Wales in crisis: regions the bane of a rugby nation facing the abyss

T o a casual observer – and in rugby there are plenty of those – the situation is bewildering. Wales have won more grand slams in the Six Nations era than anyone bar France, who drew level with them on four last season. They boast one of the biggest and most charismatic stadiums in the world and – more of an intangible, but very real all the same – rugby runs more deeply through the nation’s culture than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere.

Yet Welsh rugby’s facade has imploded this past fortnight. Sitting bottom of the Six Nations table after two rounds and before yesterday’s encounter with England in Cardiff, the players walked out of talks with their employers and threatened to derail the entire championship only to relent on Thursday and call off proposed strike action.

Naturally, the fingers of public opinion have been pointing and as always it is the faceless administrators who find themselves drenched in vitriol. The recent exposure of the rotten culture in the Welsh Rugby Union supplies us with ready-made villains. It may well be a fair cop, but as always the reality is more complicated.

To compound the picture, at the top of the table, not to mention the world rankings, sit Ireland on maximum points. How can Wales’s Celtic cousins be thriving so well on broadly the same levels of union income and exactly the same number of professional teams?

There is no doubt that Ireland and their four provinces represent the success story – despite Wales’s grand slams – of the professional era. Let us not delve too deeply, for fear of depression, into either’s international record in the 1990s, but professionalism spurred Ireland into a bottom-to-top alignment that is now delivering at the highest levels, after a