Peter Jackson’s verdict on Wales: It screamed out for a gamble on James Hook

WalesIn the privacy of the team room just before the began, urged Wales to play with ‘a bit of a strut'. The double champions, after all, were going for a treble which had never been done before. They had talked of little else during the two months since losing to Australia, if not to soothe the wounds left by the then to remind themselves that in Europe they ruled the roost.
If the strut turned out to be more of a stutter during the opener against , well that could be conveniently ascribed to a tendency to be slow out of the blocks. Dublin was the one that really mattered and that was where Wales would rise to the occasion.
They would go about it in the typical Big Bash fashion which has long been Gatland's trademark.   They were bigger and stronger and, as if that wasn't enough, their head coach had the inside track on the best Irish players from having run the in Australia last summer.
They also had the advantage of an extra day's preparation, television having dictated that started the tournament 24 hours later. If a lack of conviction had been Wales' undoing during their 2003 quarter-final against England, then nobody could doubt the self-belief of their successors.
Even old-timers like Phil Bennett spoke of how impressed he had been by Welsh confidence that they had what it would take to win in Dublin just as they had done when they were last there. Whatever the Irish came up with, they would have an answer, least of all their human wrecking balls on the wings.
So much for the theory. When push came to shove, Wales had no answer.  They lost all the individual battles so comprehensively that a composite XV selected from the starting 30 would be all-green – headed by Jonny Sexton, Peter O'Mahony, Paul O'Connell, Conor Murray, Rory Best, Cian Healy, Devin Toner, Chris Henry etc ad nauseum.
Ireland not only outplayed the champions to the point of humiliation, they dismantled them bit by bit. Above all, they outsmarted them, one coach, Joe Schmidt, winning the most influential battle of all hands down at the expense of another New Zealand coach, Gatland.
The longer the game went on, the clearer it became that this was all About Schmidt, with due apology to Jack Nicholson and the block-busting Hollywood movie about a retired insurance salesman. The pre-match ballyhoo about Brian O'Driscoll and his discarding by Gatland from the Lions finale proved a total irrelevance.
Never in his wildest dreams could Joe have imagined anything like this, certainly not after his last run-in with Gatland as players in Palmerston North way back during the late Eighties when the former appeared at centre for Manawatu, the latter as hooker for Waikato.
A home defeat condemned Schmidt's team to relegation whereupon the pair went their respective ways – Gatland to Ireland, his compatriot, eventually, to .
Schmidt's strategy, confined to precision kicking out of hand, a mauling line-out and not much else, would have been no more or less than Wales expected.
It took all of 30 seconds for Ireland to put the plan into operation. Aided and abetted by recurring Welsh sloppiness, the Irish executed their strategy to such telling effect that had they won by an even wider margin, Wales could hardly have complained.
Now even the best of champions have their bad days but what kind of team starts as Wales started yesterday by conceding penalties at the rate of one every three minutes? They'd given away six before the opening quarter had run its course, half of them technical offences committed by Danny Lydiate.
Wales needed half an hour to establish their first attacking platform inside the Irish 22. Richard Hibbard promptly threw it away, allowing his throw into a shortened line-out to be picked off by Toner without the Irish beanpole being required to get off his feet.
It took them almost 50 minutes to raise the fleeting glimmer of a try when Jamie Roberts went careering past O'Driscoll, the Grand Old Man's only mistake. When Wales did get over the line, via substitute tighthead Rhodri Jones, Wayne rightly ruled it illegal.
Nobody holds inquests quite like the Welsh and the shambling manner of their dismantling raises the most damning question of all. Why, when Plan A kept failing, did Gatland not implement Plan B or Plan C? Was there such a thing?
That begs another question. What's the point of the Welsh management having someone like James Hook on the bench if they never use him? Leaving him in splendid isolation throughout the Italian match was one thing but repeating the punishment yesterday made no sense.
At 19-3 down with an hour gone and Wales going nowhere, their predicament screamed out for something different.
Hook offered one last roll of the dice.  Instead he sat the game out and watched Ireland inflict such extensive damage that Wales not only lost the match but, very probably, their title given that their Irish masters are 60 points clear on points-difference. Pulling that back will take some strutting.

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