‘We made some dumb decisions’ – Warren Gatland backs Dan Biggar over foul-mouthed tirades

Wales head coach Warren Gatland insisted that Dan Biggar was right to admonish his team-mates during their victory over Fiji.

Never short of a word or two on the field, the pivot sometimes made his feelings known to his fellow players on Sunday following a mistake.

The Welsh ended up claiming a vital 32-26 victory over Fiji with Biggar being named the man of the match.

Not personal

“I didn’t have a problem with it. It’s about making people accountable,” Gatland said.

“There’s nothing wrong with players in terms of challenging each other. We want that as part of the group so that everyone is accountable.

“For me, that peer pressure is huge in terms of that and taking responsibility. Those sort of criticism aren’t personal. We talk about it being a point of care.

“It’s about the team getting better and individuals getting better because we need to be comfortable with being critical.”

Wales found themselves 32-14 up at one stage but two quick-fire Fiji tries in the last 10 minutes set up a tense finale.

Gatland felt that they did not manage the end to the game well and was “angry” with other things throughout the match, which perhaps led to Biggar’s frustrations boiling over.

“I’m delighted with the win but we made it a lot harder for ourselves than we needed to, made some dumb decisions in the last 15 minutes,” he said.

“We’ll have a thorough review that we need to go through, some of the discipline and stuff. I’m a little bit angry about a few things but the positive is we won.

“I thought we were in control of the game but we know what Fiji are like and what they’re capable of and we lost a bit of composure.”

Game-management

The head coach added: “There were periods which were excellent and were there learning, you know, with all the hard work that we’ve put in.

“And there was some times where when you’re in control of the game, it’s about your man management. And I kind of go back to four or five years ago when we’d been through this process for the team as it was growing and developing.

“It took us a bit of time to actually be able to comfortably implement sort of the game management and understanding, and players not giving away stupid penalties and putting us under pressure.

“And then so today there was incidents of that. Like I said, it’s making sure that we’re honest and we review that and we learn from those situations about how we manage things going forward.”

READ MORE: Wales v Fiji: Five takeaways from the game of the opening Rugby World Cup weekend