Cardiff City mauve and yellow army.

You can talk about bad luck in being reduced to ten men and losing to goals conceded in the ninety eighth and one hundred and first minutes, but, sadly, that’s being delusional. Although there’s still an opportunity for this Welsh team to make me look an idiot when we face the old enemy England on Tuesday, the 2-0 defeat by Iran this morning had the feel of an era ending.

Back in 2006, Gareth Bale made his international debut as the first member of a golden generation of Welsh players to break through at senior level and today he became our most capped player, but, on this evidence, you have to wonder how much further he can extend that record.

Wayne Hennessey, Joe Allen and Aaron Ramsey are the other survivors of the golden generation who made it to a World Cup, but today was a chastening experience for the three of them with our goalkeeper becoming the first player in the tournament to be shown a red card, Allen being at fault with both goals and Ramsey, as on Monday, being one of our weakest performers.

I want to focus on Allen first. The desperation to, first, get him into the squad and, second, on to the pitch despite him not having played since sustaining a hamstring injury in mid September tells you so much. For all of the column inches taken up by Bale and Ramsey, I think there’s a strong argument for saying that Allen has been the most important member of the Welsh side in many respects.

Like all of the outfield surviving members of the golden generation, he is not the player he once was, but, whereas Bale and Ramsey come up with moments of quality which roll back the years, a match fit Joe Allen can still make the team play better because he is the fulcrum which enables others to prosper.

While not every team in this tournament has a nucleus of quality central defensive midfielders (CDMs) to fall back on, most of the European teams here do. Contrast that to Wales, who have two candidates for that position at League One clubs and another one at the bottom of the Scottish Premier League in their squad – Joe Ledley is hardly the first name you think of in terms of a golden generation, but we could really do with a player like him now..

Allen has become so proficient at the role of an international CDM that as recently as June, he was able to play in the position by himself  in the so important Play Off game with Ukraine. The visitors were good enough to make it a very tough occasion for any opposing CDM that day and Allen had a testing time of it during which he got booked early on and really should have had a penalty given against him. However, the Swansea man played a full part in getting us through the game and to our first World Cup in sixty-four years.

I’m reminded of something Brian Flynn said in BBC Wales’ excellent Together Stronger series which I would recommend to anyone who hasn’t watched it yet. Flynn spoke of a conversation he’d had with John Toshack in which Wales’ former manager talked about the young players in the squad needing to get to the forty cap mark before they would be fully at home at international level.

I’d say Allen is a case in point of what Toshack meant – he knows his position off by heart now and, while the legs won’t carry him as far as they once did, he can still make up for it through anticipation skills acquired via the seventy plus caps he has over a thirteen year international career.

Today was a step too far for Allen though. Brought on into what was ,apparently, the hottest day so far in the tournament (the game was played at the worst possible time of day for Wales as well) to play his first competitive game of any sort in a couple of months, Allen cleared the ball straight to Rouzbeh Chesmi who fired in from twenty yards to break the deadlock and then, three minutes later he lost the ball to allow an Iranian break which ended with Ramin Rezaiean slotting in an irrelevant, in terms of this game at least, second goal.

Wales had continued with a back three and a single shielding midfielder when one of the lessons of the first half of the American game was surely that something different to what they had started the game with was required. When you consider that we have a plethora of wingers, number ten and second striker types who won’t contribute a huge amount defensively, it seems to me that we need two shielding in front of the defence and, maybe, a flat back four.

Ethan Ampadu is pretty close to that forty cap mark now and did a good job in very testing circumstances in the lone CDM role on Monday, but he struggled today and could have done with a match fit Allen alongside him. The problem is that, if you’re talking about this level of competition, the cupboard is pretty bare even if Ampadu develops into a reliable performer in the position, because the day cannot be too far away now when we will have to cope without Joe Allen.

As for the manager, he had his doubters after the Euros. For myself, I don’t think he did too badly there, but, this time around, he’s had a poor tournament so far.

Granted, I don’t envy Rob Page his job in a competition like this with a squad which has been over reliant on a group of fading stars for too long, but he got it wrong by leaving Keiffer Moore out against the USA and, judging by the selection today, he seems to have decided the poor first half on Monday was just one of those things when there had been signs for some time that it had been coming.

Having got out of jail with the half time introduction of Moore first time around, Page had nothing to offer here to change the flow of a game both sides needed to win. Without a base in the middle of the park to build from, Wales were completely unable to impose themselves on proceedings despite “winning” the possession battle 62/38 and the longer the game went on, the more marked the Iranian superiority became.

Having been denied a goal by a VAR call which Page called marginal, Iran shaded the first half, but I’m afraid the second half turned into a repeat of the first one on Monday. Iran hit both posts in the opening minutes of the second period, but they must have known that, if they could find a goal for themselves, their opponents had little to threaten an equaliser with.

Any lingering hopes that Wales could sneak a highly unlikely win ended on eighty six minutes when they were caught out by a long ball over the top which saw Hennessey come rushing out of his goal to clatter Medhi Taremi. It would be a straight red no doubt in the UK, but it looked like the goalkeeper would get away with a yellow until VAR persuaded the ref to reconsider and so Hennessey became the third Welsh player to be dismissed in their last four matches in major tournaments – a record which only makes the very tough task of competing in Euros’ and World Cups even harder..

Even in the very unlikely event of Wales turning things around and qualifying on Tuesday, this feels very much like a time of change in Welsh football. It seems certain that those moments I talked about from Bale and Ramsey will get fewer and fewer in the coming months and years and so questions will need to be asked about the current policy of if they’re “fit”, they play with those two great servants of Welsh football.

Wales seem to have a conveyer belt of the aforesaid wingers/number tens/second strikers coming through, but I could see a very quick promotion to the senior squad for a stand out sixteen/seventeen year old central midfielder if such a player exists – as it is, a quick call up for Birmingham’s Jordan James appears both highly likely and needed.

Robert Page talked about the supporters who’ve made the trip to Qatar being owed a performance by the team and he’s right, but it’s hard to see where it comes from. For now, the height of my ambitions will be a hope of an exit from the competition with some respectability and that one or both of City’s representatives see some game time.

Coming back to domestic football, for years Swansea City were the dominant force in Welsh women’s club football, but that’s become more of a big three in the past year with an improvement by City and Cardiff Met. Having beaten the jacks already this season, the unbeaten City side staked a real claim for superiority by beating Met 5-0 last night with the goals coming from Siobhan Walsh, Danielle Broadhurst, Rihanna Oakley, Phoebe Poole and Danielle Green.

A few hours after Wales’ loss, City’s under 21s faced Reading in the Premier League Cup at Leckwith and edged a very physical encounter 1-0 to continue their improved form (think it’s seven wins out of nine now).

Reading lost their captain to a second yellow card around the hour mark. Up to then, I thought the visitors had been slightly the better side. However, the dismissal helped turn things in City’s favour and the visitors should really have been down to nine following a punch on Caleb Hughes.

Joel Colwill played a big part in the goal on seventy-six minutes when his shot from distance was turned aside for a corner by the keeper. Hughes’ flag kick looked to have crossed the line, but play was waved on and just when Reading thought they’d escaped, Colwill shot again, this time from around thirty yards, and the goalkeeper’s save was only into the path of sub Morgan Wigley who calmly netted from eight yards.