SHANE WILLIAMS
WALES AND LIONS LEGEND
Dai Young was spot on this week when he said the regions should be thinking bigger, much bigger, than merely winning the Welsh derbies. In this league, they are judged on performances against the top teams in Europe, not just those in their own back yard.
Regardless of what happens to Dai's side Cardiff in their back-toback clashes with the Scarlets, their best performance this season to date will remain their home win over Leinster. The Irish side are the yardstick for almost every club in Europe these days and that is the outfit our four regional teams should be trying to emulate.
And not just in their results and performances on the field but also their production line of talent, their crowds and their commercial success. Being the number one team in Wales will take care of itself if you try to benchmark your standards against the best teams in your league and in Europe.
The European Challenge Cup plays its final round of pool games this coming weekend before it heads into the Round of 16 with the Heineken Champions Cup. It all confuses me a little bit these days, even though the draw for the European tournaments in which I played for the Ospreys sometimes required you to have a PhD in pure maths to understand what was going on.
This season has been the worst on record for the four regions. Not one game has been won on the field and only Cardiff will go through to the Round of 16, albeit by dropping from the Champions Cup to the Challenge thanks to a victory awarded from a Covid cancelled fixture.
The Scarlets, Ospreys and Dragons have had particularly unhappy European campaigns and need to take a long, hard look at themselves before next season's tournaments kick-off with the South African teams involved.
All of a sudden the bar at the top end of both the URC and Europe is being raised higher and higher, and our regions are struggling to keep up. As Dai pointed out after his side's mauling by the Stormers, his players now know the levels they have to reach not to get humiliated.
He asked them to work harder, do extra bits in training and to raise their levels all round. The other obvious difference between all the Welsh regions and the South African sides was the speed of their players. It is not a quality the players in Wales tend to have.
Louis Rees-Zammit has genuine pace, as does the new boy at Cardiff, Theo Cabango. Josh Adams and Alex Cuthbert, as well as Matt Prothero and Luke Morgan, are all rapid, but the Springbok franchises all have so much gas to burn.
I'm not sure how much speed work is done in the regions, or if the work they all do in the weights room helps their fast twitch fibres, but serious attention must be given to how all our players can improve their speed.
“Boks have so much gas to burn… it's not a quality players in Wales tend to have”
What we've seen over the past few weekends from the South African sides is proof of how devastatingly powerful they can be. The question now is whether or not any of the Welsh regions can make it through to the knock-out stages of the URC competition.
It has been a long, hugely disrupted season for all of them. There are three Tests against the Springboks to come in South Africa this summer before there will be a well deserved break for the top players.
The problem for the regions is that the final game against the world champions is July 16. By the time the players get home and have their summer break, the new URC season will have started. A couple of months in, Autumn Internationals take over and the merry-go-round will have started again.
What chance do the regional coaches have of fielding their best teams? What chance do the fans have of backing truly competitive teams? What hope is there of an upturn in regional fortunes when the odds are so hugely stacked against them?
When your backs are against the wall there is only one thing to do. Fight back! Those young players who have been learning the hard work in the past 18 months have got to suck it up and work even harder. Their real reward will not be in their pay packets, but in the improvement of their performances and the results of their teams.
If we want to see our teams winning outside of Wales in both the URC and Europe then we have to invest even more time and effort into the development of every one of our professional players.
This summer could be crucial for the survival of Welsh rugby. If Gareth Bale produces some more magic to steer the Welsh football team into a first World Cup in 63 years, and Wayne Pivac's team have a tough time of it in South Africa, then the balance of power in Welsh sport could swing very heavily in favour of football.
The Qatar World Cup runs from November 21 to December 18. If Wales make it, then everyone will be focussing on them from June to Christmas. They'd better cram in the Autumn Tests early not to clash with the games in Qatar.
Next year will be the chance for Pivac's men to shine on the world stage and there is no reason why, given a fully fit squad, he shouldn't be able to put together a strong challenge. But I'd suggest that to do that he needs four fully-firing Welsh regions. He needs his players to be tasting success somewhere.
These are difficult times for so many people whichever way you turn. With fuel prices rising, as well as sky-high petrol prices and extra taxes, who is going to have the spare money to support regional rugby – and even the Welsh side in the Autumn? The way to keep the fans coming back is to give them a team with a chance of competing against the best. That's where the focus should be this summer.
