After Wales’s home defeat to England in the Six Nations, a match which went ahead after their players backed down from a threatened strike that had been called because of concerns about how the game was being run, the odds on their becoming the first side to qualify for the World Cup quarter-finals would have been on a par with Newport County winning the FA Cup.
Yet there they are after a victory over Australia that was as unproblematic as it was convincing. Wales may have been in a group that did not contain a team in the top six of the world rankings, but they played to their strengths aga...