Wales got the win, and they got the send-off. Steve Tandy's side beat the Barbarians at Twickenham in a warm-up for their Nations Championship campaign — but the head coach left the ground insisting his rebuilding team is a long way from the finished article.
"Getting the win is great for us," Tandy said, calling the run-out "a brilliant hit-out" and ideal preparation for a chaotic opener against Fiji. "It's everything we wanted going into Fiji, because that's going to be chaotic at times. There's going to be moments that you can be in really good positions and something happens." Played in sapping heat, the match gave a young squad the kind of live problems no training session can replicate.
He was quick to cool any talk of a corner being turned. "If we start focusing on the bigger outcome, I still don't think we're ready yet," Tandy said. "We've got to be focusing on how we get better." Consistency, he argued, is the only measure that matters now: "I just want us to be better. If we are seeing more consistency in our performance, then I'll be very happy, because of that we'll be closer to winning games."
Captain Dewi Lake, back after a long injury layoff, echoed the message. "It was a nice one to dust any kind of cobwebs off," he said, before adding a warning. "We've got to be better earlier. When we come into next week and we're playing Test matches ... we need to make life easier for ourselves sometimes." Lake said the temptation against invitational opposition is to run loose: "It is quite easy to get sucked into a Barbarian style of playing." When Wales stuck to their structure, he said, "we looked very good."
The afternoon doubled as a career send-off for George North, the 100-cap wing who bowed out on the losing side but still scored twice off the bench. "It's always great for great players to finish up on a high," Tandy said, calling North "an amazing ambassador" for Welsh rugby. Lake was equally warm: "I don't think there's really a better way for him to have finished off, coming off the bench, scoring two."
Tandy, who took charge after a turbulent spell for Welsh rugby, named an initial 48-man squad featuring six uncapped players and will trim it to "between 32 and 34" for the Nations Championship, with prop Keiron Assiratti ruled out of the summer. Wales open against Fiji in Cardiff on 4 July — technically a Fiji home game, played at the Pacific side's designated northern-hemisphere venue — in the first of three Tests Tandy called "massive."
Outside observers see a genuine contest. The analyst behind the SG Rugby channel tipped Fiji to edge it, calling them "Wales's bogey team," but was pointed about the hosts' direction: Wales, he said, "are building something a lot better right now."
