Heads must roll. If not today, then very soon

JUST when the Red Dragon Brotherhood thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, their team duly plunged through another fathom of uncharted waters before hit- ting a deeper rock bottom.

- PETER JACKSON

Another failure, one infinitely more comprehensive than the scoreline might suggest, leaves Wales with nowhere to go beyond stumbling on towards a second successive Six Nations whitewash. It also leaves Warren Gatland in an increasingly untenable position; 14 straight defeats and no sign of the run ending any time soon.

How many defeats can one man take, especially when that man has built an enviable reputation for dealing in World Cup semi-finals and landing more Six Nations Grand Slams than any other head coach?

Neither Ireland, next up in Cardiff on Saturday week, nor Scotland, at Murrayfield a fortnight later, offer any realistic prospect of a Welsh win. England, at home on the last weekend, might have been seen as the best hope before ridiculing such a notion against France at Twickenham.

The Welsh rot will take some stopping if they are to avoid finishing the championship equalling the longest losing run by any British or Irish team: Scotland’s 17 over four years during the first half of the 1950s.

The biennial pilgrimage to Rome had long been earmarked in Welsh diaries as a trip to end the nightmare, a game that the more upbeat fans believed they would win if only because the alternative was too dreadful to think about. Their downbeat compatriots, all too aware of Italy’s renaissance, feared the worst all along.

Too many Welsh supporters have grown tired, some almost to the point of beyond caring which may explain why the overriding emotion to all those defeats has felt more like one of apathetic acceptance than angry disapproval.