Scott Gibbs has urged Wayne Pivac to use the Tests against South Africa this summer to draft in fresh faces and see what a Wales rebuild looks like.
The British and Irish Lions' kingpin from the 1997 series in the republic would also like Springboks coaches Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber to operate from a similar playbook. Both sets of coaches still rely significantly on many of the players who featured at the 2019 in Japan.
But Gibbs said: “If I were Pivac or Rassie or Jacques at the moment, I’d be saying: ‘Listen, maybe we need to start thinking what a rebuild looks like because we can’t carry on the legacy from Japan four years hence. There’s clearly an array of talent that we need to blood and how do we do that? Let’s free up some spaces.’”
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For Wales, Gibbs argues, it might be better if the likes of Alun Wyn Jones, George North and Justin Tipuric sat out the summer, with all three having battled injuries over the past 12 months. Speaking via a video published on the SARUGBY MAG website, he said: “If you look at Alun Wyn, George North, Tipuric — all of them have had a difficult year with injuries and so on.
"Maybe it’s time to just say: ‘Listen, take the off season and rest. Let’s free up some space to see what talent we have coming forward.’
“I think that would make for an even more interesting Test series. Both sides [would] have new faces and new identities and maybe you can blood some new rugby patterns that’ll be a little bit more exciting, rather than maybe going up against a robust selection that will be familiar to South Africa, and with Wales then trying to bring all of their injured guys who haven’t had much game-time into a Test series.”
It’s hard to accuse Pivac of not looking around for new players, with the New Zealander handing Test debuts to 23 players in the 27 Tests since he took over from Warren Gatland. That compares to the 28 players Gatland blooded between the 2015 and 2019 World Cups.
But Pivac is still reliant on many of those Wales used at the last global tournament, with nine of them starting against Italy in the final round of this year’s Six Nations and two more on the bench.
Plenty of them are important players as well.
For the Italy match, seven of Pivac’s starting XV were 30-somethings. You can read how Wales fared in that match here.
Pivac has 17 months until the tournament in France, but Gatland took a largely youthful squad on Wales’ 2018 tour of the Americas, the commensurate stage where Pivac will be at this summer, and they played and beat South Africa and Argentina, so there is still time for the current Wales coach to assess options.
“While it is a significant Test series this summer, it probably has no bearing [in terms of results] on how you prepare going forward with France 2023 around the corner,” said Gibbs. “So I’d like to think the sentiment from both camps would be ‘let’s see some new faces, let’s freshen it up a little’.”
