While the Wales head coach was happy to complete an unbeaten home campaign with a narrow victory over France to clinch the runners-up spot to Grand Slam Ireland he wants to warm-up for the World Cup in Japan with another trophy.
“What we will do in the autumn is different and then we will go out to try and win the Six Nations because that’s important. There’s a lot at stake,” said Gatland.
“The hard thing as international coach is that it’s not like a club side, where you can fail a little bit because you are working on things. It doesn’t cost you your season by losing two or three games because you can still stay in the competition.
“International rugby isn’t like that. That’s why we look forward to the World Cup campaigns because we get the two or three months preparation time.
“We’ve always felt in the past that what we have done our best after having time together as a squad, spending time on working hard on in-depth game plans and skill development.
“The Six Nations is a tough tournament, but we are pretty satisfied with where we are at the moment. I felt going into it that we could do reasonably well and I was relieved that we ground out a win to finish second.
“In the 10 years that I have been involved we have had three firsts, a couple of seconds and another one where we thrashed Italy when we played first in the order and it could easily have been another championship or higher finish.”
Next up for Gatland and his team are three Tests in the summer. They play South Africa in Washington before heading further south to play two games in Argentina.
“In the past we’ve always tried to take as strong a squad as we possibly can, so this is the first time we will have left a number of players behind or taken some youngsters and less experienced players, apart from when it’s been Lions years,” added Gatland.
“We’ve got to plan for what we want to do in the autumn in terms of using that as a real conditioning and skill development phase when we will probably do a little less rugby. That’s the starting point for building up to 2019.
“We will look at the summer tour and how that goes, but things are being talked about with planning and detail at the moment. In terms of tournament teams and players, we haven’t really gone into that in too much depth yet.”
