Posted by At a time like this it’s important to celebrate even the smallest and seemingly inconsequential wins when it comes to Welsh rugby.
It’s been eight years since the Cymru men’s football team and their supporters began to sing Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau acapella prior to home games in a move that attracted praise across the country and beyond for the stirring renditions that followed.
Over that time the Football Association of Wales have continued to garner recognition for the fan culture they’ve created, and calls have increased for the Welsh Rugby Union to take a leaf out of their book and build something similar at the Principality Stadium. On Saturday they at last decided to make some in-roads in that sense and cut the music for the anthem.
It produced when one of the best pre-match atmospheres in years at the stadium, and while we’ll never know the exact impact on the team’s performance, was the pre-cursor to an excellent 40 minutes from Steve Tandy’s side as they remained competitive with the All Blacks having scored two very good tries and clung on defensively to keep them to a 10-point lead.
In the end the visitors would run out fairly comfortable 26-point winners, as Cymru’s defence creaked just too much for the referee to tolerate and yellow cards allowed New Zealand to score with more freedom. It was an 80 minutes that underlined the narrow margins of test rugby though, as some small tweaks led to greater levels of success while more quick fixes can follow.
The big difference for Tandy’s men on Saturday versus the previous two tests of the Autumn was aerially. Having failed to secure basically anything out of the sky against Argentina, followed by only slightly more success against Japan, the hosts managed to recover three of Tomos Williams’ box kicks against the All Blacks which led directly to Tom Rogers’ hat-trick.
A mixture of better kick quality, a better kick chase, some smarter player placement around the drop zone and a bit of the associated luck you need when it comes to the bounce of a rugby ball, all led to either some clean takes out of the air or the recovery of possession from slap downs and the subsequent ability to attack in transition.
It was a clear Welsh game plan to kick early and kick to compete, with very little rugby played in the middle third of the field or beyond phase two from set piece. Unfortunately though that meant that once again Cymru ceded the majority of possession to the opposition as tries were scored in quick attacking strikes before New Zealand got the ball back again.
Attempting 250+ tackles in a game is not sustainable, particularly at test level against the best teams in the world, and failing to win one breakdown turnover is tough for a team trying to play on the counter attack. The issue for Tandy is that physicality is not something that necessarily comes naturally to this playing pool.
That is summed up in Taine Plumtree. The 25-year-old, at a recorded 6’3″ and 108kg, is a supreme athlete; big, strong, quick, athletic, skilful. He’s a player that we have very little of in this country, yet he splits opinion among supporters and observers due to the penalties he concedes with an almost exuberant level of physicality which manifests itself in illegal play.
A team that lacks physicality while simultaneously having a player who is overly physical. Schrodinger’s rugby team.
Tandy and Dan Lydiate need to consider something slightly different to face South Africa this weekend as having to attempt another 250-odd tackles could be disastrous. Whether that’s an overt focus on competing at the breakdown even to the detriment of width in the defensive line, or bringing another level of line speed in an attempt to drop ball carriers behind the gain line and build pressure, or some other tweak.
Ultimately it would seem unlikely to have much of an impact on a game that will likely result in a dominant Springbok victory, but at least it can add to the green shoots of optimism that we have seen through this Autumn campaign, and be another strand in the identity that this team is building.
Much of the talk around this fixture will, rightly, rage about the point of organising it, the impact on the national team’s players, whether there’s any financial benefit and the associated handcuffing of the professional teams in United Rugby Championship action across this weekend.
For now though it’s an on-field focus here and Cymru have to add another layer to the their game. Hopefully it’s defensively, or at the very least in a better functioning lineout, because if there’s not then from a rugby perspective it will have been a total and utter waste of time.
Cardiff Rugby Life 