Peter Jackson: The joke’s wearing thin for Warren Gatland

This is getting beyond a joke. The more Wales fail to answer needling jibes about their ‘mental barrier’, the more the Australians succeed in tripping them up.
Sam Warburton had coined the buzz-phrase of the week: ‘Enough is enough’. The Wallabies had been hired at their going rate of £750,000 for one extra Test and the Lions captain laid it on the line – Wales Expects and all that.
George North mimicked the ‘enough-is-enough’ mantra word for word in his newspaper column and backed up the mighty words with mightier deeds. He accounted for the first and last tries of a wonderful match and still finished up as just another demoralised member of the supporting cast.
Enough is patently not enough when it comes to Wales losing to Australia. Eight straight defeats may have been at least seven too many but now it’s nine and the majestic manner of the Wallaby victory suggests that it will be but a matter of time before their winning sequence gets into double figures.
The bad habit which Wales can’t seem to kick for love nor money just keeps getting worse. On Saturday, the faithful among another vast congregation in their temple by the Taff shuffled home wondering why the law of averages no longer apply to Wales-Australia. The WRU cannot be faulted in that respect, not after cramming nine matches into the last four years.
Their team had lost the last three by an aggregate total of five points, an infuriating margin of less than a conversion per game. If Wales were hard done by on all three occasions, let nobody delude themselves about any hard-luck story last night.
That there were only four points in it at the end was hard to explain.   At times the visitors played as if they had come from a different planet, like gold-plaited Martians dropping in to sample the Saturday night hooley in downtown Cardiff.
They enjoyed themselves even more than their last night out, a costly one at the Krystle nightclub in Dublin four days before they ran rings round Ireland.  Some 15 were hauled before the coals, nine given written and oral warnings, the other six one-match bans.
One of them, Adam Ashley-Cooper, had doubtless been given both barrels by the management if only because of his aristocratic old English name, having been descended from the 6th Earl of Shaftesbury.
The Earl’s relative was still trying to find his bearings upon his reinstatement to the threequarter line when North’s punt skidded off  the double-barrelled one’s shin and sat up for North to plough over. It had taken 71 seconds.
They had had the effrontery to give their opponents a seven-point start and they didn’t stop there. They gave them three more when Rob Simmons obstructed Toby Faletau at a line-out. Ten points up after ten minutes, Wales were on their way at last, surely.
There was always the fanciful notion that the Wallabies might seize up from sheer exhaustion before the end of this their sixth away Test in as many weeks, a schedule.
Instead the quixotic Quade Cooper inspired his team to play their way out of the early trouble by raising their game to a level beyond the wit of a Welsh team that had roasted England in the same stadium fewer than nine months earlier.
For the best part of 40 minutes either side of half-time they outplayed Wales with the breathtaking range of their passing. Some of it, mostly from Cooper, had to be seen to be believed and when Joe Tomane’s fly-paper hands finished off another scintillating move, Wales had gone from winning 13-3 to losing 27-16. A lesser team would have succumbed to collective dizziness. Instead Wales roused themselves for a grandstand finish but their cause would long have been a lost one had Will Genia not knocked on with the line at his mercy and the exquisite Israel Folau not been denied by Dan Biggar at the expense of a yellow card.
For Warren Gatland the stats are stacking up with grim monotony. A series which began with the 14th consecutive win for the Springboks over Wales ends with Australia making it nine on the trot.
After 25 straight wins, the All Blacks decided to give Cardiff a miss this year. Gatland, of course, inherited a very bad historical Welsh habit but his own record as national coach against the Big Three is looking decidedly chronic: Played 23, Won 1, Lost 22.
Beyond a joke…