The WRU chair remains defiant despite humilation
17:18, 30 Nov 2025Updated 17:21, 30 Nov 2025
WRU chair Richard Collier-Keywood at the annual general meeting(Image: Gareth Everett/Huw Evans Agency)
WRU chair Richard Collier-Keywood says he was “embarrassed” by Wales’ 73-0 hammering at home to South Africa – the heaviest in their history – but maintains he is still the right man to lead the sport’s future in Wales.
Saturday’s defeat to the world champions was a record home defeat and arguably Welsh rugby’s lowest point of the professional era. It emphasised how far away Welsh rugby is from competing with the best sides in the world and Collier-Keywood said he found it hard to watch.
“I felt very very disappointed and very upset,” he said, speaking to the press at the WRU’s AGM.
“It was very hard to take. Yeah, I was embarrassed.
“I think any Welsh person sitting there would have been embarrassed to be honest with you.
“It was pretty hard to watch, wasn’t it.
“I was concerned about the boys out on the field. There was clearly a massive mismatch.
“It shows us how far we’ve got to go. I think it was as bad as my worst expectations were.
“Inevitably you go into games and you think about a range of potential outcomes. That was probably at the worst end.”
When asked if he would consider his position given the lowly state of Welsh rugby Collier-Keywood insists he is the right man for the job.
“Yes I am,” he said when asked if he is the correct individual to take things forward.
“I mean it’s obviously subject to the board and the clubs agreeing with that but yes.
“I think we’ve changed the finances around, it’s sustainable. We’ve announced an investment of £40million into rugby in Wales in the next five years, which just would not have been possible apart from the professionalisation of everything we’ve done there.
“And I think we’re working on the professional side.
“We are halfway through a process of trying to land that in the next literally few weeks, I hope.
“And if we do manage that, then I think we’ve got the main things behind us.
“So yeah, I’m very confident that we’ll get there and I’m looking forward to the next challenge.”
Yesterday’s horror show was played outside of the international window, meaning Wales were severely depleted due to being without the services of their English and French-based players.
The WRU has come in for fierce criticism for arranging this Test match on the same weekend as all four professional clubs had important United Rugby Championship fixtures to play.
But Collier-Keywood has defended the decision.
“The match was contracted originally back in 2018,” he said.
“It was meant to be played in 2020 but then got rearranged in 2021 to yesterday so this was way ahead of time.
“I don’t think you can cancel matches because you are worried about the result of them.
“I think we went ahead and that was the right thing to do. I did check in with Dave Reddin in terms of the opportunity for the lads and it was an opportunity to see a broad range of people play for Wales.
“That will have helped Steve Tandy in his future thought process and strength in depth but it does show you how far away we are from where we need to be.”
Collier-Keywood has revealed it would have cost the WRU significant money to cancel the game.
“It would have cost us money to cancel it and I think even beyond the financial side I can’t remember an international rugby game that’s been cancelled because a nation didn’t want to play it,” he said.
“That just would have sent shockwaves through the tier one rugby world so I think for those reasons it wasn’t an option to cancel it.
“Financially we would have had to pay a significant penalty to South Africa if we had pulled out of it and it would cost us significant money – you’ve seen in our accounts over 60% of our income comes from rugby and that’s a core part of it.
“Our ticket sales would have been about £2m from yesterday and we would have had F&B on top of that.
“It’s a substantial amount of income we would have foregone. The penalty to pay South Africa if we had cancelled the match was over £1m and we would also not have taken the ticketing revenue, we would not have taken the F&B revenue.
“So, all those are significant numbers for us.
“It obviously costs us to put the match on but I think if you talked about a £2m delta you wouldn’t be too far off.”
Collier-Keywood’s role as chair is being questioned by vociferous supporters on social media but he claims there have been improvements under his reign.
“I think there’s a very significant set of improvements and I’m not talking just about the financial side,” he said.
“You saw what we said about the financial side. When I first came into this role a few things struck me.
“The first was we were up against our banking covenants. We basically didn’t have any money to spend on anything.
“We had significant and onerous contracts, be it with professional clubs, be it with many of the people we were partnering with.
“And today you heard us announce, depending on which line of the P&L you take, but roughly a 30% increase year-on-year on profitability.
“You heard us announce that we’ve adopted a much more professional approach to our F&B, which going forward will be a platform for further growth in that.
“And you saw us announce that we’re partnering with ZipWorld, which is absolutely the right thing to do to run an attraction where we’d previously taken it on and quite frankly were struggling to know what to do.
“So we’ve professionalised that. I think we’ve professionalised governance in the WRU.
“You’ve got a board that does understand governance now. Quite a diverse board.
“We have robust conversations on a lot of things and I think come to some good answers in relation to those those things we talk about and there have been a lot of things we’ve talked about that have been quite hard in the last year.
“On the rugby side I think we’ve made quite significant changes in the community game. You’ve heard some of those today, the new investment model.
“We’ve got a long way to go in terms of league structures and some of the ways we compensate the community clubs to make sure the leagues really work.
“On the professional side, we’ve brought in Dave Reddin and Dave’s been a breath of fresh air since he joined us.
“It’s a really hard role. Undoubtedly we need to make some significant changes there. It’s been clear, I think, for a while now. It took us nine months to renegotiate PRA 2025 and then two clubs didn’t want to participate in it. It was going to take a lot longer.
“We had to do something different.”
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