It’s a wet Wednesday afternoon and Wales are holding an open training session at the Principality Stadium. Admission is free, apart from the £1 booking fee, and the 6,000 seats they’ve made available are filled with raucous kids and weary parents looking for something new to do during a rainy half-term day. The announcer keeps reminding everyone that tickets are still available for all four of Wales’ autumn internationals, against Argentina on Sunday, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa. No one in the media seats can quite remember the last time there were spare tickets for a Test match against the All Blacks.
I join a couple of old boys loitering in the back rows. They’re Mervyn and Steve, down from Pontypridd. The previous Friday the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) had announced its grand plan to revitalise the sport, which included – almost an hour into the press conference – the revelation that it is going to scrap one of the four regional teams. Everyone agrees that the four regions are overstretched and underfunded. A Welsh team has not finished in the top seven of the United Rugby Championship (URC) since before the pandemic. The decision to make a cut was easy enough. The harder part is figuring out who, why and when, and the hardest is persuading everyone to go along with it.
