Wales have been banned from using potential injury replacements in training during the World Cup after exposing an anomaly in the competition’s regulations.
Tournament organisers launched an investigation after pictures on social media this week showed a number of players who were not in the Wales squad training with the World Cup group at London Irish’s base near Sunbury.
The initial belief was that Wales were in breach of the participation regulations, which are contained in a 484-page book. In past tournaments players called up on standby have not been allowed to have any contact with their national squad until officially called on as a replacement.
Wales had scoured the regulations and worked out that there was nothing to prevent them calling up players to help out in training as walking tackle-bags and on Tuesday morning Rhys Patchell, Rob Evans, Dan Baker, Kristian Dacey, Nicky Smith, Aled Summerhill, Jordan Williams and Dan Fish boarded a hired minibus in south Wales and were driven to the London Irish training facility.
They were wearing Wales’s usual kit, not the World Cup ensemble, with the sponsor’s name blacked out, as the regulations demanded. They did not visit the squad’s hotel in Weybridge nor board the team coach and were driven home afterwards. As Patchell, Evans, Baker and Dacey are on Wales’s official standby list, they would have been handily placed if an injured player in their positions had failed a fitness test.
Once World Rugby accepted that there was nothing in the participation agreement to prevent teams from using players from their wider squad to provide opposition in training, they were able only to issue Wales with a warning, rather than a sanction, and accuse them of flouting the spirit of the rules by having standby players with them.
“The Wales team has been issued with an official warning following an apparent breach of the spirit of the Rugby World Cup 2015 terms of participation regarding team training arrangements,” said World Rugby in a statement. “Specifically, the inclusion of a number of players from outside the selected 31-player squad for a training session yesterday. We are satisfied that no deliberate breach was intended and all participating teams have been informed that additional players from the extended national team squad, including potential injury replacements, may not participate in any training sessions.”
Warren Gatland, the Wales head coach, said he did not understand what the fuss had been about. “We did not break any rules,” he said. “The statement from World Rugby says we have broken the spirit of the rules. What that means, I do not know. We did not do anything that was out of hand and people were misinformed. All we did was bring some players in for a bit of defence work. The rules did not say we were not able to do that. If we had been trying to do that we would have sneaked them in.”
