Pressure is building on Wales coach Wayne Pivac, loss to Australia could end his tenure

No one got around to asking why Josh Adams had been dropped and Rio Dyer selected in his place on the wing, because this was all about Pivac and his future. In fairness to him, he did not swerve the barrage of questions, even if the 60-year-old could provide only a few definitive answers.

The New Zealander was never going to be worried about a group of gnarled hacks. As a young man he was a police officer in Auckland’s North Harbour. “I had some tough jobs,” he once said. “I carried a body bag and had to pick up pieces of a person who had been obliterated in a car crash.

“I saw some things you don’t expect to see. It makes you stronger. It means you can deal comfortably with some of the tricky situations being a rugby coach can throw at you.”

And this is probably as tricky as it gets for a national coach, with the question of whether he will still be in the job come this evening having become much more important than the game itself, which is another one of those blasted matches outside the autumn window. This means that Wales are without their players based in England or elsewhere (so no Louis Rees-Zammit or Nick Tompkins), and Australia are turning up simply because they are being handsomely paid to do so.

It is their fifth Test in five weeks. It is little surprise that they had only 25 players from which to choose a match-day squad of 23. They are down to the bare bones and Dave Rennie, their head coach, is probably under as much pressure as Pivac.

So who knows what the match will throw up? You would expect a game to forget, given the patched-up nature of both the sides and their appalling recent records. Australia have won only four of 13 Tests this year and Wales have won only three of 11, pitching eighth in the world (Australia) against ninth (Wales), with only Japan below them in the top ten.

But then encounters between these two have generally been exciting, even when Wales were enduring that unfathomable run of 13 consecutive defeats against them from 2009 to 2017. That Wales have won the past three matches probably does not mean a great deal, especially as only one has been under Pivac – and that was last year, when the Australia No 8 Rob Valetini was shown a red card in the 15th minute. Even then, Wales only sneaked home 29-28 with a last-minute penalty from Rhys Priestland.

That was a time when Pivac’s luck was in. His side won three Tests that year when the opposition received red cards. They even unexpectedly won the Six Nations title and might have done so with a grand slam had they not been cruelly denied in Paris in the final match.

But this year Lady Luck has not just dumped Pivac, she has thrown him out into the street to be jeered by all and sundry, not least when Dan Biggar, whose appointment as captain has proved one of Pivac’s shrewdest decisions, was ruled out of this campaign.

There were some bright moments during the summer in South Africa – including a first Test victory over there – and wins over Scotland and Argentina, but otherwise it has been a story of gloom, with the darkest moments coming in unacceptable home defeats by Italy and Georgia, as Pivac has desperately tried, but ultimately failed, to show he can find a way through the murk.

The increasingly loud word is that the confused, winding and sometimes ill-starred journey will end sometime tonight (Saturday) or tomorrow (Sunday), and I think Pivac knows that too. There was a telling moment at the end of his press conference on Thursday when he was asked about a planned World Cup recce to France tomorrow (Sunday).

He talked about the trip. “Yeah, all the bases have been signed off,” he said. “Now we go to the four pool venues and quarter-final venues. It’s a whistlestop tour. You have to select hotels, training venues, recovery pools. There’s a team of people that go.”

With that he got up to leave and, as he walked away, he chuckled and said: “Good question.” The inference was that it was a good question whether he would be going to France at all.

Surely not even the Welsh Rugby Union would allow him to do so and then tell him that his services are no longer required?

These are deeply troubled times in Welsh rugby, where nothing much is a surprise any more. A Wales victory today (Saturday) would not exactly be a shock; this squad have become rather good at responding to adversity.

It is a reasonable-looking side, with the veterans Leigh Halfpenny, Alun Wyn Jones and Taulupe Faletau back in the starting line-up. The bench, particularly in the front row, where the hooker Ryan Elias and the tight-head prop Tomas Francis are restored to avoid any repeat of the late scrimmaging catastrophe against Georgia, looks much stronger. And it will be a memorable day for the young debutant centre Joe Hawkins.

For Pivac there will doubtless be some very different emotions. The result, either way, should not really affect the WRU’s thinking on him, but surely, if this is to be his last hurrah, only the most hard-hearted of observers would want to deny him a day to look back on a bit more fondly than the passionless, humiliating capitulation against Georgia last weekend.

-The Times

Originally published as Pressure is building on Wales coach Wayne Pivac, loss to Australia could end his tenure