Johnny Watterson talks to a hero of the Welsh game about why they find themselves in such dire straits and how they can turn things around

Former Wales winger Gerald Davies is no hurler on the ditch. Involved in attempts to reform the Welsh game, the former Lion sat as a member of the Tasker Watkins working party, one of the several set up to listen to rugby's heartbeat and come up with a coarse of medication.

The experience has not softened his views on how the game, a valuable asset in Wales, has been absurdly mismanaged. Davies left Welsh rugby in a golden age. Now it is creaking at the joints.

"One word describes how the game has gone," he says. "Tragic. It has taken amazing talent at the committee level to allow the game to sink so disastrously in Wales. A profound talent, because rugby is so embedded in the culture of Wales and people are so emotionally attached to the game that it does take an incredible talent to destroy that.

"Welsh rugby is in a dreadful state. Knowing the history of the game, I would think that this is the worst period in its 120-year history. It's confusing. No decisions have been made. The mood is pessimistic. There doesn't seem to be a way forward. No one has a vision. No one has a strategy, and I think this is reflected in the way that players play."

The last Welsh Grand Slam was over 25 years ago. There has been a Triple Crown, a shared Championship and a Championship win outright. Crumbs really when, like Davies, people see the game as they would a family heirloom.

"If someone had told me in 1978 that Wales would go a quarter of a century without winning a Grand Slam, I would have shrugged my shoulders in disbelief and said it can't happen. That's exactly what happened. The bald facts are there, but the standard of play has been below par and there has been no guidance and no sense of a strategy for the future, or of where Wales would like to be," he says.

"Look back over the last 15 years and there have been plenty of indications that the game is in poor health. At least four times during that period, from the 1980s until now, there have been working parties of one kind or another which have responded to a request - what's wrong with Welsh rugby?

Each of them recommended change, and at each stage those who were in charge of the game turned them down. Now we are in a moment of severe, tragic crisis.

"Yes, the manager has been targeted, but if you look back over the last 15 years there have been about seven national coaches. The scapegoat is usually the high-profile man in the national job, but the problems are endemic to the system. Steve Hansen is under pressure, but so was Graham Henry and half a dozen coaches prior to that."

Views recently cast by Phil Bennet and JPR Williams argue that the decline of grammar school education and heavy industry has strangled some of rugby's most valued shoots. It has some truth, Davies believes.

"There have been educational changes over the last 30 years. There have been social changes too. But that is something the governing body, which is charged with running the game and taking care of it, should have been aware of, and if that is the case how do you counteract it and what do you put in its place? That is a failure again.

"The same system, as was there for the last 20 years, has allowed the game to decline. People are resting their hopes on a single figure. That is not the point. They are looking at problems at the top; it is more needed at the bottom."

This weekend the players will shoulder the burden of years of neglect. It does not help them in their hopes of a first championship win. Few in Wales are expecting the unexpected.

"I think that if there is not a feel-good factor in the game that transmits itself to the players," says Davies. "There is a feeling that they are part of something that is not quite right."