Six thousand miles separate Cardiff and Tokyo but Warren Gatland knew the inevitable question was coming anyway. Having just seen off England and risen to third in the world rankings, did he now expect Wales to go big in Japan at this year’s Rugby World Cup? “Apparently not, according to a lot of pundits out there,” came the brusque reply. “We just want to keep under the radar if we possibly can.”
He might have added that linking Six Nations form and World Cup potential is far from an exact science. England in 2003 have so far been the only side in either hemisphere ever to have lifted the Webb Ellis Cup having won a big tournament – the Six Nations or the Rugby Championship – in the same calendar year. As with a tennis player winning the Australian Open, there are no guarantees of success at Wimbledon.
Better, perhaps, to treat the Six Nations as a mood enhancer rather than a sure indicator of impending greatness. The weather, the style of rugby, the atmosphere in the stadiums – World Cups can often be a completely different ball game. That said, the psychology of having to win five tough Tests in a row is not entirely dissimilar. In 2003 England were challenged by Clive Woodward to treat their grand-slam decider in Ireland as an absolute must-win fixture if they had any pretensions to becoming world champions. After thrashing the Irish 42-6, there was no stopping them.
Not everyone accepts this binary theory. Eddie Jones prefers to remember 2007 when he was bussed in as a consultant to help Jake White drag a misfiring South Africa from Tri Nations despair to the top of the world. The All Blacks have won the past two World Cups despite Australia winning both the Tri Nations in 2011 and the Rugby Championship in 2015. It appears to suit the Kiwi psyche best to go into the tournament with zero complacency having just received a sharp kick to the posterior.
In that respect, maybe Cardiff was exactly what Jones’s team needed. Had they romped away largely unchallenged to a grand slam it would not have exposed the faultlines that Wales uncovered so expertly. It also reminded all and sundry to be tactically flexible and to assume nothing. Maybe Wales, not Ireland, will prove to be the big European predators in Japan. Might England, in the event of topping their tough pool, now face Australia rather than Wales in a quarter-final? Those English supporters who thought defeat in Cardiff was the end of the world have clearly not considered losing to Wales in a World Cup final.
Wales, either way, are now free to use the last two weekends of the Six Nations as a full-on dress rehearsal. In essence they have just won a last-eight knockout fixture and are 160 minutes from glory. Beating Scotland will set up a massive showdown with Ireland, among their prospective World Cup semi-final opponents in Yokohama in October. Collect a grand slam and, regardless of history, no one will be rushing to play them in Japan.
It is in this tricky area of developing unflinching self-belief that Gatland is so good. No one would say the British and Irish Lions trained harder than any other side has ever done in New Zealand in 2017 but they still emerged with a drawn series with minimal pre-tour preparation. The knack of getting the right players – selection also matters hugely – into the right state of mind to go the extra mile for the people around them is the trademark of all good coaches, as is ensuring they peak in the games that really count.
England, as Gatland has already observed, have not always found this straightforward. For an assortment of reasons – and even with the benefit of home advantage in 2015 – England have flattered to deceive in the past two, if not three, World Cups. They may have reached the final in 2007 but only after losing so heavily to South Africa in the pool stages some players had their bags packed on the morning of their quarter-final against Australia in Marseille in expectation of heading home.
No one is saying England are scared of big occasions, as Dublin demonstrated. It is fair to say, though, that they have a tendency to start Six Nations tournaments better than they finish them. Of their last nine final-round championship games they have lost five. Some teams, most notably France at World Cups, improve the longer they spend together in camp. England, for some reason, have tended to do the opposite.
It might just be Eddie Jones’s biggest challenge over the next seven months: allowing his players sufficient time off to refresh their minds rather than squeezing them endlessly through the sausage machine. The moral of the story? Wales may be leading the battle for Six Nations supremacy but they have not yet won the war.
Scrum waste of time
Eddie Jones reckons rugby is growing more like American football in terms of the number and length of breaks in play. A degree of anticipation is a key part of the matchday experience but the day must be fast approaching when a limit is imposed on how much time scrums are allowed to soak up. There was a good example in Lyon’s Top 14 fixture against Clermont when a scrum was awarded late in the game with Lyon narrowly leading. It took a painfully slow two minutes, after an inevitable reset, for the ball to emerge, by which stage there were only a few mundane seconds remaining. Stopping the clock until the ball is out – particularly towards the end of matches – would give spectators rather better value for money.
One to watch
Never mind the Six Nations, these are critical days in the Guinness Premiership relegation dogfight. Worcester’s win over Leicester on Sunday has left Newcastle nine points adrift at the foot of the table; should the Falcons lose at home to the Warriors this Sunday and Bristol beat Gloucester at Ashton Gate the gap will extend into double figures. Newcastle may have finished fourth last season but their play-off semi-final against Exeter now feels a long time ago.
