You can’t be a good coach if you are not a good selector, reckoned a former Australia team boss. Some might say the chap in question would have said as much, wouldn’t he, given the Wallabies’ player pool at the time included Mark Ella, David Campese, Michael Lynagh and Nick Farr-Jones – no wildly tough decisions to make there.

Still, the point is a fair one.

Successive Wales coaches made Rob Howley wait until he was 25 before awarding him his first cap, even though he had been not so much pulling up the odd tree for Cardiff and Bridgend as entire forests.

Allan Bateman wasn’t handed a Test debut until three days before his 25th birthday: what was all that about? This writer watched the great centre playing as a youngster for Maesteg in the late 1980s, marshalling the defence with the authority of a 50-cap veteran and running angles that might have confounded Pythagoras, and couldn’t understand why he was apparently invisible to the national selectors. The electric speed over 20 metres, the ability to knife through a gap, the trademark clamp tackling – didn’t Wales want their best players?

All subjective, of course. But coaches stand or fall by their choices, and the certainty is they will never please everyone – indeed, sometimes, it may be hard to find anyone who’s happy after a selection.

Fast forward to today, and the scrutiny has only intensified. Of 242 comments on the latest Wales squad on a major news website by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, it was hard to find a handful that were unreservedly positive.

Most were stinging, some simply a mile or six over the top. One person said: “I’d rather have Danny Dyer than Rio.” That would be the same Rio Dyer who beat 10 Scarlets defenders recently. Let’s be bold and say it’s not altogether sure Danny Dyer would manage the same. Still, in our great age of internet democracy, everyone’s entitled to their opinion.

Maybe we can go against the grain and start with the positives of Steve Tandy’s selection. Form has spoken in the case of Taine Basham. Or perhaps we can say form has taken a loud hailer to Tandy’s front door, pushed open the letter box and bellowed in at Wales’ head coach. How good has the Cardiff forward been of late? Very good.

Against Leinster, there were 16 Basham carries, 114m made, three line breaks, 12 defenders beaten, 11 tackles and a turnover. After three rounds of the URC, he is the only forward in the top 10 players for metres made, he has beaten more opponents than anyone else and is joint-top for gain-line carries. No Philadelphia lawyer is required to work out why he’s been recalled, then. His inclusion was an open-and-shut case.

Maybe we can style Seb Davies’ recall as a minor surprise. The back-five man hadn’t featured for four years, after all, and could have been forgiven for feeling his days as an international were done.

Dyer merits his squad return, too. If his running with the ball has been impressive in recent weeks, his chasing of kicks has also caught the eye, along with his work in the air, another key facet of modern wing play, with the Dragon brave and good technically. And while he has yet to cross the whitewash this season, he has posed a threat to every side he has faced.

Maybe we can style Seb Davies’ recall as a minor surprise. The back-five man hadn’t featured for four years, after all, and could have been forgiven for feeling his days as an international were done. But Tandy has given him another chance and with a World Cup on the horizon, Davies will be keen to take it.

Three uncapped players are named in Aneurin Owen, Che Hope and Rhys Barratt, with the first two part of an improved Dragons side. Owen, in particular, has been a standout for Filo Tiatia’s team, dependable in defence and a significant force in attack. The centre is brave and skilful enough to release the ball close to the opposition’s defensive line and makes good decisions, with his influence on those around him almost palpable.

Kieran Hardy’s absence through injury has opened up a space for Hope to fill. At 23, with only nine league starts, the youngster still has plenty to learn. Yet on the field, he flicks out passes as if he were discarding sheets in a laundrette. He also thinks quickly, is sharp around the field and developing nicely as a box-kicker.

Recent chatter has likened him to a young Mike Phillips. Do we really need to go there, comparing the 5ft 10in, 11st 13lb Hope to the freakishly big (for a scrum-half) 6ft 3in, 16st force that was Phillips as a player?

As a starting point, you wouldn’t want to be standing in an identity parade with the chap who made the comparison peering through the one-way glass. Nor is it easy to spot similarities in their play at this stage. No, the best advice for the new kid is to carve out an identity of his own.

Barratt comes in presumably as a precaution with Rhys Carre having yet to play a game this season because of injury, while Gareth Thomas missed the Ospreys’ encounter with Black Lion because of a chest problem. Tandy has the ever-reliable Nicky Smith at his disposal but will hope Carre and Thomas are able to present as fit and well.

What of the omissions that have caused so many to take to their laptops and vent their frustrations? Step forward, Macs Page, a youngster who is rapidly developing into one of the URC’s must-see acts. Those who take the trouble to go along to see him can almost be guaranteed an ethereal moment to remember that instantly dilutes the confidence of opponents. He is someone who turns mere fractions of chances into tries and not for nothing did former Ospreys coach Lyn Jones call him “one of the best players I have seen playing this season”.

Alas for fully paid-up members of the Faletau fan club, of whom there are presumably still many, his effort came too late to secure a place.

Jones suggested the experience factor or the lack of it as a possible reason why Tandy has left him out. Perhaps the Wales team boss also feels Page has room to improve in defence: the URC’s website shows he has missed 13 tackles in three league outings so far this season, leaving him with a 44% success rate when it comes to the not unimportant matter of stopping opponents.

But he is young and will surely improve in this area – and, anyway, it could be argued the pluses in his game overwhelmingly outweigh the minuses. For him, it seems, patience will just need to be the watchword. His time will come.

Elliot Dee is another whom many were happy to take up arms for, with some fine displays from the hooker going unrewarded, while an alien who had dropped into Franklin’s Gardens for an hour or two last Sunday evening would have left feeling that Taulupe Faletau was bound to be among the first names on Tandy’s squad sheet.

The great man did what it said on the tin after all, tearing through the opposition rearguard on occasions and popping up at other times with important defensive interventions, including one which denied Callum Chick a try.

Alas for fully paid-up members of the Faletau fan club, of whom there are presumably still many, his effort came too late to secure a place. The many injuries the Cardiff man has suffered in recent years meant Wales evidently needed more evidence of the 35-year-old’s durability and readiness for a month of Test rugby. But Tandy hasn’t ruled out a call at some point. Faletau just needs to stay fit, though we must concede that the word ‘just’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that particular clause.

Injury came at an inopportune time for Tommy Reffell, while Mason Grady, Keelan Giles and Tom Bowen, like Page, were crowded out amid the competition for wing spots.

Tandy accepts scrutiny goes with the job. “There’ll be people out there challenging me on selections. No-one really says who they would leave out either. It’s always the people that should be in,” he laughed.

“It’s something that comes with the territory. I cop flak wherever I go.”

The old ‘three million selectors’ line comes to mind. But Tandy’s choices are the ones that matter.

It’s over to those picked, then, to determine how much flak will be flying over the next month and a bit.