Were Wales Wheelie Woeful? (With apologies for the terrible pun)

Wales beat Canada last night, but it was far from the polished, high-scoring, free-flowing match that many expected.

However, if you consider Wales had precisely 3 players from their first choice 15 last week starting (and James Hook who was probably unlucky not to have started last week) and had, I think, no less than 4 19-year old players in the 22 is it all bad?

Wales' second and third string players aren't as good as New Zealand's second and third string players. Well there's a shock. If you have a team that is completely disrupted, and formed of new players and players who have largely been out of international selection for a year or two (for various reasons) and you throw them all out together can you really expect them to gel and perform at their best? Maybe if they're All Blacks, but apparently not if they're Wales (or just about anyone else in the world). Did Wales see some positives? Yes. Halfpenny was good again. Daffydd James was good on the other wing - 3 good wingers is better than 2. Biggar stepped in far earlier than expected and played fairly well. Sometime Steve Jones is going to either step aside or be pushed - Biggar isn't quite the polished article yet, but he's getting there. Wales, with a rather baby-faced front row totally dominated at scrum time, and although there were hiccoughs in the line out, they overall won that battle too. OK, Canada aren't England, SA, NZ for that contest, but they're not a waste of space in those areas either. The key players for 5 years time have some experience now.

The breakdown started badly, but got better. There's clearly work to do there, but by the end of the game it was pretty one-sided.

One player, I'm afraid, picked out my particular opprobrium. That would be Stoddard, the full back. I never played at full back, but my understanding of the role is that, when they have the ball he hangs back as a last line of defence and to sweep up kicks through. Stoddard did that side OK. On attack the full back chooses times and lines to enter the back line to either create an overlap, exploit space, and usually create a different angle. On that he failed, dismally. I know he scored once, but he entered the line and promptly ran players out of space, then passed when they were already teetering on the side-line. Once or twice, of course, everyone will do that, but this was time after time after time. It was notable that Halfpenny's tries didn't include a touch from Stoddard for example... and the winger had the room to score.

Wales also have a play that needs to be written out of the play book - a big left-to-right move with a big gap between 10 and 12. South Africa poaching and intercepting is one thing. When Canada do it, to almost exactly the same play, you have to start thinking that it's rather too easy to read and disrupt don't you?

I'm not totally disheartened by this performance. I'd far rather Wales had won comfortably and looked good doing it of course. But they did win and there are positives in there as well as some experience for younger potential players of the next decade. Not really woeful then.