Gatland: 'We've been looking back on some of the figures and numbers from 2015. We're ahead'

Wales head coach Warren Gatland has given some very positive signs to all Welsh fans on social media, as he compared his team’s current World Cup training camp to the one in 2015.

The team are currently in the Swiss town of Fiesch, where they are going through a camp at altitude, similar to the one they did in 2015.

The long-time coach said that there has been an improvement in a number of areas between the two camps.

“We’re really happy where we are at the moment, we’ve been looking back on some of the figures and numbers from 2015 and we’re ahead of where we were in terms of the training volume, the intensity of training.”

Wales went on to a training camp in Doha, Qatar for a further 10 days in 2015, but that has not been announced this year, as the team will head back home and prepare for four test matches against England, home and away, and Ireland, home and away, before the final squad is announced.

Wales had a decent 2015 World Cup given the circumstances, losing narrowly to South Africa in the quarter-finals. They also upset hosts England at Twickenham in the pool stage with an injury-ravaged team that saw scrum-half Gareth Davies playing on the wing. That was a Herculean effort, in which they surged to victory in the latter stages of the match. Their win could have been due to the conditioning and fitness of the team, meaning these camps have a lasting effect.

However, going into the World Cup in 2015, they were nowhere near as prepared as they are now. Wales are going to Japan off the back of a Grand Slam victory earlier this year, Gatland’s third, which is much more promising than their third-place finish in 2015.

The depth and talent in this squad is the same, if not better than in has been in the last two World Cups, so the fact that this camp has gone better than the previous ones is surely an encouraging sign to all fans.

Wales face another tough pool this World Cup, with Australia and Fiji to contend with, but if what Gatland has said is anything to go by, everything seems in place for Wales to win this group.

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