History may have been made with Ryan Jones’s side’s dramatic second half fightback to claim a first win in 20 years at the home of English rugby, but Gatland is in no mood to be carried away on a tide of emotion and hysteria.
“We have given ourselves a good start, but in terms of where we want to get to there is a hell of a lot to do,” said Gatland.
“As a team we have a huge amount of work to do. We have to face it, the first-half performance was poor, so we have to keep our feet on the ground. In two years time this team could be a good side – it isn’t going to happen in two weeks. Physically we aren’t good enough and we aren’t good enough as a team at the moment.
“We have the raw material because we have some size and skill in this squad, but it will take time. But seeing the way the players took on board what we said at half-time was very encouraging.”
At that stage Gatland admitted he thought his side could be staring at a 20 or 30 point hiding. Even after the game he was wondering how his team had turned a 19-6 deficit into a 26-19 victory.
Those second half tries from Lee Byrne and Mike Phillips turned the course of the game and changed the expressions on the faces of Gatland and Edwards. And when the final whistle went they were both spotted dancing a victory jig.
“Shaun and I were sitting on the bus coming into Twickenham slapping our hands together and saying ‘here we go again’. We’d enjoyed so many good moments together at Twickenham before,” said Gatland, who won the Heineken Cup and Guinness Premiership with London Wasps at the ground.
“Five minutes from the end I turned to Shaun and we had a little bit of a joke together. I asked him if we win would we show some emotion and jump up and down. We certainly did at the final whistle.
“When you get a result like that you have to be pretty happy with it. The team showed a lot of guts, determination and maturity in that second half.”
But while the Welsh fans continued to celebrate ending 20 years of heartache, as well as a second successive championship win over England, Gatland refused to get carried away.
“Winning at Twickenham doesn’t change the pressure on us. Even if we had lost there people would still have expected us to win at home against Scotland next weekend,” said Gatland.
“This win will help us to set out our stall. We want to get better as a team and we have set long term goals and standards. But you can’t take away from the players the fact they have won away at Twickenham. We can at least live off that for the next few days.
“Before the championship started we spoke as a coaching group about assessing ourselves after the first three games. We wanted to get a good performance at Twickenham to give us a boost coming into the two vitally important home games against Scotland and Italy.
“We felt that after the Italian match we would know where we were. We targeted finishing second or third in the championship, which we felt would be a huge achievement in our first campaign, and nothing has changed there.”
