Rugby World Cup 2019: Warren Gatland leaves Wales with the respect he’s always deserved

It wasn’t the ending he wanted but Gatland leaves after 12 momentous years with a legacy that will last long after he’s gone

A couple of minutes after the final whistle, Warren Gatland got up from his position in the stands and strolled down to the side of the pitch. There, he was greeted by a tableau of riotous colour and frenetic bustle. On the field, the two sets of players were congratulating and commiserating with handshakes and hugs. On the sidelines, the South African coaches were dancing a little victory reel. The officials were carrying out their final checks. Meanwhile, several thousand TV people were scurrying around, erecting their sponsored canvases and hoisting lighting equipment into position. And so, for a short while, Gatland stood alone, gathering his thoughts in the Yokohama night.

What was going through his mind during those few precious moments? Was he still picking over those final minutes: Rhys Patchell failing with a drop goal attempt, Dillon Lewis piling in at the side, Handre Pollard slotting over the critical penalty, those agonising last seconds as South Africa imperiously snuffed out the game? Was he distraught? Rueful? Proud? Strangely liberated? Perhaps, as anybody who has stared straight into sport’s cruel abyss will tell you, it was a mixture of all of them, and nothing at all.

“There’s no in between after a game,” Gatland once wrote. “It’s either agony or ecstasy. You’re in a lonely place because you’re hurting.” And if losing a regular game is a lonely feeling, then losing a World Cup semi-final, must be a different world of pain and desolation. The fact that his team played with heart and resilience and passion and endurance will not be a consolation. Nor will those three Grand Slams, those 19 consecutive victories in competitive matches, the fact that he took a small nation from No 10 to No 1 in the world. Not yet, at any rate. Not while the wounds are still weeping.

By the time he stepped into his press conference a few minutes later, the colour had still not returned to his cheeks. In a low, respectful voice he congratulated the victorious South Africans, talked about being “proud of the boys”, paid tribute to the squad’s “hard work”. But you could see his heart was really somewhere else. Unless you were listening extremely carefully, you’d scarcely have known if this was his last game in charge of Wales, or his first.

Perhaps it was always a touch optimistic to expect tears and melodrama. After all, from his very earliest days as a coach, Gatland always seemed to have an intrinsic distrust of theatrics. “You very seldom see him in a mouth-fight and mud-slinging before Test matches,” his counterpart Rassie Erasmus observed before the game. “He doesn’t bite at you to create unnecessary nonsense before a Test match. So I’ve got a lot of respect for him as a person.”

Quite often, that sober professionalism gets mistaken for a sort of blithe, almost technocratic dispassion. Occasionally, though, you get glimpses of just how much this all means to him: the quiet dreamer lurking beneath the calm, level-headed façade. “When you want something bad enough – when you really, really want it – it can happen,” he said earlier this week. Over 12 years as Wales coach, Gatland has bled and breathed and lived and died a thousand times over. Finally, he had turned out his pockets, and found them empty.

It was a horrible, attritional game, and ultimately Wales’s inability to change its prevailing tone played neatly into South Africa’s hands. If Gatland by his own admission got lucky against France, playing most of the second half against 14 men, then here, in another tight game, Wales found themselves on the wrong side of those tight margins.

Not that there would be any complaints afterwards. Not from Gatland, at least. Nor did he talk about the injuries his team had suffered, with at least five first-teamers missing in Gareth Anscombe, Taulupe Faletau, Cory Hill, Josh Navidi and Liam Williams. “We can hold our heads high and leave Japan with a lot of respect,” he insisted instead. “We’re really disappointed, but we’ve got to be proud of ourselves.”

And ultimately, for Gatland, it all comes down to respect. Nobody respected Wales back in 2007, when he took over after a calamitous World Cup defeat to Fiji. The domestic system was a shambles. The fitness and discipline of the national team was well off the pace of the top nations. And Wales seemed to burn through coaches on an almost annual basis. Slowly, but deliberately, he forged Wales into a unit that would not always be universally liked but would always compete, instilled values that will endure long after he has left the dressing room for the last time.

The occasional lows – those eight straight losses in 2012, the curious inability to beat Australia, successive World Cup heartbreaks – were outweighed by a torrent of highs. Meanwhile, Gatland brought through a generation of players – Sam Warburton, George North, Liam Williams, Leigh Halfpenny – who would define their era and who would in many ways define the new Wales. Even the appearance of Rhys Carre off the bench – a 21-year-old rookie prop who Gatland called up after just two professional starts, yet who was now playing in a World Cup semi-final – illustrated his unshakeable faith not just in raw young talent, but the system producing it.

Through it all, through the derision and sneering, the “clown” taunts and the “Warrenball” labels, Gatland never chased personal plaudits, never sought celebrity for its own sake, nor notoriety either. He wasn’t indifferent to criticism. He didn’t much care whether you liked him or not. All he ever needed was to coach players, to improve players, to win games of rugby.

Naturally, this wasn’t the way he would have wanted to end it: beaten by three points with immortality in their grasp. But there’s a third-place game against the All Blacks to come next Friday, a team Wales haven’t beaten in 66 years. Then a return home with Waikato in Super Rugby, another sleeping giant of the game who have fallen on hard times. And then, in 2021, a third Lions tour as head coach. The opposition? South Africa. “Maybe we’ll get some revenge,” he said with a sly look. That’s the thing about Gatland, you see: he never stays down for long.