Another week, another record defeat. This time Wales went down by 33 points to South Africa, which is the worst beating they have ever had from the Springboks in a home game. It’s their 12th straight defeat, at the fag end of a year in which they have lost every single match they have played. The Welsh Rugby Union says it will hold the usual end-of-series review, although, given just how bad the results have been, this time it is going to bring in a couple of independent experts to help with it. You have to wonder exactly what anyone hopes to learn that isn’t already apparent.
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So far as summaries go, there was a pretty good one in the match programme, where the WRU president, Terry Cobner, wrote: “We can’t question the players’ commitment but at this moment in time we are just not good enough.” Cobner’s prescription is that they need to “keep working as hard as we can till we turn this corner”.
The worst thing about this particular defeat was that they played pretty well, in a way. They did not quit tackling, which stopped South Africa scoring three or four more tries, and picked off a couple of their own in the final minutes of both the first and second halves. It was a grittily determined performance, but that only leaves the uncomfortable conclusion that this thumping defeat was about as good as it was ever going to get for this team, who, let’s not forget, won five matches out of six against these opponents when Gatland was in his pomp as a head coach.
There was some good news. Wales scored twice, and the crowd, boosted by a huge number of travelling Springbok fans who had headed west from London, was the largest they have had here all autumn. Oh, and the opening five minutes went OK. Shame about the five after it though, which pretty much ended the contest, because by the tenth minute South Africa were 12-0 up. Their tries came through an unlikely couple of flying finishes by two towering lock forwards, Franco Mostert and Eben Etzebeth, who were following up breaks made by the wings Cheslin Kolbe and Kurt-Lee Arendse.
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The Wales team could hardly hide their disappointment whenever South Africa scored. Photograph: David Davies/PA
South Africa played the entirety of the next 10 minutes inside the Welsh 22, and the game started to feel like a training routine in which Rassie Erasmus was asking them to work through attacking scenarios.
Jac Morgan managed to hold up Siya Kolisi to stop him scoring a third try, but it arrived soon enough afterwards when the ball was moved across the field to Arendse off the back of an attacking lineout. Arendse nearly made their fourth, too, when he leaped to gather a cross-field kick and batted the ball back for Aphelele Fassi. This time it was Blair Murray who managed to get his hands under the ball to prevent the try.
Kolisi had another try struck off when the television match official spotted that Jordan Hendrikse had knocked the ball on in the run-up to it. That didn’t make much difference either, because Elrigh Louw bashed his way over from the back of the ensuing scrum.
By now the Welsh fans were cheering tackles as if they were tries. After 40 minutes, they finally got something to celebrate properly when Wales made it into the South Africa 22 for the first time. They threw 13 men into the maul and tried to bully their way over the line, once, twice, three times, before throwing it wide to Rio Dyer, who scored in the corner.
That was about as good as it got. The second half coasted along towards its inevitable conclusion. South Africa blew a couple of chances with some sloppy handling. They were stuck in second gear, but Fassi finally scored after another startling break by Arendse and Gerhard Steenekamp finished off a series of pick-and-go charges. Wales blew one good opportunity when they bungled a lineout in South Africa’s 22, and another when they were penalised at a hard-won scrum. They finally scored a second when James Botham managed to squirm over from the last play of the game.
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So Wales lost by a hefty margin and the abiding sense at the end was that it could have been even worse, especially given that they had to make two last-minute changes to their lineup after the prop Gareth Thomas came down sick and the wing Tom Rogers injured his calf. Thomas was one of the most experienced men in the squad and Rogers the only one to come out of last week’s debacle against Australia in any credit. Nicky Smith and Josh Hathaway were brought in to cover for the two of them, and Kemsley Mathias and Owen Watkin took the spare places the changes left among the replacements.
The plan is that the WRU’s end-of-series report will be done before Christmas, which would give the team just over a month to get ready for their next fixture, away to France at the start of the Six Nations. Whatever happens next, it’s not going to get any easier in the spring.