Welsh rugby fans usually look forward to the start of the men’s Six Nations Championship, which kicks off on Thursday, with excitement, but this time the feeling will be one of trepidation. The Welsh men’s recent record has been abysmal. They have won twice in their past 22 matches – both narrow victories against Japan. Wales’s most recent defeat was a 73-0 hammering at home to South Africa in November. For a proud rugby nation, one that has in many ways articulated its identity through rugby, this was embarrassing, intolerable even.
On Saturday, Wales face England. If Wales manage to lose in London by fewer than 25 points, they will have exceeded expectations. The gap between the teams saps the fixture’s appeal. Wales’s vertiginous decline over the past five years – they were Six Nations champions as recently as 2021 – is undermining international rugby in the UK. Formerly bitter rivals now feel sorry for Wales, and pity is the most painful reaction of all. Why has this sudden decline occurred? Some attribute it to infighting in Welsh rugby. The game is in a parlous financial state in Wales and the Welsh rugby union wants to cut one of the four regional teams – Cardiff, Scarlets, Ospreys or Dragons. The Ospreys, based in Swansea, look the most likely fall guys, a move that, not surprisingly, is being fiercely resisted in west Wales.
Yet these bureaucratic wrangles disguise a deeper malaise. Rugby is losing its place in the cultural mainstream in Wales. Welsh rugby in its pomp – the 1960s and 70s in particular – was a vivid representation of a way of life. The game was played primarily in south Wales; the great clubs hailed from Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Llanelli, Neath, Pontypool, Pontypridd and Bridgend (plus a star-studded exiles team at London Welsh). It was a largely amateur game and encapsulated the bleak but passionate industrial life of the valleys. It gave voice, literally, to a world founded on coal, iron and steel.
It is tempting to romanticise that world, and there were significant downsides, but there was a deep sense of community that found expression in rugby. The collapse of that industrial world in the 1980s, followed by rugby’s professionalisation in the mid-1990s, stripped the sport in Wales of its cultural foundations. Town-based clubs gave way to diffuse regional sides, players lost their intimate ties to place, and a way of life became just another game. The contortions of the bureaucrats reflect the fact that rugby is no longer sure of its place in the Welsh cultural landscape. By 2022, football was the number one sport in Wales, with cycling coming up fast. Women’s rugby in Wales is also stumbling.
To revive the sport, the authorities in Wales must bring rugby back into schools, stop selling playing fields, re-establish club-based pathways into the elite game, raise coaching standards and determine once and for all how many professional clubs the sport can support. But they also need to answer more profound questions: what does rugby represent in modern Wales; what culture does it now encapsulate; will it feed off its glorious past or reinvent itself for an uncertain future? Rugby union is not always an aesthetically pleasing sport, but the unique beauty of the Six Nations lies in the passion and pride it arouses. Rugby in Wales has never been just a game. In a post-industrial nation, its meaning is unresolved.
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