Wales confront weight of a glorious history

Rugby World Cup: Hansen's side take on Italy today knowing that national heritage as well as a place in the quarter-finals demand victory

It has come to this, then: 80 desperation-soaked minutes with the potential to blow the roof clean off the creaking, badly-maintained, rickety old mansion that was once a Xanadu of the sporting world.

There is more than a touch of the Citizen Kane story in the rise and fall of Welsh rugby - how Orson Welles would have loved tearing strips from the self-important buffoons responsible for this betrayal of the legacy left by Gareth and Barry, JPR and JJ - and if the Red Dragonhood succumb to Italy here today, the sound of the ornamental gate clanging shut will be loud enough to wake the dead.

As Gareth Thomas, the long-serving wing from Bridgend, admits: "It is now or never for us." Now or never? Against the Azzurri? The great ones, the likes of "Merv the Swerve" and the Pontypool front row, never even played against Italy, let alone lost to them. Why? Because the Italians weren't fit to tie their bootlaces. But Thomas, who knows what it is to stand toe-to-toe with the superpowers of the union code - the All Blacks, the Springboks, the Wallabies and, yes, the bloody English - unhesitatingly describes this as the most significant of 70-odd matches he has played for his country since the 1995 World Cup in South Africa.

Four years previously, the Welsh also talked themselves into a "do-or-die" situation, and duly died a small death by losing to Western Samoa and missing out on the knock-out phase of the tournament.

Gerald Davies, the prince of Welsh wings and a sad-faced observer that day, remembers it like this: "Wales had added to their pressure by declaring beforehand that this was the most important game in their 110-year history. Bringing the burden of history on to a single game is invariably an error of judgement; it attaches a focus and an attention that one game hardly merits, thereby flagrantly accentuating the importance to the point of exaggerated gravity. In the event of a loss, the game's meaning assumes seismic proportions. The damage to team spirit is incalculable."

Davies knows his onions; he is an astute analyst of the sport he once played as well as anyone on earth, and he never allows the fog of emotion to cloud his sense of perspective. His is a faint voice of reason in a deafening chorus of hyperbole. But he may be tempted to revisit some of his opinions if Wales go west this time.

In 1991, few saw the Samoans coming, even though they brought the likes of Brian Lima, Frank Bunce, To'o Vaega, Stephen Bachop and Pat Lam to the party on a gatecrasher's ticket. These were very considerable players, unleashed on an unsuspecting world. By contrast, everyone knows about Italy; about their forward strength, their improved organisation and discipline, their natural affinity with the union code. As a package, they are about as surprising as rain in Port Talbot.

So the metaphorical playing field is every bit as level as the real one at Canberra Stadium: there is nothing arcane or mysterious about this contest, there are no riddles to be unravelled or puzzles to be solved. All the cards are on the table, face up. If Wales lose to the Italians, as they did in Rome last February, it will be because they are inferior, because they have replaced the Azzurri as the weakest of Europe's front-line rugby nations. More to the immediate point, their chances of making the last eight will suddenly depend on their beating New Zealand in Sydney tomorrow week; in which case, they may as well cut down on the hotel bills by heading straight for the airport.

Welsh rugby is in a state of crisis that would be intensified five-fold by failure here. Horribly in debt - why did the general committee commit themselves to building the Millennium Stadium, when they knew they were skint? - and losing worryingly large chunks of traditional support to the less complex lure of football, the administrators have foisted a new quintet of regional teams on what remains of their public, who show little sign of responding in the numbers necessary to underpin the financing of a vibrant domestic game.

Two of these new sides, the Gwent Dragons and the Celtic Warriors, have been split asunder by boardroom conflict, less than two months into their competitive histories.

These may be small-town issues involving small-time personalities, but, when it comes to rugby, the Welsh consider themselves big news. Defeat here would finally disabuse them of that notion.

More immediately, it would mark the end of the road for Steve Hansen, the New Zealand coach who thought he had switched hemispheres to work alongside his countryman, Graham Henry, but effectively passed him in mid-air, flying in the opposite direction. Hansen is far from the least able strategist appointed by the Welsh Rugby Union over the last two decades, and he is nobody's idea of a selectorial coward. For this game, he has omitted the likes of Rhys Williams, Gareth Cooper, Iestyn Thomas and Robert Sidoli - players who might have expected to be involved at the business end of this campaign. He has even left out Stephen Jones, the outside-half from Llanelli. Jones may not be a Jonathan Davies, but he knows his way around a pressure occasion.

Hansen may have hit the spot here. He may be right in his view that Ceri Sweeney of Pontypridd - "a cheeky little bugger", to borrow the coach's words - has the dash and nerve to lead the exceptional Azzurri loose forwards a merry dance. He may be correct in his suspicion that the two Jones boys from Neath, with their four-square front-rowers' frames and unlikely haircuts, will stoke up sufficient levels of heat and energy to undermine the Italians' belief in their right to challenge the rugby establishment in so impertinent a fashion. (It is worth mentioning here that Italy mean so little to the organisers of this tournament that they have been forced to cram their four pool matches into a 15-day span, rather than the more leisurely period of 22 days granted to the Welsh).

But whichever way you cut it, Wales have gone backwards at a fearful rate. Sixteen years ago, they finished third in the inaugural World Cup, having beaten Ireland, England and Australia along the way. Today, they would not expect to get within 35 points of any of those teams; instead, they are worrying themselves silly about beating opponents who, in their own country, generate less publicity than the Under-17 footballers of Juventus.

Welsh rugby has always existed in a peculiar world of romance, myth and exaggeration. Question: "Who's that flash bloke playing at outside-half?" Answer: "That's God, but he thinks he's Barry John." Suddenly, no one is exaggerating. The most important game of the professional era? Yes, and then some.