The Wales coach tried to remain positive after watching his side suffer a record home defeat
Wales coach Steve Tandy refused to blame the fixture as his side were hammered 73-0 by South Africa in Cardiff.
The out-of-window match has been roundly criticised this week, with Wales missing 13 players based in England and France. Given their results over the last year, the value of playing a fixture against the back-to-back world champions with such a depleted team had been questioned by many.
Even given its status as a money-maker fourth autumn Test for the Welsh Rugby Union, despite only pulling in a crowd of 50,112 – the lowest ever for the Springboks at a full-capacity Principality Stadium – the hefty scoreline only served to confirm those concerns.
Wales were kept scoreless in Cardiff for the first time since 1967, while it was nearly a record defeat – getting close to the 96-13 defeat to the Springboks in 1998.
However, Tandy refused to lay the blame at the arranging of this particular fixture.
“The fixture is the fixture,” said Tandy. “You can’t change that.
“I knew when I got the job, this fixture was in place. We’ll learn lessons from it, but ultimately it’s the rugby. It’s focusing on how we get that better.
“It isn’t about my situation within it. It’s a game of rugby and we need games of rugby as a nation that wants to get better. It was another opportunity to work with a different group.
“We had to bring people in and it wasn’t perfect circumstances. But you learn about people in these times. There’s so many ways we can be really down.
“And we should be down about the scoreboard. But I’m not going to sit here and throw stones because ultimately it’s my job to coach the team. I love coaching this team. I believe in the future of this team. We need more games to get to where we want.”
He added: “I don’t think it’s one game too far. It’s easy when you don’t get what you want. But we need Test matches. The bit we’ve got to do is really focus on the bits we’ve done really well over the campaign.
“It’s a young inexperienced group in terms of where we need to go to. But it’s a another opportunity to get out there and see different people. When we look back at the game, there’ll be certain things we can take out of the game.
“But we know where we are. We need to create depth. The way we do that is playing games and getting more aligned.”
Having now lost 21 of their last 23 Tests, there is undeniably scar tissue in this Wales.
However, Tandy didn’t necessarily believe this latest result would do serious damage to this Wales squad.
“I think it’s how you look at it,” he said. “Everyone loves playing for their country.
“You want to be the best you can be. You can look at it like that, but also about how far you need to go. Going up against world class athletes, there’s different ways of looking at it.
“We can run away from where we’re at. We could not play a game today and take the benefits from that. But ultimately, we need experience and we haven’t got that many Test caps. That’s where we need to be.
“They beat Argentina by 60-odd points. These games can blow out pretty quickly. When you feel they won most parts of the game, that does come into it.
“How we go about it, being positive not about the scoreboard, but the vision of where we want to go to. The young group we’ve got did a real good job against New Zealand. It’s making sure we learn and understand.
“We’re a proud rugby nation. We don’t want to be losing at home, let alone by that scoreline. For us, it’d be easy to sit here and say that was one game too far. But the game was here and it’s about what we get from this game.”