Inside Welsh Rugby is a weekly newsletter which gets under the skin of the game in Wales, attempting to get to the heart of the issues and biggest stories.
Written by WalesOnline rugby correspondents Steffan Thomas and Ben James, it takes readers deep into the heart of Welsh rugby, while also shining a light on problems which need to be fixed in order for the game to flourish. There is also be deep-dive analysis, explaining to readers exactly what's happening on and off the pitch.
You can read a snippet of the latest newsletter on Wales' blunt attack below and sign up for Inside Welsh Rugby here. There is currently a special offer that gets you a whole one year subscription for just £20.
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Ahead of the trip to Paris on Friday night, Warren Gatland claimed that Wales wanted to “go out there and do some things that potentially France aren’t going to expect us to do”.
In fairness, Antoine Dupont probably didn’t expect to be given quite as much time and space as he was gifted for parts of that first-half.
A generational talent he may be, but watch back the Welsh defensive line for Theo Attissogbe’s first try and the scrum-half was allowed to just crab across the pitch, waiting for the space to open up out wide.
Of course, Gatland’s comments were more about what Wales wanted to do with the ball, rather than without it.
“We want to go out there and play some good rugby,” he said on Wednesday. “We’ve talked about being really positive in terms of the way that we play against them, to see that there's opportunities to attack them as well.”
Having been nilled for the first time in 218 Test matches, it’s fair to say that didn’t exactly materialise.
Wales, as Gatland said, went out to play good rugby. But in the end, they didn’t trouble the scorers.
So why was the attack so insipid? Let’s just get the obvious answer out of the way first and foremost.
To paraphrase James Carville’s famous quote from the 1992 US election, ‘It’s the gainline, stupid’.
France won collisions at will on Friday night. Wales simply don’t have the carriers - beyond Jac Morgan, who honestly deserves so much better than being the shining light in hammerings.
Our men are big, but theirs are bigger is just about the gist of the argument and it goes a long way to explaining away how Wales were kept off the scoreboard at the Stade de France...
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