Short dash from no hope to ever rising expectation

For Wales the long march from no hope to inflated expectation has in fact been a short dash under the benign tutelage of Graham Henry. Why, the man has been coach hardly a year and already they are talking in terms of the World Cup.

Not of participation but of winning the thing, though this is the sentiment of the sentimental, the dewy-eyed long sufferers with extended memories of the Seventies, rather than the harder-headed realists of the latter-day dressingroom.

But the simple fact that anyone, however addle-brained, could conceive that the Welsh would have even the ghost of a chance in their own impending tournament shows how times have changed. Remember, the last time Wales went into a Test without Henry as coach they lost 96-13 to South Africa.

That was when they were a laughing stock and a crying shame at one and the same time. The eternal embarrassment of Pretoria was bad enough but the prospective humiliation of going the same way on a global stage as World Cup hosts was too much to bear.

And so the Welsh Rugby Union, at an expense that would have seemed vast but for subsequent results, turned to Auckland and Henry, the eighth coach since the glory days of Edwards, JPR and co, and the last hope. After eight successive victories, it is as if what went before never happened. Yes, the last team to beat Wales were Ireland.

Time, then, for feet to be kept more firmly on the ground than Chris Wyatt's in a line-out, because there is nothing so dangerous to a Welsh rugby team as the cockiness that invariably comes with being cock-a-hoop, the pride that goes before a fall.

Henry learned this in no time once the euphoria of last autumn's Wembley near miss against South Africa - just four months on from the 96-pointer - was punctured. Wales captain Robert Howley has endured enough disappointments to have reached the same conclusion long ago.

"The World Cup is the yardstick by which we will be measured," Howley said. "I know there's talk about Wales reaching the final or even winning the trophy, but as a group of players we aren't looking that far ahead.

"We are aware that Wales haven't reached the knock-out stages since 1987 and our first task is to put that right. It means coming at the head of our group and that's going to be far from easy."

This is sensible talk, not least because of the excruciation Wales endured at the 1991 and `95 tournaments. Samoa's presence in the Welsh group this time is a convenient rebuke for what occurred eight years ago, however misleadingly it was interpreted at the time.

That Samoan team were judged on the supposed status of their tiny country rather than that of their rugby players, virtually all of whom were playing at the highest level of New Zealand provincial rugby. To have to play the equivalent of New Zealand A at a time of trouble in Welsh rugby was therefore far more difficult than it appeared.

It made no difference. "Wales enter the land of the lilliputians,' ` read one headline after the islanders won at Cardiff Arms Park, and I plead guilty because it was my own paper. But there is a point to rehearsing this fairly ancient history: many of the ills which have afflicted the game in Wales during the doleful Nineties can be traced back to the effects of that day, and that result.

There is not a team among the familiar rugby nations who have not subsequently racked up record victories over the Welsh. Indignity was heaped on indignity when the Irish kept Wales out of the 1995 quarter-finals. The Nineties reached their nadir when the Springboks reached the nineties.

SELF-EVIDENTLY, the only way was up, but with Wales you never quite know. And even after Henry had signed up for £1.25million over five years, it took time. Amid the current euphoria, is there anyone left who remembers how Wales lost to Scotland at Murrayfield and Ireland at Wembley within a fortnight last February?

But what Henry had going for him - quite apart from a profound rugby knowledge and brilliant strategic and tactical appreciation that had been applied to, and developed with, Auckland - was precisely this: time. This precious commodity had never been granted his ill-fated predecessors.

In fact, the WRU had as good as written off the 1999 World Cup in the interests of pulling things round under Henry for 2003. Hence his five-year appointment. You could argue that Wales's emergence as a genuinely competitive force for this tournament is a bonus beyond the union's wildest dreams.

That said, it is no fluke. Henry admits that he listened to too many siren voices on arrival and excluded players he should have selected in his early squads. His own compatriot (and former Auckland full-back) Shane Howarth was, strangely, the prime example.

Left to his own devices, Henry has devised a game-plan with which his players are comfortable - the first time any Wales coach has managed this in at least 11 years. He has instilled discipline among players whose control has occasionally been abject and quite possibly cost them the Irish match seven months ago.

Above all, he has discovered and developed players capable of winning and using the ball. Banal though this sounds, it had proved impossible for Kevin Bowring, Alex Evans, Alan Davies, Ron Waldron and John Ryan before him.

As Henry himself put it: "I had a vision of the game and how I wanted to play it. It was a case of finding the players to fulfil that vision. The winning run gives the guys a lot of confidence, and beating France twice in those eight games is good for the psychology of the team when they had an inferiority complex a while ago.

"I didn't look back. I didn't look at the past team and how they performed. I didn't watch them on video. I just had my own ideas and tried to put them into action. Common sense, really." Really? Thus did "The Great Redeemer", the WRU's hostage-to-fortune sobriquet for their Kiwi coach, become the saviour of Welsh rugby.

So Wales now have in Wyatt a lock to win line-out possession and run around the field like a flanker. The introduction of prop Peter Rogers and reintroduction of hooker Garin Jenkins not only stabilised the scrummage but turned an area of weakness into an attacking weapon potent enough to destroy even the Argentinians.

Colin Charvis has provided the back-row resilience and physical presence for so long absent. Neil Jenkins has been liberated to become the out-half orchestrator he was for so many years at Pontypridd. And so on and on. But for the obvious lack of pace on the wide outside, Henry might even be smug as well as satisfied.

Still, it should be good enough to win a group that, with Samoa, also includes Argentina and Japan. A home quarter-final against Australia or Ireland, depending on which of them decides to go out and win the Irish group, would be the first reward.

"I'm hopeful that we can get through the round robin and enter the quarter-finals, but we will have to play to a very high standard to do that," is as far as Henry will let his imagination run. Injuries could yet have a disproportionate bearing.

Most obviously, there is Neil Jenkins, the Redeemer's redeemer with the phenomenal accuracy of his place-kicking. In one sense, Jenkins's pivotal tactical role is no more than an adjunct to incessant points-gathering which has taken him to 838 for Wales. With 41 for the Lions, his total is an evercloser second in the all-time Test list behind Michael Lynagh's 911 for Australia.

So please, Lord, don't let anything happen to the whey-faced one. " A marked man?" Henry poses the question rhetorically. "I think there's a certain amount of that. But key players in every team will be marked men, and I guess if he is a marked man, then others aren't and that will be an opportunity. He will certainly be a key figure and people will be wary of that."

Jenkins's success is only the most glaring reason why Henry's Wales find comparisons with the great Welsh sides of the Seventies, a sincere compliment instead of an impossible burden. At the very least, they are the first since Bleddyn Bowen's Triple Crowners of 1988 to inspire optimism instead of pessimism.

"Wales won Grand Slams and Triple Crowns in the Seventies, and they would have had a good crack at the World Cup if it had been up and running then," Howley said. "We don't have the right to be compared with them because we haven't won anything yet.

"What we've done is get rid of a few unwanted records. We've shown we aren't a bad side. But I'm not even thinking about the quarter-finals, because we have to get there first." This would once have been a modest ambition - now it would be a minor triumph.