Six Nations dressing room cameras reveal two very different team talks

Another dramatic week in Welsh rugby and the BBC had a perfect opportunity to get in amongst it for Saturday’s big match against England. They had cameras in the dressing room at half-time and it was a fascinating little peek behind the curtain.

Six Nations coverage has had this behind-the-scenes element for a couple of years now and fans in other sports are, of course, well familiar with the fly-on-the-wall. The idea of the sanctity of the dressing room feels passe now, in today’s dignity-free, post-privacy world of 24/7 expressing your feelings, oversharing the minutiae of your life and general emotional incontinence.

Unlike some other sports, rugby’s use of this modern feature was more about discreetly placed fixed cameras than a large crew creating a sense of theatre, and compared to the barnstorming, performative team talks of Mikel Arteta or Jose Mourinho on Amazon Prime Video’s All or Nothing documentaries, this on the BBC was downbeat to the point of muted. But it was none the less revealing for that.

The Welsh players trooped in at half-time and milled around, a battery of support staff tidied a few bits and bobs away, some of the players talked among themselves. Warren Gatland, in a dark suit, hands clasped together in front of his body, wandered around apparently lost in his own thoughts, reminiscent of a man who had gone to the funeral of someone he knew only vaguely, too polite to intrude on the family’s private grief.

Maybe it is unfair to draw too many conclusions and perhaps while we viewers were watching Gabby Logan, Martin Johnson, Wayne Pivac and Sam Warburton doing the punditry, Warren was giving the Welsh guys a stirring call-to-arms from the Michael Sheen motivational speaking school, stripped to the waist, beating his chest and ranting about how the team needed to give Henry Cooper, Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Anthony Eden a hell of a beating.

But it surely did not seem like that and, although the studio panel made no comment on it, the footage of the Wales holy of holies was an intriguing little insight into the relationship, or otherwise, between the team and staff.

The Wales coach wrote in these very pages about the players’ dispute with the board: “I was not privy to a lot of the discussions. I was caught in the middle. I am employed by the union so it is a hard position to be in. You want to support the players as much as possible, but you have got to be careful about how much of the line you cross from that perspective.” He certainly seemed to be staying well on his side of that line.

Commentator Andrew Cotter observed that “Sam [Warburton] needs to be doing the team talk”, and certainly it was all at odds with the fierce passion that televised Six Nations matches from Cardiff have always been able to tap into.

While Gatland contented himself with a wee chat with coaching staff, 15 feet or more away from the nearest player, there was a contrasting interval in the away changing room. Steve Borthwick seemed to be running a totally different sort of operation. He had the England players all sitting in a horseshoe shape, and was making a series of tactical points with reference to diagrams on a whiteboard. His charges, to a man, sat around listening intently, or at least looking like they were listening intently, like a very well-behaved, very outsized primary school class. Admittedly England did then concede in the first minute after half-time on an interception so maybe the message did not entirely sink in, but still. Back to the tactical drawing board.

The England side, on this evidence anyway, seemed united, committed and on the same page as the coach. As for Wales, well, the drama continues, caught on camera or behind closed doors.