One really tough game and another awkward one, both away from home in sultry conditions, to end a long hard season always looked a dubious piece of fixture planning by whoever was in charge of negotiations arranging the itinerary for Wales’ qualifying group for Euro 2020 and tonight they duly followed up the 2-1 loss in Crotia on Saturday by coming off second best to Hungary in Budapest thanks to a goal by the home team inside the last ten minutes.
As second seeds in their group, you would have thought the Welsh contingent would have been in a strong position to arrange a more sympathetic pair of fixtures to end the 18/19 season with. However, with just three points so far compared to Hungary’s nine and Croatia and Slovakia’s six, Wales are now faced with a mountain to climb and, frankly, there has not been much shown under Ryan Giggs’ management so far to offer encouragement that they can recover to secure a top two finish.
The knives are out for Giggs tonight on social media and another man who would have to be mentioned as a contender in any debate about Wales’ greatest ever player is, for the first time in his sparkling career for his country, finding himself facing the wrath of disgruntled Welsh supporters.
Starting with Giggs, I think anyone reading my pieces on the games we’ve played under his management will see me trying to put over the genuine excitement I have felt as a fan when his team has played well and showed what we could potentially be seeing almost as a matter of course in a few years time. However, I think it’s thirteen matches now we’ve played under Giggs’ management and those occasions have been too few and far between to make me overly confident that the wealth of young talent we have coming through will coalesce to become a side that will be capable of putting good opponents to the sword by consistently coming up with the sort of attacking ability shown in flashes against the Republic of Ireland and Slovakia.
There is a frailty to this side that wasn’t there for most of Chris Coleman’s time in charge. This showed when James Lawrence (who has not had a good pair of games following an encouraging start to his international career) was held off too easily in the build up to the goal and Welsh players were losing too many balls in their own half that they should have been favourites for in the first half in particular.
Maybe I’m not being fair to Ryan Giggs here because he was a diligent and effective defensive player to go with all of his attacking talents, so I do feel he is aware of how important the “ugly” side of the game is, but I find it hard to avoid a feeling that there is an element of thinking which says “we’ll leave Joe Allen to get on with all that and then the rest of our midfield/attackers can start playing” in his selection and tactical decision making.
Wales have a surfeit of young, quick and talented footballers in attacking positions at the moment and, with the man who is Wales highest ever scorer and was once the world’s most expensive player to put at the heart of it, it’s tempting to look at all of those exciting options and think what can possibly go wrong – but, with just two goals and a couple of defeats in three games, something, plainly, is going wrong.
For what it’s worth, my explanation as to why we are nowhere near the sum of our attacking parts yet is that, for all the individual talent we have, they are currently just that – talented individuals who lack the quality number ten type player to knit it all together. I’d like to think that David Brooks, (or maybe Ben Woodburn or Harry Wilson), could become that player in time, but, for now, their abilities shine through intermittently and, anyway, I believe that the effects of Brooks’ injury problems over the latter weeks of the domestic season were evident in Croatia and Hungary.
The likes of Dan James, Tom Lawrence, Rabbi Matondo and, to an extent, Harry Wilson are instinctive players who will need to receive the right service as opposed to being service providers themselves and, as yet, I don’t see much evidence of Ryan Giggs coming up with a solution to the conundrum of how we get our four forward talents to think and act more in unison.
To be fair to Giggs, he has not been able to call on the player we have most suited to knitting together all of that rich attacking potential in this qualifying campaign yet.
While it’s been too long since we’ve seen Aaron Ramsey at his best in a Wales shirt, his form over the second half of the season with Arsenal when fit suggested that he could have made a huge difference if he been able to play over the past four days. It’s also worth noting that while Ramsey is not the best of defenders, as a central midfielder he has the experience of having put in defensive shifts throughout his career whereas, up to now, the impression I get is that Joe Allen and whoever is playing alongside him are being left to do too much of the work required when we don’t have the ball.
Ideally, Gareth Bale would be able to be that overseer in attacking areas, but, increasingly, it’s looking like the combination of acceleration, pace, strength and dynamism that fused with his physique and his almost unique ability to be as good on the ball at maximum speed as he was when moving “normally” has deserted him – possibly for ever. The thing with Bale in his pomp was that he was a purely instinctive footballer, as opposed to a thinking one, and, as such, the likelihood always was that once Anno Domini started to take an effect, his demise might be a quick one. I don’t mean this as a criticism, but it was always hard to see Bale adapting his game to compensate for the physical changes he was experiencing in the manner that someone like, say, Christiano Ronaldo has.
It summed up where Bale’s career is at the moment that his best work tonight was done early on in the game as a central defender dealing very capably with a series of testing dead ball deliveries by Hungary’s best player, Balázs Dzsudzsák. In the parts of the pitch where he should be most effective, Bale, again, was a peripheral figure and whereas the sort of miss that he came up with around the hour mark would have been met with astonished gasps by Welsh supporters once, now it didn’t come as a complete shock to see him make such a mess of things after being set up by Tom Lawrence.
I still say that Bale is not a candidate for the knacker’s yard quite yet. Playing amateur psychologist, I must say that he strikes me as a personality who would not cope well with the sort of dressing room ostracisation and fan criticism that he, seemingly, has experienced at Real Madrid in recent months – let’s face it, he’s like most of us in that respect. To use Ronaldo as an example again, his response in such circumstances would have been “I’ll show them”, whereas Bale has always struck me as someone more likely to shrink into himself.
Hopefully, a summer move to a club where he is appreciated more by team mate and supporter alike will lead to the return of something like the Bale of old. The days when world class defenders found him simply unplayable (“taxi for Maicon” anyone?) may have gone, but he could still be instrumental in turning around his country’s spluttering Euro 2020 qualifying campaign while doing his under fire manager a huge favour in the process.
