To say things have been turbulent in Welsh rugby of late would be putting it mildly, even compared to usual standards.
The national side endured a disaster of a Six Nations campaign, losing a home game against Italy for the first time ever, and generally failed to capture the imagination of the nation with a meek defence of their title.
On a wider scale, the four professional sides have been whacked all over South Africa as they have taken on extremely testing assignments shorn of their Test match stars. Off the field, the WRU are being panned from pillar to post with criticism exacerbated by the recent successes of the Welsh national football team.
Then there is an employment tribunal hanging over the Union, in which an unnamed former employee claims she was sexually discriminated against, alleging a colleague openly joked about wanting to rape her.
Since all of these issues have come to a head, the WRU has been unable to make chief executive Steve Phillips, chairman Rob Butcher or performance director Nigel Walker available for interview, though there is hope it might happen sometime in the near future.
Acknowledging that the employment tribunal is a legal proceeding, with a preliminary hearing having already taken place, it is impossible for the WRU to comment on it. But away from that, there is a myriad of issues that we need to hear from them on.
The performance of the national side will always be the one that catches the eye for most, good or bad. If Wayne Pivac's men are performing well, generally it masks the issues that the rest of the game faces in the eyes of the casual Welsh rugby follower. So when things go bad, problems become a little more apparent.
A year after winning the Six Nations, Pivac is facing calls for his job again. Losing to Italy in the circumstances Wales did in the autumn, 18 months out from the Rugby World Cup, is less than ideal. It piles the pressure on the WRU hierarchy, who face the prospect of trying to sell a failing national side to the masses later this year.
Wales need to start winning, or those at the top of the organisation may be forced into an uncomfortable position of having to consider dismissing their head coach with a year to go until the Rugby World Cup. We've been there before.
The questions are simple, is Pivac's job safe? What is being done to improve that situation?
Then there are the crowd figures, which were pretty alarming. Just 63,000 turned up to watch Wales' clash with France, one of the most entertaining rugby teams on the planet right now. A number of factors contributed. Consumer confidence was dented during the Covid surge over the festive period and the game was played in the unpopular Friday night slot.
Are the excuses really valid or are the figures a concern?
Then comes the real hot topic of the week. Welsh football is currently scaling an enviable high. A win over Austria at an absolutely rocking Cardiff City Stadium - where Dafydd Iwan belted out Yma O Hyd and feelings of Welshness were palpable - has put them within touching distance of the World Cup Finals. But it is the fan experience at Wales football matches that is leading to criticism of the WRU.
Accounting for recency bias - one team is flying, the other is floundering - we have to accept that a sold-out Principality Stadium when Wales are hitting their straps is an experience that is almost unrivalled in sport. But, without question, Welsh football fans have never been more connected to the stars on the pitch, and it feels like the disconnect between their rugby counterparts and the supporters is stark.
One feeling feeds the other at times like this and can make things feel worse than they are. But there are serious questions to be asked around whether the matchday activity at the Principality Stadium is outdated and whether enough is being done to make the icons of Welsh rugby relatable to their fans.
Suddenly when Wales start losing, more people seem to take notice of the plight of the rest of the professional game in Wales. It has been a extremely difficult period for Cardiff, Dragons, Ospreys and Scarlets. All four teams are in the bottom half of the United Rugby Championship.
The fact that Welsh sides are lagging behind the majority of their rivals should be a source of great concern not just at the respective organisations, but the WRU too. Essentially, the national governing body is the custodian of the game in Wales and, at present, it is failing. What is being done to reverse the fortunes?
Sticking with the professional sides, Cardiff boss Dai Young revealed - later confirmed by Dragons director of rugby Dean Ryan - that the WRU were presented with a series of recommendations by the heads of all four pro teams last summer, however nothing has been done since.
Here you have the four men entrusted with making a success of things on the pitch in Wales, putting their considerable knowledge in one place in an attempt to instigate change. Yet it appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Why?
Dragons boss Dean Ryan said: “I’d just invite people to answer the question: How do we move forward in a way that allows us to be competitive and be close to supporting players’ development into the international arena in the future?"
“At the moment, I haven’t heard any discussions or ideas [from the WRU]."
If the game fails at URC level, then it is a matter of time until the ripples are felt at Test level. The WRU must recognise this but it seems nobody is aware of what sort of plan is in place to fix it. We are at the stage where the WRU are having thinly-veiled criticism hurled at them from regional bosses on a weekly basis. All is not well.
Then we come to an issue that has been a constant source of frustration for regional bosses. Pre-Covid, the preference of coaches was to get the bulk, if not all, of their recruitment and contract business done before Christmas. But for the second year running, we're at the end of March and they still don't know what level of payments are coming from the WRU. As such, they don't know what budgets they've got, which impacts their ability to recruit.
Last year, Covid was the reason but we're a long way into this pandemic now and that reasoning doesn't really wash now. The house needs to be in order.
Then there is the age grade debacle. There are already fears the crop of young players coming through beneath the men's senior team is not saturated with enough talent to take over from a golden generation of talent when the time comes. The Wales under-20s side haven't been a factor in the Six Nations since a mouth-watering crop of talent won the Grand Slam in 2016.
It leads to serious questions over how the best young players in this country are being managed and what opportunities they are getting to develop. There is tireless work going on within the four pro sides to identify and bring these youngsters on, but is it receiving adequate investment and can more be done?
In truth, there could be a second edition of this article, such are the mountain of issues that pertain to the community game in Wales (the grassroots season has just been described as a s***show ). Then there is the concussion lawsuit against the WRU, the RFU and World Rugby in which over 100 players allege the Unions failed to protect them from the risks caused by concussions. What does the conclusion of that look like?
One of the only, possibly THE only, bright lights of this season has been the Union's investment in the women's game, which has seen professional contracts handed out to some of the game's best talent for the first time in Welsh rugby history.
The result? Ioan Cunningham's side beat Ireland in the opening round of this year's Six Nations having lost last year's clash 45-0. Not a bad start.
Elsewhere, there are many questions that need to be asked. The sooner they're answered, the better.
