Put down your drinks, shut up that piano, and snap your head towards the saloon door. Warren Gatland’s back. Watching him work the Six Nations launch, you wondered if he had ever really left. He seems to have slipped back into his old role as Wales head coach as if he were sliding into a favourite seat at the bar. But then he left such a big impression on the Welsh game first time around that the job still fits like it was moulded to him. His trusted players are a little older, he doesn’t know the younger ones so well, but otherwise the place hasn’t changed so very much during the three years he was away.
It was supposed to. Wayne Pivac promised to get Wales playing an entirely new style of running rugby. It didn’t work out that way. The longer he went on, the more they lost, and the more they lost, the more obvious it was that it was Gatland who had held Welsh rugby together for the last decade. The current chaos at the WRU is nothing new to a man who has spent as long around the game there as Gatland has. You can be sure he will deal with it the same way he always did, by closing it out and concentrating on building the tightest, toughest team he can in the time he has available.
