CARDIFF (AFP) – Threatened player strike assuaged, Wales will now focus on a first win in this season’s Six Nations when they take on England in Cardiff today.
A dispute over player contracts reached a head this week, with Welsh players threatening a strike over contractual issues.
But compromises were reached and the game at Principality Stadium will go ahead as planned.
Wales coach Warren Gatland, who made nine changes to the team that lost 35-7 to Scotland in their last outing, admitted that the dispute had been “a challenge, there is no doubt about that”.
“I support the players in terms of the action that was taken,” he said. “Maybe there could have been a little bit more warning but that’s the way it is and they made those calls.”
As of today, professional players in Wales now know that playing overseas is an option should you have 25 rather than 60 caps.
Player representation at Professional Rugby Board (PRB) meetings is also guaranteed while there has been a move on contract to include solely fixed ones alongside fixed-variable hybrid contracts (80 per cent in set wages, with 20 per cent as bonus payments).
The players, Gatland said, “are pretty happy with the outcome and what’s going to happen moving forwards”.
Gatland admitted that Wales having been successful in his first tenure as head coach between 2007-19, when he oversaw four Six Nations titles including three Grand Slams and two Rugby World Cup semi-final appearances, in 2011 and 2019, had “probably papered over the cracks a little bit”.
