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'As tough as it has ever been' - Wayne Pivac

By Paul Smith
Ben Smith hands off Wales' Tomos Williams to score New Zealand's fourth try in Tokyo (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

With three of the four Rugby Championship giants plus upwardly mobile Fiji due to visit Cardiff over a four-week period few would dispute that Wales face a hugely challenging autumn campaign.

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This view is shared by head coach Wayne Pivac who has told BBC’s Scrum V that his team’s schedule will be “as tough as it has ever been.”

To make matters doubly hard, the 59-year-old Kiwi’s team must not only face the huge test provided by his native New Zealand first, but do so without some significant squad members.

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The All Blacks visit the Principality Stadium on Saturday October 30 – outside the agreed international window. This means English-based players such as Bristol fly half Callum Sheedy and Gloucester’s British Lions’ wing Louis Rees-Zammit will be unavailable to Pivac even if they are fully fit.

“It’s going to be as tough as it has ever been,” Pivac said of a schedule which sees South Africa, Fiji and Australia arrive in consecutive weeks.

“It’s a good test on us, on our style of game we want to play, we are building towards a World Cup in 2023, we’re at the halfway stage.

“It’s a great time for us to come up against the southern hemisphere boys. At the World Cup we’ve got Fiji and Australia in our pool, so mentally for us those two games are massive for us.”

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Pivac will announce his squad selection in late October and with the World Cup in France still two years away he said plenty of opportunity exists for players to catch his eye through their club performances.

“Form is everything,” he said.

“There are few injuries about at the moment so some players won’t be able to be selected.

“We’ve looked at around 50-odd players in the last two years, so it’s time for us to start nailing down 40 to 45 players of which 33 will come from that group for the World Cup.

“We are looking forward to naming that squad, getting back into training and challenging ourselves against the southern hemisphere sides.”

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J
Jon 9 hours ago
Jake White: Are modern rugby players actually better?

This is the problem with conservative mindsets and phycology, and homogenous sports, everybody wants to be the same, use the i-win template. Athlete wise everyone has to have muscles and work at the gym to make themselves more likely to hold on that one tackle. Do those players even wonder if they are now more likely to be tackled by that player as a result of there “work”? Really though, too many questions, Jake. Is it better Jake? Yes, because you still have that rugby of ole that you talk about. Is it at the highest International level anymore? No, but you go to your club or checkout your representative side and still engage with that ‘beautiful game’. Could you also have a bit of that at the top if coaches encouraged there team to play and incentivized players like Damian McKenzie and Ange Capuozzo? Of course we could. Sadly Rugby doesn’t, or didn’t, really know what direction to go when professionalism came. Things like the state of northern pitches didn’t help. Over the last two or three decades I feel like I’ve been fortunate to have all that Jake wants. There was International quality Super Rugby to adore, then the next level below I could watch club mates, pulling 9 to 5s, take on the countries best in representative rugby. Rugby played with flair and not too much riding on the consequences. It was beautiful. That largely still exists today, but with the world of rugby not quite getting things right, the picture is now being painted in NZ that that level of rugby is not required in the “pathway” to Super Rugby or All Black rugby. You might wonder if NZR is right and the pathway shouldn’t include the ‘amateur’, but let me tell you, even though the NPC might be made up of people still having to pull 9-5s, we know these people still have dreams to get out of that, and aren’t likely to give them. They will be lost. That will put a real strain on the concept of whether “visceral thrill, derring-do and joyful abandon” type rugby will remain under the professional level here in NZ. I think at some point that can be eroded as well. If only wanting the best athlete’s at the top level wasn’t enough to lose that, shutting off the next group, or level, or rugby players from easy access to express and showcase themselves certainly will. That all comes back around to the same question of professionalism in rugby and whether it got things right, and rugby is better now. Maybe the answer is turning into a “no”?

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