Cardiff: Wales great Gareth Edwards said the players who featured in last weekend's 21-9 defeat by Scotland are still the right men to get the team's stuttering Six Nations campaign back on track. 

 Defeat meant Wales had lost their first two games of this season's Championship after a 19-9 loss at home to Ireland.

It was also their ninth consecutive failure to beat a nation ranked in the world's top 10 since 2005 Grand Slam winning coach Mike Ruddock's shock resignation a year ago after a victory over Scotland.

Inevitably questions have been raised about the selection policy and tactics of current Wales coach Gareth Jenkins.

But legendary scrum-half Edwards was clear where the fault lay as Wales contemplated the daunting prospect of a match away to table-topping reigning champions France in Paris when the Six Nations resumes on February 24.

"You got us into this mess - you get us out of it. That should be Gareth Jenkins's message to his players ahead of the next game against France," Edwards wrote Monday in his column for Wales's Western Mail newspaper.

"I don't advocate major changes to his starting XV. The players have to accept Saturday was a bad day at the office and produce the sort of vastly-improved display in Paris that we know they are capable of," added Edwards after a second successive match where Wales didn't score a try.

"In a similar way, if you like, to the Scots and the way they bounced back against us from their own England horror show," explained Edwards in a reference to Scotland's 42-20 first round defeat at Twickenham.

"The pleasing thing for me, having spoken to some of the Welsh players after the game and listening to what Gareth Jenkins had to say, is that the Welsh camp are offering no excuses.

"They know how badly they performed and, equally, they know they need to step up several gears for the French game.

A repeat of this sort of display in Paris and I dread to think of how bad the scoreline could be."

Some observers have focused on Jenkins's continuing omission of 2005 star centre Gavin Henson but Edwards, one of the stars of the successful Wales teams of the 1970s, said a change in personnel was not the answer.

"Jenkins should stick with these players for the next one because they are the ones who need to right the wrongs," insisted Edwards, a key member of the British and Irish Lions sides that won Test series against New Zealand in 1971 and South Africa three years later."

However, Jenkins did not escape criticism completely. "Good Welsh players haven't become poor ones overnight, although perhaps there is a case for Jenkins to utilise his replacements more against the French than he did at Murrayfield," Edwards wrote, before the man many regard as the greatest No 9 in rugby union history focused on his old position.

"Why, for example, wasn't Mike Phillips sent on for Dwayne Peel against the Scots when his physical presence might have given Wales the new dimension they so desperately needed?

"There is so much work that needs to be done it is difficult to know where to start... Going back to basics should be the motto, I suggest, just like it was for the Scots on Saturday," he said.