The fear of the Wales-Ireland fixture becoming a pushover game is a mournful moment for media on both sides of the water.
Through the 2010s, it was the most vibrant and spiteful rivalry in the Six Nations. At its zenith, online sports desks would spend the week of the game surveilling the press on the other side of the water for any hint of slight.
It peaked back in 2015 when Neil Francis said Warren Gatland's intellectual capacities were on a par with a tub of Flora. Back then at least, Welsh fans were inclined to disagree with this assessment.
The Principality rose in fury. Condemnations poured forth from Wales Online. Reminders came thick and fast that Adam Jones had amassed more Grand Slams than Ireland (thankfully, we have since surpassed him in the all-time standings). Tony Copsey was prodded into recommending that Franno get "another slap". By the end of the week, we expected to hear denunciations in the Welsh Assembly and calls to boycott Kerrygold.
But can you prolong this air of needle when the rivalry is in danger of becoming so lop-sided?
Our friends at Off the Ball on Newstalk gamely sought to keep this relatively modern tradition alive by wondering aloud whether Ireland could beat Wales with 13 or indeed 12 men.
Needless to say, the Welsh retorts to this provocative train of thought were all a variation on the theme of 'quarter-finals'
The question as to how Ireland might cope with a numerical disadvantage was worth posing, given that their only loss to Wales this decade occurred after Peter O'Mahony had been sent off in the first 15 minutes. (Wales' improbable 2021 Six Nations victory - which rivals 1994 in the WTF stakes - owed much to the fact that their opponents kept getting men sent off).
Needless to say, the (many) Welsh retorts to this provocative train of thought were almost all a variation on the theme of 'quarter-finals'.
Irish rugby fans, meanwhile, extended themselves to their full ambassadorial height in the replies and insisted that 'these comments do not represent the views of the Irish rugby fraternity, we have nothing but respect for our Welsh rugby brethren who are merely in the midst of a cyclical downturn, etc, etc.'
Indeed many saw fit to invoke our own lamentable QF record while criticising the video, as if to pre-empt the taunts on that front, which duly arrived in any case.
Donncha O'Callaghan issued a statesmanlike denunciation of the segment on his podcast with Tommy Bowe, partly, one suspects, to negate its potential as dressing room wall material. Donncha is from that generation where it behoved one to be intensely wary of the Welsh on their home soil.
OTB have been offering hostages to fortune for a while. It seems plausible that the 'Sam Cane can't ruck' business cost Ireland at least a World Cup final appearance, if not the whole shebang.
Lookit, there's no one with clean hands here. Last year, this writer compared watching England to being akin to looking at a man unrolling a length of carpet with his toe for 80 minutes. Two days later, and without warning, England scrum half Alex Mitchell morphed into Antoine Dupont for the afternoon and the rest is history.
Gerry Thornley upbraided his erstwhile radio colleagues for their sneering tone in the pages of the Irish Times.
These ostentatiously diplomatic interventions did little to forestall the accusations of arrogance coming from across the water, which is now becoming a settled narrative.
In the Daily Telegraph, James Corrigan wrote that Irish rugby's arrogance was becoming "hard to ignore", largely building his article around the Off the Ball snippet, alongside a few anecdotal accounts of Irish rugby fans/ journalists casually giving it the big one in conversation with their Welsh and/ or Scottish counterparts down the years.
The apologetic nature of the Irish response possibly highlighted the extent to which the relationship had changed.
Wales are in such rag order these days that the kind of jeering that was standard back in the 2010s is now evidently regarded as unacceptable punching down.
Like taking a gratuitous swipe at Italy back in the day or the Leitrim footballers.
In the history of the Wales-Ireland rivalry, this is newish terrain. The disparity between the teams has surely never been as stark as it is now. Perhaps it was in the second half of the 1970s when Wales were still hoovering up championships and Grand Slams while Ireland were scraping one win in a good year. Or maybe in the early 2000s, after the tide finally turned in Irish rugby as Wales were reaching the sour and torrid end of the Graham Henry era.
Aside from that, the fortunes of the two nations have had a habit of rising and falling in tandem. Back in the 90s, the fixture usually decided the destination of the wooden spoon; by the 2010s, it was often dictates where the title went.
The Welsh rugby team in the first half of the 90s resembled the BDO darts championship, with all the big names from the late 80s having absconded to the PDC, aka, rugby league.
A generation of Irish rugby players have Wales' struggles to thank for the fact that they managed to win any Five Nations game at all.
For Ireland, the arrival of professionalism was supposed to signal the death knell for a rugby culture that was never in the rudest of health to begin with.
How did we get from there to the present day, with a sizable portion of the sporting community bored from 'too much winning' (quarter-finals, notwithstanding)?
Proof of that came with last year's Six Nations championship victory, which was celebrated with all the gusto of a Dublin Leinster title win.
Andy Farrell spent the aftermath of the nervy win over Scotland gently chiding interviewers for their lack of enthusiasm and playing the hype-man to the latest trophy success, like a father trying to get his subdued child to start enjoying his own birthday party.
At the same time, Wales were reeling from only their fourth Five/Six Nations whitewash in their rugby history (the previous ones being 1990, 1995, 2003 for those interested).
Their golden generation - which emerged in an era when the Welsh academy structure was a match for their rivals - has departed for the podcasting circuit. They are now left with the overly raw products of their comparatively impoverished regional game of the 2010s.
Gatland - the new poster child for the 'you should never go back' maxim - went back into the mists of time in his first post-sacking interview this week, blaming Margaret Thatcher's response to the 1980s teachers strike for the decline of schools rugby in Wales.
Wales becoming the sick man of northern hemisphere rugby is a disaster for the competition. As the anti-rugby crowd are fond of pointing out, numbers are tight enough as it is.
What to do? Perhaps the Leinster Schools Cup coaching mafia could be dispatched to the Valleys on a humanitarian mission?
Jonathan Davies, who led the charge in the exodus to league in the late 80s, is tipping they'll be in the doldrums for three World Cup cycles.
Any grounds for Welsh hope under their hastily installed interim coaching ticket? Back in '03, when they were en route to their third whitewash, they almost derailed a Grand Slam chasing Ireland - Clive Woodward's England put paid to that dream in the end - in the penultimate weekend, with a Ronan O'Gara drop goal required to spare Irish blushes at the death.
It would be a seismic shock if Matt Sherratt's boys were even to get that close this afternoon. But who knows? Maybe a few Irish red cards to make it interesting.
