I spent most of the first half of this decade looking forward to international breaks because watching Wales play offered a relief from what was often dross being served up Cardiff City every week – watching Wales was usually a pleasure in a way watching City wasn’t.
Time have changed though. The results may not quite be there, but watching City play these days is an enjoyable experience, whereas Wales are down to a mediocre, by the standards of the last thirteen of fourteen years, thirty eighth in the world rankings and it looks more likely that they’ll drop further before any move in the right direction commences.
After the defeat against Romania in June to bring the 2025/26 international season to an end, I contrasted Craig Bellamy’s second season in charge with his first and concluded that it wasn’t just results that had declined, it was also performances and standards.
After a summer where it looked like Bellamy was prepared to head off to Burnley despite all his talk about how much managing his country meant to him (to be fair, Bellamy said this week that he turned Burnley down, rather than, as was reported at the time, negotiations between the two parties stalled), it was hard to come into this international break with much enthusiasm. The penalty shoot out defeat at the Semi Final stage of the Play Offs against a pretty ordinary Bosnia side was made all the harder to take by a widespread feeling that Bellamy had got his selection and substitutions wrong.
Getting back to the top grouping in the Nations League is probably Craig Bellamy’s biggest achievement as Wales boss, but with fixtures against Portugal, Norway and Denmark twice during this break, it’s hard to see where a belief restoring victory is going to come from before club fixtures start taking priority again.
Last time Wales were in with Europe’s big boys in this competition, they were pretty competitive, but ended up with just a single point from their six matches and my own view is that we can expect something similar, or worse, this time around.
However, while I wouldn’t say we were great by any means, we did go to Lisbon tonight and only lost by a single goal to the defending Champions Portugal.
It was interesting to hear Robert Earnshaw say after the game that, despite the frightening array of world stars in their ranks, modern Portuguese sides are flawed outfits because I’ve been feeling something similar for getting on for twenty years – they have trouble blending all of those great individuals into as effective a team as it should be.
It was there again to see tonight, Wales were quite lucky to get to half time just the one goal down and, if you’d have asked me then what I thought the full time score would be, I would have said three or four nil.
As it was, once Cristiano Ronaldo had a goal correctly disallowed by VAR for offside around the hour mark, the Portugese became careless and error prone for the rest of the game and Wales had two or three opportunities to equalise .
In what the television commentators said were physically taxing conditions due to the high temperature and humidity, Wales were often not as convincing in their passing as they usually are and so for two thirds and more of the proceedings, there seemed to be atmosphere akin to “oh well, at least they’re not murdering us”, whereas, with a bit more belief, composure and clarity, Wales might have got something from the game.
For a short while at the start, Wales forced their hosts back with a combination of a passing game of a standard they could not maintain and an effective and aggressive pressing of the Portugese keeper and defence.
When the hosts started to impose themselves, an impression I’d gained during the World Cup reasserted itself – hardly surprisingly, Ronaldo at 41 is not the player he once was.
Watching at home, the atmosphere around the ground seemed a little odd. It was as if a good proportion of the crowd had just come along to get a glimpse of Cristiano. So it was then, that there was a determination that Ronaldo had to score and, at times, it felt like a significant number in attendance were Ronaldo fans rather than Portugal fans.
At times, it felt like Wales were just being the biggest of all party poopers, but there was still a football match taking place and, ever so slowly, we asserted ourselves to the extent that most of those just turning up to watch Cristiano wanted the final whistle to be blown by the end.
Portugal were beginning to rouse themselves in the seven or eight minutes after Wales had pressed them back and on seventeen minutes, they hit the front with Ethan Ampadu (who was unusually poor in the first half before improving after the break) missing a tackle to allow Nuno Mendes to slip a pass to Joao Felix, who took the ball on a little before, shooting low past Danny Ward from twenty yards. I must admit I was surprised to see Ward beaten with a well struck, but clearly speculative, shot, but replays showed it was aided by a slight deflection off Ben Davies.
That deflection probably meant that Ward could not have saved it, but maybe a better one could have? Karl Darlow isn’t great with the ball at his feet, but, on tonight’s evidence he’s a big improvement on Ward – while the lack of a real aerial presence up front made Ward’s task more difficult, his long kicking invariably found an opponent and his short passing was unconvincing. That said, with Darlow absent through injury, Ward would be my choice to play tonight, but that’s just an admission really about how poor the standard of Welsh goalkeeping has become and it’s an indictment of the FAW and their goalkeeping coaches that a true international standard keeper hasn’t come through their system for round twenty years.
For about an hours playing time after that goal, it appeared as if the height of Wales’ ambitions was to keep the margin of defeat down. In the injured Harry Wilson’s absence, David Brooks was the player most likely to be, to use modern parlance, a difference maker, but, disappointingly, he had barely any influence on the game and we only started to look like we might be able to threaten the Portugese after he went off.
Brennan Johnson played the whole game and made slightly more impact than he usually does, but you’d hardly believe he was someone who has cost close to £100 million in transfer fees during his career on this evidence.
Johnson’s big moment came when Wales really carved open the Portugese defence for the only time in the game. I thought his first touch wasn’t great, but maybe I’m being harsh there. As it was, Johnson did well to lob onto the crossbar from almost on the byeline, but when the ball dropped, Lewis Koumas (who, along with Ben Davies and Jay De Silva, I had as candidates for our best player) and sub Dan James got in each others way thereby enabling Ruben Dias to scrape the ball off the line to make a clearance he should have been given no chance of making.
The small number of threatening situations Wales managed besides that tended to be ruined by a poor final ball – the worst instance occurring really late on when another sub Kieffer Moore failed to pick out an unmarked James with what was a fairly simple pass to execute.
There were encouraging signs from Wales, but it seems to me that our general tempo of play has become slower than it was two years ago when we played our first games under Craig Bellamy. To be fair, the energy sapping conditions conditions probably had something to do with that, but it’s now ten months since we thrashed North Macedonia 7-1 and we’ve not come remotely close to matching the attacking intensity and finishing quality we showed that night since.
