Like all the coaches bar Joe Schmidt, like all the teams bar Ireland, Warren Gatland and Wales finished the Six Nations Championship in subdued mood, pondering where they are and how far off the trailblazing grand slam winners they might be. Gatland wrestled manfully with the warring impulses to offer due respect to the champions and to query just how good they are.
Wales scramble into second spot after Liam Williams try subdues France
“They never looked like scoring a try against France in the first game, did they?” he said when asked how big the gap is between first and the second place Wales clinched with this victory, which the less charitable might have described as proverbial daylight robbery. “It’s a tough competition to win and you need a bit of luck. Ireland have had that and will be aware of that. In fairness, they are the best team in the northern hemisphere at the moment.”
To finish second in a competitive Six Nations is an achievement for Wales to cherish. But, just like everyone else in Ireland’s slipstream, their championship whimpered out in the flattest of finales. If Ireland did indeed get away with one in Paris in the opening round, Wales were similarly let off by the French – and here under their own roof.
“We were just happy to win ugly,” said the back row forward Taulupe Faletau. “It was not pretty out there and to come away with a win was a positive. There was disappointment with the losses at England and Ireland, but I guess second is kind of a good way to finish.”
The sheepishness is understandable. This was not a day for Welsh chest-thumping. They were gifted all of their 14 points and when France were awarded the fifth of their eight second-half penalties, François Trinh-Duc pulled it wide. By then Trinh-Duc’s game had imploded and he was hauled off. In the remaining few minutes, France would not be offered another chance to secure the win they were so demonstrably worthy of.
It will not have gone unnoticed by Jacques Brunel after his first five matches as France’s head coach that, but for a missed penalty against Ireland, together with an almost pathological insistence on offering up unnecessary shots at goal to all three of the Celts, we might be looking at very different, not to mention unexpected, winners of the grand slam.
Such are the margins, France must settle instead for fourth position in the table, their discipline on and off the field as infuriating a failing as it has ever been, for all the improvement elsewhere.
And not just technical indiscipline, but mental. Wales may have scored the try against France that Ireland never came close to but it was handed to them on a plate. France had just taken an early lead with a majestic drop goal – one of Trinh-Duc’s good bits – when they gifted Wales the restart in embarrassing fashion. A couple of moments later Trinh-Duc failed to gather Scott Williams’s chip ahead, which bounced awkwardly but far from unmanageably in front of him. Liam Williams could not believe his luck. Compare and contrast with the brilliant, all-singing, all-dancing try France responded with, started and finished by Gaël Fickou, with five other pairs of hands flourished in between.
Much has been made this championship of Celtic mastery of the breakdown, but notwithstanding Wales’s selection of two “sevens”, they were outclassed in that department by France – and in particular captain for the day, Mathieu Bastareaud, and the ferocious replacement hooker, Camille Chat, neither one a seven.
So Wales next depart for their tour of the Americas, where they will face South Africa in Washington followed by two Tests against Argentina. Warriors of a certain age, such as Alun Wyn Jones, will be left behind and new ideas explored on the approach to Japan 2019. Eddie Jones will tell them that success on such an Argentine tour is not necessarily a harbinger of joy for the following year.
But Wales can be satisfied, at least, with the 2018 Six Nations. They, too, could play the what-if game surrounding their fortunes in this championship, so compromised by the loss of key players and the schedule misfortune of dates in London and Dublin in rounds two and three. They will rightly feel they are not far off Ireland – but then so will everybody else. At the moment, that feeling is no reason to pop any corks.