WAL team announcement (v ARG): head coach Gatland

Comments from Wales head coach Warren Gatland on Thursday after the announcement of their side to face Argentina in the quarter-finals at Stade de Marseille on Saturday.

Warren Gatland, head coach:

On where Wales are at:

“The first challenge is obviously the pressure you are under to make the knockout stages, that’s the biggest hurdle you want to get over. Then the quarter-final poses its own challenges and pressures because you’re either here to the end of the tournament, or you’re going home on Monday. As a squad we’re definitely not ready to go home.

“It’s pressure rugby now, isn’t it? It’s the knockout stages and that’s what we prepare for and put all the hard work into. We’re really excited about the challenge on Sunday.”

On whether they embrace the pressure or try to block it out:

“You’ve just got embrace it, you can’t hide away from it. We know within the squad the preparation and hard work that has gone into this World Cup. We’re not surprised at all by where we are, in finishing top of the group. We haven’t picked up too many injuries which has been a bonus and we think we are in pretty good shape from a physical point of view but also a mental point of view.”

On whether they are comfortable being labelled favourites by Argentina head coach Michael Cheika:

“Yeh, absolutely. I don’t know where Michael has got that from, he’s probably trying to take some pressure off himself. If you read too much, there was plenty of speculation and people predicting we wouldn’t even get out of the group. But we embrace that.

"We can only control the things we do and we knew what we were doing with the group and if things change, you have to be comfortable with whatever is thrown at you. We haven’t spoken about underdogs or favourites’ tags, we are just going through our own processes and working as hard as we can to make sure the preparation is right for Saturday.”

On the fitness of Gareth Anscombe, Dan Biggar and Liam Williams:

“Liam’s fine, he just took quite a severe knock on his knee last week. He was up and running on Tuesday. We kept him out of the contact stuff but he took a full part today. Dan was the same. We put him on the bench last week but didn’t need to use him. He’s pec’s just a bit sore.

"Gareth is up and running and fingers crossed, hopefully if things goes well for us on Saturday, he is in contention for next week. In terms of contingency, whether that would have been Leigh Halfpenny -  we are expecting Argentina to kick a lot of ball to us so that was one consideration - or whether we moved Louis [Rees-Zammit] to full-back and Rio [Dyer] started on the wing. So we had options to cover that. But we didn’t really have to go through the process because from Tuesday, we were very confident Liam was going to be fit.”