Gatland opens up on Bok drubbing

REACTION: Wales head coach Warren Gatland admitted that the Springboks physically dominated his team in all areas of the game in Saturday’s World Cup warm-up match in Cardiff.

South Africa scored eight tries on their way to a convincing 52-16 victory over a Welsh side missing several key players.

“It was disappointing, I thought we were dominated physically on both sides of the ball,” said Gatland.

“We’d spoken to the players about the physicality they’d bring and playing against the world champions who have just come out of a Rugby Championship.

“The only positive I can take is there’s hopefully there’s a lot of learning that some of those players will have got from today [Saturday].”

He added: “When you have a defeat like that it’s about how do you look at the positives when you are reviewing it as a group.

“There’s some easy fixes in terms of probably four or five of those tries are easy enough to stop and then all of a sudden there’s a different complexion on the game.

“We wanted to give everybody an opportunity and find out about players. A large amount of those would have learned a hell of a lot from that experience.”

Gatland believes his inexperienced side’s performance gave him some answers ahead of his World Cup squad announcement on Monday.

“It’s made it easier for our discussion about some of the questions we had,” the coach explained.

“We will go back to the hotel and sit down as coaches and hopefully finalise it.

“If we need to have more discussion we can hopefully do that tomorrow [Sunday] morning.”

There will be a spotlight on the injured trio of flyhalf Gareth Anscombe, wing Alex Cuthbert and No.8 Taulupe Faletau ahead of that announcement.

Those played have not featured in any warm-up matches.

“They are in contention because they are experienced,” said Gatland.

“If they were young players, it would be very difficult to select them but given their vast amount of experience they will be in the discussions.”

Source: BBC