The only thing anyone in the game appears to agree on is that they do not trust the WRU to sort it out It’s a wet Wednesday afternoon, and Wales are holding an open training session at the Principality Stadium. Admission is free, apart from the one-pound 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 their grand plan to revitalise the sport, which included – almost an hour into their press conference – the revelation that they are 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. Continue reading...

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