The lyrics of that old Kenny Rogers favourite The Gambler sprang to mind as Warren Gatland sat down in Wales’s team hotel this week to explain his desire to stay on as head coach. “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away …” Approaching his 18th Six Nations campaign – he has been involved in 13 previous ones with Wales and four with Ireland – Gatland is clearly not ready to abandon all hope just yet.

There is a fair amount of professional pride involved too. Plus the enduring stubbornness of a competitor who, unlike Tyson Fury, still feels he has some unfinished business. While Wales may have lost 12 consecutive games, the key to Gatland’s coaching longevity remains his enduring belief that the next game is always winnable. Even if it involves a pumped-up France in Paris on the opening night of the 2025 Six Nations. “If we can go out there, play well and get a little bit of luck …”

And why not? The 61-year-old Gatland may look slightly more rumpled and grey these days but he has always loved confounding expectations. Exhibit A? His first game as Wales coach, in 2008, when he took a team of supposed no-hopers to Twickenham and, from 19-6 down, came away with the first Welsh win at England’s citadel since 1988.

Six years ago Wales also kicked off the 2019 Championship in Paris. They were 16-0 down at half-time and seemed dead and buried. Somehow they rallied to win 24–19 and went on to win a grand slam, making Gatland the first coach to win three grand slams in the Five or Six Nations era. As head coach of Wales he has won four Six Nations titles in all and steered the national team to the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2011 and 2019.

Stir in some of his glory days with the British & Irish Lions and Wasps, and his CV still compares with any in the modern game. The only question is whether there are more epic days yet to come or, bluntly, whether the old magic has gone. The France game on 31 January will be Gatland’s 150th in charge of Wales and even he accepts another poor tournament could spell the end. “There has been a fair amount of criticism, which is completely understandable when you are dealing with professional rugby. It’s all about performance and results.”

So can Hamilton’s answer to Harry Houdini fashion one last miracle? One of Gatland’s greatest skills, according to his former captain Alun Wyn Jones, is convincing players they can do anything. “From the start Gats was on to us about being more confident, about backing ourselves. That wasn’t the instinctive Welsh way.”

Johnny Sexton also made some interesting observations in his recent autobiography, Obsessed. On his first Lions tour he was initially unsure where he stood with Gatland. “I didn’t know what to make of Gats. The Welsh guys told us that he can be hard to read. I think he likes it that way, to keep people on edge.” Sexton, though, grew to admire the coach’s innate understanding of rugby players and what makes them tick. “What I liked about him was that he had a good sense of what players needed and wanted. I liked the way he talked, liked the buttons he pressed. I wouldn’t rate him as highly as Joe [Schmidt] or [Andy Farrell] as a technical coach but those two are among the best ever. As a manager and a selector I thought Gats was quality.”

Which is worth remembering amid the grey wintry gloom of Wales’s recent record. Would anyone else be faring any better with the resources available? Perhaps not but there are whispers – and Welsh rugby can be the loudest of echo chambers – that Gatland’s methods are chiming less well with today’s younger generation of players. Even the former Waikato hooker concedes he has had to adapt his approach. “I suppose you probably need to temper yourself a little bit [compared] to what you might have been in the past in terms of the language you might have used and how direct and, potentially, critical you were.

“Sometimes you ask the question: are players today as resilient as they might have been? Not just me but all the coaches are conscious of the way we speak to the players and the language we use in terms of not knocking their confidence.”

Gatland, though, has never been one to roll over when challenged, not least after being shown the anonymous feedback supplied by the players as part of the recent independent review commissioned by the Welsh Rugby Union. “It gave us an insight into some of the things they found challenging and things they wanted more of. So we’ve taken that on board. But you’ve also got to realise they are still young players. What has been their experience in a professional winning environment? None of them have really had that. So how do they know what that looks like? I’d like to think we’ve got people who have been involved with that [kind of] environment and know what it feels and smells like to be part of it.”

By his own admission, even so, Gatland has found life hard at times during the past year, with assorted squad injuries making a tricky job tougher still. “There is no doubt it has been challenging. It has been tough. You do question yourself. For me it’s also about looking back historically and asking why have we been successful? It’s about making sure you don’t go away from some of the philosophies that have made you successful with teams. Sometimes you can lose a little bit of that. You have to trust your own instincts and experience.” Which is why, rather than walking away, he still fancies he can conjure up an ace or two.

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