I’ve spent the last few days in varying states of stress. Being exhausted? I can deal with that. Everyone keeps telling me about sleep deprivation when it comes to babies but honestly – I’m used to that. For the first six or seven years of TRK, I was sleeping, at most, around 4/5 hours a day. Now, I wasn’t exactly the picture of health at that point but I’m used to it. I didn’t sleep for 30+ hours on Thursday when my little girl was born but I was OK, chipper even. Adrenaline does that, yes, but I only had that because I was stressed. Stressed because of worry, stressed because I was sitting in a car park on the Ennis Road knowing my girlfriend was in pain and stressed because I just didn’t know what was going to happen.

Typically I write a preamble here about where Ireland are at and where Wales are at but… I don’t have time for that this week. I’m currently looking at my little girl sleeping on her mother’s chest so I have an hour to put down some thoughts that make sense for this Six Nations game and the best way for my brain to do it is this; what if I was Warren Gatland? 

What would I do heading into this game if I was coaching Wales?

Ireland are favourites, befitting our status as the #1 ranked team in the world and vibes. Ireland only lost twice in 2022 away to France and New Zealand but, more pertinently for this article, we walloped Wales in the Aviva in what was probably our most complete performance of the Six Nations last season.

Wales under Wayne Pivac were a team built more on aspirations than the brutal, sharp-edged reality of test rugby. Too many things needed to go right for Pivac’s Wales to play consistently well, or at least consistently well when it came to beating the teams Pivac needed to beat to keep his job.

Last season Wales did a little bit of everything. They had on-ball numbers – carries, balls played, passes, offloads – to compare with Ireland and France (when it came to offloads completed they were second only to France) while also having the second-to-lowest number of turnovers conceded. What does this tell us? They played ball, they made passes, they offloaded and they managed to do all that while not losing the ball despite a large amount of on-ball volume. What’s the problem? They weren’t breaking tackles. They have the second-lowest number of broken tackles in last year’s Six Nations which meant that, in bare terms, Wales were quite good at retaining the ball – almost as good as Ireland – but they weren’t advancing up the field with enough dynamism like Ireland and Scotland were.

That, on its own, wouldn’t have been a killer because they were good at retaining the ball so, in theory, they can’t concede during those stretches of possession. When you combine an attack that isn’t firing with a defence that’s missing a lot of tackles while they were making the second most tackles in the Six Nations and, crucially, not forcing a lot of turnovers.

In short, Wales were overheating in attack while simultaneously kicking more of their possession than most of their opponents (bar Ireland, France and Italy in the last two games) while they were ALSO struggling to get consistent stops in defence.

Is it any shock that, bar the opening game against Ireland, they only lost key games by a score or two? Ultimately, I think Wales were mostly let down by unit failures – defence, lineout in particular – while lacking a few power forwards in attack to make the most of what they were trying to do offensively.

This nerfing on both sides of the ball would then spill over into lads chasing big moments in defence which, as it almost always does, lead to a tonne of penalties and they conceded an average of eleven penalties per game.

France, as a counter-example, conceded an average of just nine penalties per game. Those two penalties might not sound like a lot but they are often the difference between winning and losing games. If you’re losing enough games, you’re losing your job and Pivac did just that.

The first job for Warren Gatland, as far as I can see, is stripping away the elements of Wales’ game that were burning them out. For me, the 3-2-X that Pivac ran – and had so much success at the Scarlets with – required too much cardio output and accuracy to be successful, especially for a team that would kick quite long and then end up defending as much as they did.

Wales need to do less before they do more.

If I was Gatland, I’d move to a flatter 3-3 shape on phase play to allow Biggar and Williams to pick simpler, more direct options. A 3-3 central shape with Tipuric/Faletau running the edge makes a lot of sense but, if I’m Wales, I want to strip where I play that phase structure way, way back.

Yep – I’m talking about kick pressure. If I was sitting where Gatland is this week, I’d make the exact same selection he did if I was planning to play a counter-kick pressure game this Saturday. Why would I select three small forward archetypes in the backrow if I wasn’t planning on them filling in the gaps behind a Dyer/Adams/North/Hawkins pressure chase?

Pivac’s mistake last season was that he thought he could kill Ireland at the breakdown but he miscalculated – you need the referee to reward you for slowing the game down and 99% of referees don’t do that. That 1% is Mathieu Raynal. All of the rest of them – Karl Dickson, in particular – do not want to be overly involved at the breakdown and that means overcommiting to a poach heavy gameplan is a losing plan. Wales got battered last season with that approach but here, I think you’ll see that backrow in particular maxing out on their tackle count and limiting their defensive breakdown entries to all but the most obvious windows. The last time Wales played Ireland in Cardiff with Gatland coaching was March 2019 and sure, a lot of water has flown under the bridge since then, but Wales won that game with a higher kick count than Ireland while Ireland had a 99% ruck completion rate.

You don’t need to take Ireland’s quick ball away from us to beat us. For me, you need to kick long when you have possession in your Q3, prevent Keenan, Ringrose or Hansen from starting an immediate transition on first phase and then just pressure Ireland with linespeed, keep active on the pillars to bait Gibson-Park but stay out of all transition rucks to maximise defenders in the line.

Make Sexton take control and then pressure his screen plays with heavy middle pressure and back your inside defence to deal with the tip on. Wales will want Sexton to get screen possession to make him back his attack as a changeup – Jac Morgan, Justin Tipuric, Joe Hawkins will all be putting big pressure on Sexton inside the Ireland Q2 while also using North and the free flankers to spike deep into our 3-2-X structure. The key for them will be hijacking Sexton’s supply lines to Doris/Beirne in that second pod of two where they often pop up alongside Ryan for pass action that unlocks Ringrose around the corner.

There is a way for Wales to attack without the ball that would be classic Gatland and I’m deeply curious to see if it plays out anything close to this. I can’t see any way that this Welsh side beats Ireland without a kick heavy plan that starts with kick pressure, ups the involvement of Wales’ defensive scrum as a penalty winning weapon and gets their lineout numbers back to even approaching elite level completion numbers of 90%. I will say this, though; Ireland’s defensive lineout can kill anything Wales want to do stone dead and they’ll need a huge game from Tipuric and Faletau there to take pressure off Beard.

I still think Ireland will win but Wales’ selection got me very wary of an ambush here.

Let’s see how it plays out.