If Warren Gatland is playing a game over the make-up of the front row in his Wales World Cup squad, opponents and pundits have fallen for it hooker, line and sinker.
Gatland, a former hooker himself, caused a media stir when he followed Australia and named only two specialists in the position, Scott Baldwin and Ken Owens, in his World Cup 31. The prop Aaron Jarvis has been named as the back-up to the pair and he is on the bench in Saturday’s final warm-up match against Italy at the Millennium Stadium.
Kristian Dacey, the hooker left out of the squad, is included because Baldwin has a minor toe injury and will also be one of the replacements in Cardiff. When Owens is replaced against the Italians, will Gatland bring on Dacey or give Jarvis his one opportunity to have match experience in an unfamiliar position before the World Cup starts?
Gatland does not regard naming two hookers, rather than the customary three, as much of a gamble. It would only backfire were Baldwin or Owens injured within two days of a match because players called up must spend 48 hours in camp before being available for selection. Dacey, and the Gloucester hooker Richard Hibbard, would be able to join Wales within a few hours of contact.
If Jarvis is not used at hooker against Italy, it would indicate Gatland does not envisage having to play him there in the coming weeks having already stated that if one of his five second-rows suffers an injury, he would probably replace him with a hooker. What the composition of his 31 has allowed him is to have opposed training sessions with two full teams.
A major focus of Wales’s rugby training in the last month has been discipline. They conceded 13 penalties in their two matches against Ireland last month, providing an average Gatland feels will need to be maintained if they are to progress from a World Cup pool that includes England, Australia and Fiji.
Wales face tournament hosts England at Twickenham on 26 September, a match that will be refereed by Jérôme Garcès, who is in charge of the game against Italy. Gatland used the opportunity to speak to the Frenchman on Friday about what the official wanted at the scrum and breakdown.
Garcès refereed Wales’s Six Nations defeat to England in Cardiff last February when the loosehead prop Gethin Jenkins was penalised regularly for not scrummaging straight a year after another Frenchman Romain Poite had sent him to the sin-bin at Twickenham for the same offence. World Cup rules do not allow coaches to speak to referees before matches and Wales are not wasting their last opportunity to find out what Garcès is looking for before the match with England that will have a significant bearing on the outcome of Pool A.
Wales won the penalty count by a margin of two to one against Ireland in Dublin last weekend, although the home side felt their opponents were allowed to slow down their ball at the breakdown and their normally unruffled coach, Joe Schmidt, was so incensed after the match he asked the referee Craig Joubert for an explanation.
Wales believe if they can keep their penalty count below 10 and so minimise the number of lineouts they have to defend as well as not conceding territory cheaply, they will give themselves every opportunity of progressing from the group having failed three times before to make it through to the quarter-finals.
“England are awarded an average of 15 penalties at home and we have to limit our count to single figures,” Gatland said. “We have been working on stuff this summer that will allow me to go to a meeting with Joël Jutge [World Rugby’s director of referees] and deliver a message.
“We have been criticised in the past for our scrummaging tactics but my message to Joel is that with our firepower behind, the last thing we want is a messy scrum. It is about ensuring referees do not go into matches with pre-conceived ideas about us.”
Italy should be the ones more concerned about the penalty count in Cardiff after their heavy defeat in Scotland, although they have proved obdurate opponents in the Welsh capital this decade.
Gatland needs his backs to hit the ground running in a way they did not against Ireland last month having picked his strongest threequarters line, with the exception of the injured Jamie Roberts.