PETER JACKSON
By the time Warren Gatland's second coming runs its contractual course, Wales will have gone 20 whole years without a Welshman in charge.
The last one, Gareth Jenkins, wound up being sacked during the 2007 World Cup, in a hotel car park on the outskirts of Nantes the day after Fiji knocked Wales out. He has never forgiven his employers for not affording him the dignity of coming home first, nor should he.
Eddie Jones' exit from Twickenham clears the way for England to be run by an Englishman (Steve Borthwick), just as Scotland and France are run by native sons in Gregor Townsend and Fabien Galthie. Ireland may be different but at least Andy Farrell's name sounds Irish if not his accent.
That the Welsh Rugby Union finds it necessary to keep hiring New Zealanders is an indictment of their recurring failure to deliver coaches of the calibre required to run a national team. And to think there was once a time when the same WRU could justifiably claim to be world leaders in coaching.
Some 50 years ago, they were the first to appoint a full-time specialist in Ray Williams to the role of coaching organiser. He shared his manual with the future Australian head coach Bob Templeton and anyone else who took the trouble to turn up at the Arms Park.
The more reactionary national Unions back in those amateur days, notably Ireland and Scotland, saw the employment of a full-time expert as a harbinger of professionalism, a move to be resisted at all costs.
The SRU viewed coach and coaching as dirty words, so much so that when Bill Dickinson became effectively the first to take charge of the Scotland team in 1971 they gave him the quaintly absurd title of ‘adviser to the captain'.
The Lions had no such qualms about giving Carwyn James his proper title of coach for that year's historic tour of New Zealand but even they baulked at giving the cerebral Welshman the authority his role warranted.
They ought to have made him chairman of selectors but did nothing of the kind. Instead the Lions selected one former player from each of the four home countries to discuss the composition of the squad with the tour manager, Doug Smith. Any say James had would have been strictly unofficial.
He died at the age of 53 almost 40 years ago when Wales was still being run by a Welshman, the late John Bevan who followed the first four Welsh national coaches: David Nash, Clive Rowlands, John Dawes and John Lloyd.
Four more followed Bevan the ex-Aberavon fly-half: Tony Gray, John Ryan, Ron Waldron, Alan Davies. Alex Evans, the Australian then running Cardiff, took emergency charge of the team a few weeks before the 1995 World Cup, thereby breaking a 28-year-old tradition of Welsh coaches. The first of the New Zealanders, Graham Henry, arrived in 1998 with a contract which made him the best paid coach in the business on £250,000-a-year.
A record beating in Dublin saw to it that ‘The Redeemer' departed before his contract ran its course. History having repeated itself last Monday with Wayne Pivac suffering a similar fate, the WRU thought so much of their best Welsh coaches that they reappointed Gatland on a long-term basis.
England had been interested in him only as a stop-gap between Eddie Jones' departure and the arrival of a less temporary successor post-World Cup. Gatland rejoining Wales on the same short-term arrangement would have allowed them due time to consider a more permanent appointment except for two reasons.
Gatland wasn't interested in a brief return and, secondly, Wales had nobody on their doorstep clamouring for the job. So where have all the Welsh coaches gone?
Those with the strongest claims to be a national head coach in their own right are contracted elsewhere, notably Scotland's defence expert Steve Tandy and ex-Wales forwards' coach Robin McBryde, now working in the same capacity for Leinster, an international team in all but name.
England's putative coaching hierarchy post-Jones is expected to include Leicester's head of physical performance Aled Walters, a Welshman from Carmarthen who helped the Springboks win the last World Cup.
In the absence of what they deemed to be a credible Welsh alternative, the WRU gave Gatland what they refused to give Shaun Edwards, effectively a four-year deal through to the World Cup after next. And that prompts perhaps the most intriguing of all the questions over Gatland's return.
Can he dredge Wales up by their bootlaces and put them back where they were without Edwards by his side to ensure the game-plan worked? The partnership, forged at Wasps during their glory years as champions of country and continent, brought three Grand Slams.
Edwards has since added a fourth, rewarding France for the security of employment which he craved from Wales. They have already given him a second four-year contract despite the first one not expiring for another ten months.
Such decisive action eliminates any possibility of Wales reuniting the English half of their old duo without shelling out a fortune in compensation. They will have to do enough of that with the coaches already in their employment should Gatland chose to replace one or all of Pivac's specialist coaches – Jonathan Humphreys, Stephen Jones and Gethin Jenkins.
