There are defeats, and then there are defeats that feel like historic punctuation marks. Wales’s 73-0 capitulation to South Africa at the Principality Stadium is a result so stark, so Âbrutal, that it becomes a reckoning.
This was billed as a match nobody wanted. Played outside the Test window, both teams were missing numbers of players due to club commitments, and the Welsh regions were short-staffed to the point of borrowing players to meet their United Rugby Championship obligations.
This record defeat was the first time since 1967 that Wales have failed to score a single point in Cardiff. What unfolded was every bit as bleak as the most pessimistic forecasts. Wales were overwhelmed from the outset, conceding four tries before the interval and never once threatening to alter the trajectory of the contest. South Africa built their dominance on a scrum that reduced Wales to a state of permanent retreat.
Their scores were not the product of flamboyance but of unanswerable physicality. Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu scored 28 points, including two tries. Wales, by contrast, managed just two fleeting incursions into the South African 22.
Matters grew darker still when, at 49-0, the Springboks introduced their entire bench, seven forwards among them, 10 minutes into the second half. This is a South Africa team who will be talked about for generations for their ability to control even the biggest games, but discipline is their weakness. Eben Etzebeth added the 11th try before a needless act of foul play earned him a clear red card (South Africa’s third this autumn) for putting his thumb into Alex Mann’s eye with two minutes to go.
It would be comforting to treat this humiliation as an outlier. Wales were missing players, the timing was bad, the line-up was experimental. Whatever excuses there are, a 73-point margin exposes, once more, the chasm forming between Wales and the rest of the tier one nations.
For a long time, the Welsh Rugby Union has operated within an atmosphere of dysfunction. Reforms arrive late or not at all. The regions, intended to be the engine room of talent and identity, are contracting year by year. The production line of players has gone from vaunted to haunted by what might have been.
Welsh rugby has always relied on a kind of stubborn resilience, a belief that adversity can be out-willed. But resilience is not a strategy. The regions, those maligned and misunderstood institutions, have endured an existence shaped less by planning than by compromise. Each financial negotiation brought fresh uncertainty; each public dispute between the union and regions deepened mistrust. In such an atmosphere, how could the national team flourish? For this match, Wales were deprived of players based in England and France and further stretched by concurrent domestic fixtures.
The Springboks played like a team who have continued to evolve even at the summit of the sport. Wales looked like a team searching for the bottom from which to start again.
Perhaps the most dispiriting element was how quickly resignation crept into the atmosphere. Even the red card issued to Etzebeth, normally the sort of incident that shifts the tone of a game, felt irrelevant.
Beyond the scoreboard, another concern loomed: the thinning crowds. For a fixture intended, at least partly, to generate financial uplift, the sight of broad swathes of empty seats told its own story. Yet a two-thirds full Principality Stadium is, to defend the WRU for a second, better than an empty one. This match provides money the WRU desperately needs. But for how long will the team garner decent crowds for poor performances? The Welsh public, famously loyal, are now conflicted. They still care and they still yearn. But their patience, strained by the slow erosion of standards and direction, cannot be taken as inexhaustible.
And yet, amid all the gloom, there remains the task of imagining a way forward. Rebuilding Welsh rugby will not be achieved through rhetoric, nor through romantic appeals to heritage. It requires unapologetic structural reform: a clear-eyed reassessment of the purpose and resourcing of the regions, a coherent pathway for nurturing talent, and an end to the internecine politics that have throttled progress.
Wales needs professional environments capable of developing players who can withstand the brutality of the modern game. For now, this score stands as a stark reminder of what has been lost, and what must be recovered.
Photograph by David Rogers/Getty Images