Wales's Head Coach Wayne Pivac during the pre match warm up during the Rugby Summer Series match between Wales and Argentina. Photo / Getty Images.
Wales's Head Coach Wayne Pivac during the pre match warm up during the Rugby Summer Series match between Wales and Argentina. Photo / Getty Images.
OPINION
If Wayne Pivac's Welsh team can beat the All Blacks it'll be the biggest upset in international rugby since Japan toppled the Springboks 34-32 at the 2015 World Cup.
There were already 15 Welshmen unavailable to Pivac because of injuries, or clubs in England refusing to release them, beforeWillis Halaholo tested positive for Covid-19 this week.
But for once with Welsh fans a loss will not be the end of the world. A bold showing by the rank underdogs would be enough. And a win? They may be scrubbing up Caernfron Castle to anoint Pivac the new Prince of Wales.
The passion for victory at all costs has been a part of Welsh rugby for generations. Steve Hansen soon found how fierce those feelings could be when he took over as Welsh coach from Graham Henry in 2002.
"I kept getting asked the same question," Hansen said. "When are we going to win? When are we going to win?"
At least Hansen was only facing annoying press conferences. In 1978, after the game with Brigend, All Black manager Russell Thomas experienced one of the strangest expressions of Welsh angst ever.
"After that game," Thomas once told me, "I was assaulted in the stand by about four men, who got around me, and tried to strangle me with my scarf.
"The people who assaulted me were never caught. At that time the intensity between New Zealand and Wales was too much."
Support for Pivac in Wales, after a shaky start last year, is now riding high, buoyed by not only victory in this year's Six Nations, but also by the fact he's introduced a style of play that in his words harks back to "the time in the 1970s when there was a very attacking (Welsh) mindset with Phil Bennett and Co."
Pivac, say those who knew him from his days as a championship winning Auckland coach in the early 2000s, is a realist, hard minded enough to challenge the status quo with officialdom.
He might have moved on from the Auckland job to the Blues, if the Blues management had been as far sighted as the Welsh Rugby Union.
In 2003 Pivac, as Auckland's head coach, had Grant Fox and Graham Henry working with him and they beat Wellington 41-29 in the NPC final, to end a glory year for rugby in the city. Five months earlier the Blues, coached by Peter Sloane, had won the Super Rugby title.
But there would be no wooing of Pivac by the Blues. So at the start of 2004 he signed on as coach of the Fijian side.
By contrast two years before Warren Gatland ended his time with their national side in 2019 the Welsh Rugby Union started working through a list of 12 potential replacements. All 12 were interviewed and Pivac got the job after such success coaching Llanelli that comparisons were being made with the great Carwyn James.
Wayne Pivac, Head Coach of Wales looks on prior to the Guinness Six Nations match between Italy and Wales at Stadio Olimpico. Photo / Getty Images.
Before his first Six Nations last year Pivac told a Welsh journalist there were a lot of similarities between coaching in Wales and coaching in New Zealand. "Rugby means a lot to people and you can affect the national psyche with your performance. That's an extra responsibility. It's something I grew up with in New Zealand. People are passionate about the game."
He now enters the arena against the All Blacks on Sunday morning our time with a solid account in the Welsh bank of goodwill.
Meanwhile the Wallabies will have been grievously weakened by the withdrawal of Quade Cooper, Samu Kerevi, and Sean McMahon from their squad for the European tour, which starts in a week's time against Scotland. All three players are sticking with their Japanese clubs.
It was a development described by one Sydney rugby journalist as "amateur hour", and drew a stinging reaction from Rugby Australia's CEO, Andy Marinos. "We just expected a more honest approach, right from the beginning, if it was not their intention to travel. If there was an inclination they were not going to tour, we would have appreciated it a lot earlier."
The disconnect feels as wide as the Tasman. The weird thing is that, approached the right way, Japanese clubs, despite the staggering million dollar plus salaries they pay players, have a history of taking pride in seeing their men on the international stage.
As a prime example, in 1995 Graeme Bachop became the first, and to date the only, offshore All Black to play for New Zealand.
When he and his wife Angie went to Japan for him to join the Sanix club at the end of 1994 a handshake agreement was worked out. After training in Munakata with Sanix for three months under former All Black fullback Mark Finlay, Bachop could return to New Zealand in January, 1995.
He was at the last two World Cup training camps the All Blacks held, played in a warm-up test against Canada in Auckland, and then went on to be a star at the World Cup in South Africa.
How amicable was the arrangement? A team-mate of Bachop's at the Cup has told me how two officials from Sanix flew to Johannesburg, staying just one night, purely to tell Bachop face to face how proud the club was of him.
A little more of that spirit and who knows how things might have been different for the Wallabies?
