The Wales squad spent an evening this week with the unbeaten former world boxing champion Joe Calzaghe, as they prepared for Thursday evening’s encounter with Fiji in Cardiff. The match will not deliver a knockout blow in a group that also contains England and Australia, but victory for the men in red would leave the host nation having to defeat the Wallabies on Saturday to remain in their own tournament.
The Welsh players met Tom Jones before last Saturday’s victory at Twickenham – the singer had the message that it was not unusual for them to beat England – and Warren Gatland has spent the week ensuring that none of the euphoria that greeted the final whistle on Saturday night pollutes the preparation for what is an equally significant match. At the same time he has been preserving the emotional intensity that took an injury ravaged team over the line.
Gatland warned that if he noticed any slacking in training players would be pulled from the team. The head coach would also have reminded them that the past three meetings with Fiji at the Millennium Stadium have all been close: Wales won 11-10 with a late drop goal in 2005, drew 16-16 five years later and last November edged home 17-13 after failing to score a point in the second half.
One problem Gatland can do nothing about is the rash of injuries that have blighted his squad in the past month: five of his original World Cup 31 are out of the tournament, along with a replacement, all backs in a squad that contains 13, three of whom are scrum-halves and four outside-halves. He only has one specialist in each of the three-quarter positions, although three are Test Lions, and one of his two full‑backs, Matthew Morgan, who will start his first international on Thursday, plays at fly-half for his club.
A date with Fiji and their powerful runners and tacklers is not what Wales’s medical team would have ordered. At least their backs will not have to feel the impact of the 20st wing Nemani Nadolo, who is suspended, but his replacement, Timoci Nagusa, can hardly be described as diminutive and has a scoring record at Montpellier close to a try every other game. He was hiking in the Swiss Alps when his call-up came, but it is Wales who have the mountain to climb, even if the ascent is not as sheer as it was before Twickenham.
Gatland said his focus this week was mental rather than physical and Wales will not be suckered into an open, fragmented game as they were against Fiji in Nantes at the 2007 World Cup, when they lost and flew home rather than to Marseille for a quarter-final against South Africa. That defeat not only summed up Wales at the time but for most of the period following their glorious decade, the 1970s, mercurial and talented but divided and unreliable.
Gatland, who was contacted by Wales as he waited for England to follow up an earlier approach, has changed that to such an extent that he has imbued the side with a trait inherent in his native New Zealand, the ability to change players in the side seamlessly despite a relatively small playing base and four regions who have struggled this decade.
He has made Wales more successful by stripping romanticism away, the land of poetry giving way to prose, appreciating that succeeding at the highest level demands a hard-nosed approach. Fiji will not meet a talented but loosely knit team as they did in Nantes, and while their record in Cardiff in the last decade is, for a second tier nation, notable, Wales were not at full strength in any of the three matches.
Fiji impressed in their opening two matches, against England and Australia, drawing the second half against the latter 10-10, but lost concentration at vital moments. Playing the game under a closed roof will suit them and, while they will be without the scrum-half Nikola Matawalu, a spontaneous player capable of the outrageous, they looked more effective behind when he went off against the Wallabies and Ben Volavola, the Waratahs’ outside-half whose ability to glide away from tacklers contrasts to the more direct style of his colleagues, dictated play.
Wales’s resolve should be enough. While they have only a five-day turnaround after Twickenham, it is something Gatland has long planned for. Gone are the days when Wales had the stamina of a chain-smoker walking up a long, steep hill, and by naming the same pack he is giving them opportunity, ahead of hoped-for bigger matches to come, to right parts of the game that did not function against England as planned, most notably the set pieces, and to prevent the Fiji forwards from roaming.
What Gatland cannot afford is even more injuries behind; he is down to his fourth outside-centre in Tyler Morgan. He has only one fit back on his standby list who went on the summer training camps, another outside-half, Rhys Patchell, although the wing Eli Walker is expected to soon recover from a hamstring strain. After that, Gatland would be left with the largely untried, players who have not been forged from granite. Victory is a must, but so is an empty treatment room.
