Wales and the immediate aftermath of a tournament elimination
It's always hard to get knocked out of a major international tournament, but losing on penalties at home in a play-off final is one of the most crushing of all.
Until Tuesday night, it remained a singular statistic that of the four ‘home countries’, England were the only one that had lost a penalty shootout. This is no longer the case, after the life was sucked out of The Cardiff City Stadium as Wojciech Szczesny dived to his right to save Daniel James’ penalty kick and knock Wales out of Euro 2024 by the narrowest of margins.
There are rational and irrational responses to losing a penalty shootout. Rationally, these are all professional players, but we all know that somebody, perhaps more than one person, will slip up in the end. And while there is merit to the beard-stroking observation that ‘actually, penalty shootouts aren’t a ‘lottery’ at all’, if you draw the lens further back we all know well that they are, really.
The best players on the pitch have missed in shootouts, and the worst have scored. Goalkeepers have come millimetres from saving shots that have knocked their teams out of tournaments. The combination of the base level of ability of those taking part and the tiny margins that separate joy from despair means that, from any reasonable sort of distance, they more or less are one, or are at least indistinguishable to one another from the naked eye.
The rational mind might consider that if you have home advantage for such an important one-off match and the fans can turn the place into a bearpit, the players have little choice but to step up and deliver. It might be considered that Poland have some outstanding and highly experienced players, and that this was always a substantially more difficult tie than it might have looked at first glance.
But the football stadium on an evening of such importance, still less after 120 minutes has failed to separate the teams, is not a place for the rational mind. After the final whistle blew at the end of extra-time, the crowd belted out Land of my Fathers. The benefit of hindsight may offer the observation of its similarity to the band playing God Save the King as the Titanic sank, but this was something else, a cry of come-what-may Cambrian defiance, rather than one final act of defiance from an already defeated orchestra.
Both the irrational and rational minds may cast their eyes back to the qualifiers, to the four dropped points from their final two matches, or to their surprising 4-2 home defeat in their second home match against Armenia. There were undoubtedly moments of missed opportunity, and there will be demands for change, particularly following their underwhelming performance at last year’s World Cup finals.
But points of maximum emotion probably aren’t the best time to be making such fundamental decisions. Dust needs to be allowed to settle. The Nations League starts in June, and it’s up to the FAW to decide how much they have invested in this competition and whether they want to make that change. Page does have questions to answer. It is absolutely not over-analysing to question the decision to substitute Brennan Johnson over Kieffer Moore with twenty minutes to play, when Johnson had been looking the more dangerous of the two and has been in excellent form for Spurs recently.
David Brooks came on for Connor Roberts with six minutes to play, but was withdrawn himself during extra-time. Brooks had, after all, hadn’t trained since the Finland match five days earlier. Page described Brooks as a “gamble.” It was one that significantly backfired. Was this the only option that the head coach had with six minutes to play and with the stakes so high? The Roberts substitution also required Daniel James to move to wing-back, further restricting the likelihood of them scoring. By the final five minutes of extra-time, Poland were well on top and Wales were holding on a little.
It marks the end of a miserable spring for Welsh sport, with the national rugby union team having finished at the bottom of the Six Nations Trophy group for the first time in more than twenty years less than two weeks earlier. But what is to be done, here?
The first thing to do might be to remember a little perspective. Wales is a country of 3.1m people, which puts it between Bosnia & Herzegovina and Armenia in the world’s national population rankings. The disappointment of losing at international sport always has to be tempered by the understanding that not all countries are created equal, even though we all know that these numbers do not have to equate to success on the pitch.
The pain of supporting Wales had always been that lengthy and growing gap between even getting to the summer jamboree in the first place. Following the 1958 World Cup, it took them a further half decade to reach another one again. But it’s worth remembering what the last decade has brought. Prior to Tuesday’s disappointment, they had qualified for three of their last four tournaments, and had got through the group stages in two of those. From 58 years of nothing to three major tournaments in less than a decade can hardly be called a lack of progress.
But none of that matters right now. Just as The Cardiff City Stadium fell so suddenly into gloom on Tuesday evening, so it may take a little time for Wales to recalibrate themselves, and the Nations League offer that ahead of qualification for the 2026 World Cup. With 48 places on offer in the USA, this will be a tournament that Wales will be expecting to reach. Just to say that offers some perspective on how far they’ve come this last decade. This doesn’t have to hurt like Paul Bodin’s penalty kick did against Romania did at Cardiff Arms Park in 1993. This has been a mixed qualification round for Wales, but it hasn’t been a disastrous one, even if it may feel that way today.