Warren Gatland will remain Wales's head coach until after the 2019 World Cup when he will have been in charge for 12 years, an unprecedented stint in the professional era, but it took far less persuading for the Welsh Rugby Union to convince the New Zealander to stay for another six years than it has to convince its four regions to sign a new participation agreement.
The regions had issued a statement 18 hours before the announcement that Gatland, who would be available to lead the Lions in New Zealand in 2017, had signed a new contract by calling for an independent public inquiry into the way they were funded. Shortly before the carefully stage-managed media conference to announce the head coach’s new deal, the Ospreys hooker Richard Hibbard became the latest national squad player to leave the regional game after signing for Gloucester.
The regions have until the end of the month to sign the participation agreement which caps their funding from the WRU until 2018. They have told the union that they will not be in a position to do so unless its terms are renegotiated, which would leave the governing body free to make alternative arrangements from 1 January. While Gatland was prepared to answer questions about a dispute which looks increasingly likely to end up in the law courts, the conference was abruptly terminated when it started to dominate the questioning.
“I have always been an optimist and the glass is always half-full. There are always solutions to be achieved. That has always been my position and it continues to be so,” said the WRU chief executive, Roger Lewis, before, along with his chairman, David Pickering, and Gatland, making a swift exit out of a door at the back of the room. In the evening Lewis had meetings with representatives of the regions’ four supporters’ groups and the Welsh rugby players’ association to explain the impasse.
Gatland, who has inspired Wales’s first period of sustained success since the end of the 1970s, said he thought the uncertainty over the future of the regional game had affected some of the players whose contracts are up at the end of the season during last month’s internationals. Leigh Halfpenny, Sam Warburton, Alun Wyn Jones, Adam Jones, Scott Williams and Rhys Priestland have all been offered new deals by their regions but they are conditional on sufficient funding being in place.
“We are all striving for harmony between the regions and the union,” Gatland said. “It is not just that the relationship needs to be improved but there has to be certainty about competitions and the retention of players. When I look back on the autumn campaign, there were a couple of performances in the final game against Australia that were a bit below par: there was a lot going on in the players’ minds about their future. The ideal situation for me is that the regions sign the agreement and do everything in their power to keep players in Wales.”
In a subsequent interview with Wales Online, Gatland revealed that the second-row Alun Wyn Jones, who captained the Lions in the final Test against Australia last July, had not sung the start of the Welsh national anthem before the match in protest at the deadlock. “If a player like him does that as a protest at what is going on between the regions and the WRU, it is an example, for me, of the uneasiness these young men are feeling about what has been happening,” he said. “When there is uncertainty about the future, you do not go into a match with quite the same focus you might otherwise have.”
Hibbard said he was leaving the Ospreys reluctantly after 10 years. “I am gutted to be going,” he told the region’s website. “It’s unfortunate that there is not the funding to allow boys who want to remain in Wales to do so.”
The WRU has yet to say publicly what it would do if the agreement remained unsigned on 1 January but, as the Rugby Football Union’s chief executive, Ian Ritchie, attempts to revive plans for a six-nation European club tournament next season, Premiership Rugby has warned it would have nothing to do with new teams put together by the Welsh union. “We would only want to be involved with the regions,” said a spokesman.
Gatland believes that Wales have the potential to win the 2015 World Cup. “We will play matches at Twickenham and we are not afraid of going there,” he said. “If we stay relatively injury-free, we will have a chance and I want to leave a legacy here, not look back in 10 or 15 years and see Wales on a rollercoaster again.”
