Warren Gatland has said he weighed up taking the easy option of stepping away to spend his days on the beach in New Zealand, but the thrill of the challenge and the desire to tap again into Wales' underdog spirit led him to Monday afternoon, where he was 14 miles outside of Cardiff, talking through his latest squad ahead of the 2025 Six Nations.
In short, 2024 was "challenging", as Gatland puts it. Wales failed to win a Test match over the course of a year for the first time since 1937. They're on a run of 12 Test defeats on the bounce. It's hardly ideal. But having gone through the post-autumn internationals review, Gatland took on the feedback, and believed it was not the time for mass overhaul. Instead, he wants Wales to get back in touch with that innate desire to bloody the noses of the bigger countries and teams around them.
It's that inner-mongrel and desire to topple the natural order of rugby which has retained Gatland's self-belief that he can turn this ship around.
"I had some discussions with the family and spoke about the challenges, and asked whether I needed the negativity in my life," Gatland said. "Do I just hang up my boots and go to the beach and enjoy myself?
"But I've thrived on challenges in the past when people have written us off and haven't expected us to do well. So I looked at the challenge of it all, accepted it, and felt I could make a difference."
This all does come with a qualification, however: "If things don't improve then, you know, there's likely to be a change from the union," he said.
In the end-of-year review from the WRU, Nigel Walker was the main casualty, with the former WRU executive of rugby stepping away. There were other changes recommended, and Gatland will announce changes to his backroom setup later this week.
Abi Tierney, the WRU CEO, said on publication of the review "I will make no secret of the fact that [Gatland's] position was on the line as we undertook our review".
The WRU said Gatland has been challenged to lead Wales to "success" in the Six Nations. Gatland doesn't have a set number of victories he has to achieve with Wales in the forthcoming tournament -- he's never had that -- but he does want to see "an improvement in performance". But fundamentally, he acknowledges they must find a way to start winning again.
To achieve that, Wales will be going back to the future. Gatland wants to tap into the spirit which guided the nation to two Grand Slams and two Six Nations titles when he was coach in his first spell from 2008-2019. In his second tenure, which started ahead of the 2023 World Cup, he's looked to transition the group from one era to the next.
Experienced players have either retired, or been ushered away, while there is a new crop continuing to find their feet on the Test stage. This latest squad mixes eras: the likes of Taulupe Faletau, Josh Adams and Liam Williams are back, but it's Jac Morgan, 24, who captains the team. There's a lack of Test match nous at fly-half, but Gatland has opted not to draft in Gareth Anscombe, 33, with one eye on 2027.
In short, it's a juggling act. But what he wants to retain, and nurture is the DNA which has served Wales well in the past couple of decades.
"You do question yourself and you think about sort of things you could do to improve things but it's also trying to find a balance between not making radical changes but also looking at the small tweaks that you can make," Gatland said.
"For me, it's looking back historically and saying, why have we been successful in the past? When you've won trophies over the years it's making sure that you don't go away from some of the philosophies that have been successful. Sometimes you can lose a little bit of that but you have to be able to trust your own instincts and own experience as well."
Gatland says the Six Nations is "about winning and [Wales] can't hide away from that fact". But he does point to how over the past couple of years there hasn't necessarily been that culture of winning within the regions, the age-grade sides, or his own team. So that has to change and more than anything, he wants his team to go out and "give a real performance" when they come up against France on Jan. 31 in Paris. There are few tougher challenges in rugby.
But don't expect him to make wholesale changes. He's seen such approaches attempted and fail. So instead, he'll trust instincts and nous which have got him this far as he looks to take Wales back to winning ways.
"Probably what I've experienced sometimes in the past is that, you've seen organizations or you've seen teams where coaches have gone they have implemented a completely new structure and I've very, rarely seen that to be successful," Gatland said.
"And I think it's about, how do you make small tweaks to fix things up. It's about being smart in terms of the way you want to do things and making small changes, making sure everyone's clear on exactly what we want to try and achieve."