and to say a nation expects would be an understatement.

In Wales they lurch from suicidal pessimism to blind optimism in the blink of an eye (never mind after a winning run of eight games), and quite possibly no nation expects more than the hosts - at any rate the prime hosts of five.

Although Graham Henry has inspired an extraordinary transformation with Wales in the last year, the messianic coach clearly now feels that his team are becoming ensnared in a euphoria of their own making. "This team is not hugely talented but they're giving the best of their ability and they've got huge pressure on them. They carry the flag," he says.

"Welsh people depend on the rugby team. You go across the Severn Bridge (to England) and in comparison rugby means nothing. If the football side loses it's mourning - but if the rugby side loses, who knows? In Scotland it's soccer; in Ireland it's the same; in Wales, though, rugby's everything."

Such has been the hype in Wales that Henry had to take the squad to Portugal to escape. He has also played down the team's chances: "Wales will not win the World Cup because we are not good enough," he proclaimed. Yesterday, speaking to Radio Ceredigion, Henry appeared to have changed his tone slightly: "We want to play to the best of our ability and nobody knows where that will take us. It could be the qualifying rounds, it could be the semi-final, it could be in the final with the cup above our heads - we don't know." Indeed, Wales could be anything. There's usually one team that blows up spectacularly, and they have some of the credentials to fill that role (excessive expectation/pressure, a tough group with no lay-up match, lack of strength in depth).

They also have the capacity to beat anybody, especially at the Millennium Stadium. Now strong in almost every area where they were weak when Henry took over (save for a possible lack of searing pace out wide), no Welsh team has ever entered a World Cup more confidently.

That has emanated from the extraordinary eight-match winning sequence. Admittedly, they were at the pin of their collars when squeaking home by a point courtesy of Neil Jenkins' metronomic right boot in the initial wins over France and England, but with subsequent wins over South Africa and France again the run cannot be dismissed lightly.

That it has also included three wins over today's opponents gives them a huge psychological edge. When the Pumas were running up half centuries against all three of their rivals from the Americas, they would have seemed potentially Wales's trickiest Pool D opponents.

But the nearer the Cup looms, the more it seems as if the Argentinians might be in for a bit of a barging. To lose one coach in their summer of discontent might have seemed careless, but to lose two? The long-serving Jose Luis Imhoff resigned after the defeats to Wales, and Hector Mendez had barely overseen the Pumas' contrasting two-Test tour to Scotland and Ireland last month when he too stormed off.

Riven by political in-fighting, the Pumas have also seen key forwards Pedor Sporleder and Mario Ledesma suspended from the finals for verbally abusing a referee, only to be reinstated, albeit on the proviso that Sporleder relinquished the captaincy.

Alex Wyllie, now the de facto coach, maintains that after the "surprising" developments of late, "I can honestly say that the players are fine and have been looking forward to the World Cup for some time. Hopefully, their concentration has not been affected".

However, their essentially semi-professional ways mean they cannot come together as can a professional team. The camp in Portugal, for instance, was Wales's third training camp of the year.

Given a scrum platform especially, the Puma backs - orchestrated from the base by the brilliant Agustin Pichot and further out by experienced captain Lisandro Arbizu - can trouble any side. But this much-improved Welsh scrum has taken them to task three times already this year.

Furthermore, as Ireland showed four weeks ago, if the homework is done Argentina can be read easily and shackled. It's hard to think that Henry won't have done his work, or that his players won't be able to do theirs.