Peter Jackson: Wales pay price for the pursuit of money

Gareth Edwards achieved many famous things, not least playing 53 consecutive matches for Wales. From start to finish, it took him fully 11 years.
The global schedule is now so over-played that had he been around today, Rugby‘s player of the 20th century would have slogged his way through almost 150 internationals, assuming that he had passed the most savage of endurance tests.
Wales’ next match, against Australia in Cardiff in November, will be their 53rd since they played the same country at the same venue exactly four years ago.
What took Edwards his entire career can now be done in almost a third of the time.
In the annual flogging of Test rugby, nobody flogs it more than Wales. Not content at having played the Wallabies eight times in three years, they will take them on for a ninth time this autumn followed by South Africa for the sixth time.
The movers and shakers at the WRU do not subscribe to the theory that less is more. There is, of course, a price to be paid for everything and Wales may yet pay a fearful one for their insistence on cramming four matches into every autumn series.
The Wallabies’ last-minute win at the Millennium Stadium three years ago plunged Wales to ninth in the official IRB rankings and their timing could not have been worse. Their slip out of the top eight left them facing the nightmare scenario of being drawn in the same World Cup pool as England and Australia.
Barely 48 hours later, the draw made it a reality. Had they not spent more than £500,000 paying the Australians to play an out-of-window Test which coincided with a drop of 14,000 on the previous week’s attendance against the All Blacks, Wales would have been ranked no worse than eighth.
They would probably have been where Ireland are now, looking forward to taking their chance with France, Italy, Romania and Canada. Instead Wales have lumbered themselves with England, Australia, Fiji and Uruguay or Russia whose two-leg play-off kicks off in Krasnoyarsk on September 27 and finishes in Montevideo a fortnight later.
How they must wish now they had done without the Wallabies on December 1, 2012, when Kurtley Beale’s headlong, last-minute dive into the corner for the only try of the match trumped Leigh Halfpenny’s four penalties.
The Union will defend itself by arguing that international match revenue keeps the game in business although an increasing number of grass-roots clubs would take some convincing about that. The four regional teams, the ones who actually provide the players, see the ever-crammed Test schedule as a reflection of the Union’s obsession with ‘Team Wales’.
They claim they get no more than £100,000 from the fourth Test. In contrast, when England play a fourth Test every other year, as opposed to every year, their Premiership clubs benefit to the tune of seven figures, not six.
Should Wales fail to make it as far as the knock-out stages for the second time in the last three World Cups, it will be a case of short-term gain for long-term pain.
Meanwhile, Test rugby will come thick and fast almost as if it’s going out of fashion.
The All Blacks will have played 14 between June and November, likewise the Wallabies. In the 12 months starting this autumn, Wales will play a minimum of 16 – four in November, five in the Six Nations, two summer warm-ups and five more in the pool stage of the World Cup.
No wonder teams such as the Blues, Ospreys and Scarlets fail to make an impact on the critical rounds of the European Cup in early December after a month hammering themselves in the national interest.
Nor is it any wonder that the champion team of Europe, Toulon, have chosen to surround themselves largely with superstars from overseas free from the distraction of Test rugby, such as Matt Giteau, Carl Hayman, Juan Smith and, until recently, Jonny Wilkinson.
*This article was first published in The Rugby Paper on August 17.