Having ended the 2026 Guinness Six Nations on a high with a 31-17 win over Italy, Wales head coach Steve Tandy has challenged his players to use the victory as a launch-pad for more sustained success.
The win ended a 15-match losing streak in the championship dating back to 2023 and brought to an end a 1,491 day wait for a home win in the tournament dating back to Scotland in 2022. The monkey is off the back!
There were jubilant scenes post-match and a steely determination to continue the progress made in the final three rounds of this year’s Six Nations campaign. Next up for Wales is the inaugural Nations Championship.
The new competition will kick-off in July and will feature two groups of six teams competing in a ‘North v South’ Hemisphere tournament format across six rounds. There will be three fixtures in July and again in November.
It will all culminate in a Finals Weekend in London, where all the games will be played at the Allianz Stadium, Twickenham, and the tournament will be repeated every two years.
Wales’ first assignment will be against Fiji on 4 July in a game that will be played at the Cardiff City Stadium. Then Tandy’s team will head to Argentina to face the Pumas a week later at Estadio San Juan de Bicentenario, in San Juan.
The third fixture in the first block of Nations Championship matches will be against the world champion Springboks at Kings Park, in Durban on Saturday, 18 July.
This is what was said after last weekend’s breakthrough win against an Italian side that a week earlier had beaten England for the first time.
STEVE TANDY – WALES HEAD COACH
“The Six Nations is a special tournament, and it has been incredible to be a part of it with my home team. I’m a massively proud man – proud of the players and with the fans for sticking with their team.
“What the fans brought with them inspired the players. That performance has been coming but we knew we couldn’t afford to get ahead of ourselves. We had to make sure that big parts of our game are getting better and I think they were in the first half.
“This is a young group that is growing and who are amazing to work with. It fills us with real pride as coaches to see the work they put in.
“Discipline has been massive, but we need to keep accelerating our growth. We are confident that when we deliver our game we can be really competitive as a team
“We know we still have a long way to go to become really consistent, but when you look at where we were against England and where we are today, there has been a great bit of growth.
“We would have liked a few more wins, but the pleasing thing is we have built. We should enjoy today because it has been a while, but it is important that when we come back together, we get better again.”
DEWI LAKE – WALES CAPTAIN
“The important thing against Italy was that what we did in the first half we backed up in the second, which was the flip side to Scotland, where the first half was so good for us and we dropped off in the second.
“We stayed in every moment, we stayed in the game and fought for everything. That’s why the result went our way.
“When you get into camp it’s easy to block out everything else. The work you put in is for days like this. There is a lot of noise and a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes in Welsh rugby, but once you get into camp and start focusing on week to week, building and growing as a team, that’s all you concentrate on.
“Steve (Tandy) has really brought this group together in terms of how much we care for each other and how much we trust each other. Those little bonds don’t come overnight, you have to spend time on them.
“Being connected as a group on the field helps you to get through tough moments. The amount of care he shows to us, along with his whole coaching and backroom staff, has meant we have got a lot tighter.”
AARON WAINWRIGHT – MAN OF THE MATCH
“How we’ve grown throughout the tournament could really set us up for when we come into the next campaign. So, if we get that right over the next couple of months coming into the summer tournament, we can really hit the ground running.
“Steve (Tandy) is really big on his care and connection and making sure we’re all aligned with what we want to achieve when we’re not in camp.
“Given the circumstances of where we are as a country, in terms of our past results and performances, it’s great to get the win and end the campaign on a high. But if we are being realistic about it we probably should have had more wins from the campaign.
“Going forward, hopefully, this is a bit of momentum that we need to kick on and haul ourselves to the standards that we set here.”
