Warren Gatland said his Wales side had virtually “run out of players” as he surveyed the injury list at the end of a famous victory over England at Twickenham.
The New Zealander paid effusive tribute to a team that never panicked despite falling 10 points behind at stages of the match and continued to believe they could win. “We’ve run out of players at the moment,” said the head coach. “Today was about courage. There’s no one who knows more than that group of players how hard they’ve worked in the last three months.
“They’ve dug deep today. This game was about emotion. If you want it bad enough, for whatever reason it can happen for you. You’ve got to dig deep. I can’t ask for anymore. I think we wanted it more in the end.”
Gatland had already seen his squad decimated ahead of the tournament, with players such as of Leigh Halfpenny and Rhys Webb lost to injury. Things got worse during their opening clash with Uruguay and worse still during the England match.
Wales, already without two centres, lost Scott Williams with a knee injury that required him to be taken off on a stretcher. Liam Williams was taken off with concussion and Hallam Amos appeared to dislocate his shoulder.
Talking about their five-day turnaround before his side face Fiji at the Millennium Stadium, Gatland said it would be “hard to get a team together for that”.
“We’ll go back to Wales tonight for a bit of recovery and reassessment. We’ve got to front up on Thursday and get a result,” he said. “We’ve to respect them. I think we can get a lot of confidence from this performance. If we can beat Fiji, we can put quite a bit of pressure on England.”
Sam Warburton said that despite the unusual makeup of the side at the end of the game, with several players out of position, there was a determination not to allow England over the line once they had gone ahead through Gareth Davies’s try. The Wales captain said: “It didn’t feel unusual. We’ve been in that situation before. There’s nothing technical about defending a driving lineout at that point in the game.
“You could just tell from the eye contact how desperate everyone was to defend that driving lineout. At the end of the game it was just relief. It was just a battle for 80 minutes. An absolutely massive effort from everyone.”
Perhaps predictably, Gatland twisted the knife on England’s captain, Chris Robshaw, for turning down the opportunity to kick for a draw in favour of a driving lineout to try and secure victory.
“I thought they would have gone for goal and taken the draw. It was a big call to make and a brave call to make. We did a good job,” said Gatland.
“These are decisions you make sometimes. You go there and get a driven lineout and win the game and you’re a hero. You make the wrong call and you’re a zero. I would have taken the three points. That’s what I would have done.”
Despite much of the pre-game analysis focusing on the greater depth of England’s bench, it was the Welsh replacements who helped them over the line. Warburton said: “It was an amazing win given the circumstances. We never doubt the guys that come off the bench. We know we’ve got a good squad. That lifts us.”
Robshaw said the way that Wales had ratcheted up the pressure in the second half had contributed to a defeat that leaves England staring down the barrel of a pool-stage exit in their own Rugby World Cup. “They kept the pressure on and made us make silly choices. Credit to them, they came with an effective gameplan and it won them the game,” Robshaw said. “We’re extremely annoyed we gave away so many penalties. We’ve got to move forward now.”
