Warren Gatland was a symptom and not a cause of Wales’ perma-crisis – but his axing is still the right call Gatland has left his role as Wales head coach by mutual agreement with immediate effect, bringing to an end a dismal second spell at the helm.
If news of Warren Gatland’s axing came as a surprise in terms of timing, then the conclusion that the Wales head coach’s position was untenable was one that many had reached long before the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) pulled the trigger two rounds into the Six Nations.
Initially blocked from hiring Rob Howley as attack coach by the WRU after his betting ban, Gatland first moved a close colleague into an adjacent role before displacing Alex King entirely ahead of this Six Nations campaign.
While Covid made the circumstances of each job challenging, few who watched Gatland’s stints with the Chiefs in New Zealand and British and Irish Lions after leaving Wales would have felt confident that this was a forward-thinking coach with the ideas to take a limited player pool to new heights again.
Two months and two games ago, it was Tierney who said this after a post-Autumn Nations Series review: “We analysed to see, in simple terms, if changing the coach at this time would make a positive or negative difference.
