The players are relaxed and we are ready to go." We have a game-plan we have done a lot of analysis on the first game. "We've got identity, we work extremely hard for each other and we've got quality on the pitch that can hurt teams. "We've got a way of playing that has got us success and we won't comeĪway from that," Page said. Page said his team are ready to tackle the tournament in Qatar and scoffed at the USA captain Tyler Adams's suggestion that they are a "very physical" side. Wales face USA in their Group B opener on Monday at the Ahmad bin Ali Stadium and the captain Gareth Bale said he knows the buzz of the World Cup has gripped the nation and is determined to embrace a "massive piece of history in our country" at his first finals. Rob Page has urged his Wales players to "show the world how good they are" as they prepare to compete on the world stage for the first time in “They’ll just say ‘it’s in League Two’ so I’ll get there first and say it myself.” “I couldn’t do that,” he says, typically modestly. Williams, who would have been lining up for a Swindon Town side that lost at home against Crewe in the fourth tier on Saturday had he not been here, is actually Wales’s leading goalscorer at club level this season, not that he has been ribbing Bale about that fact. Rob Page, the Wales manager, insists the team are not as reliant on Bale as they once were and that is a sentiment shared by the midfielder Jonny Williams, who made his international debut in 2013 when he replaced Bale as a substitute. To be the ones to achieve it has been incredible and something we have all dreamed of since we were young – it is crazy now that the tournament is upon us and we are just going to try to enjoy it.” Every time there has been a failure it has been ‘we want to get over the line eventually’ and the longer time went on it became an even bigger task, I guess. Not only for us as players but the whole nation. The magnitude of wearing the dragon on his chest – as well as at least two armbands, only one of which is endorsed by Fifa – at a finals is not lost on Bale. The same applies to Ian Rush, whose goalscoring record Bale broke four years ago, Ryan Giggs, Gary Speed, Mark Hughes and John Toshack, who handed a 16‑year‑old Bale, then a fizzy left‑back on the books of Southampton, his senior debut in 2006.Ī giant poster of Gareth Bale hangs from a skyscraper in Doha. When the goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey, Bale’s best friend in the squad and, like him, a fellow Wales centurion, recently told of his pride at representing his country at a World Cup, he almost sounded a touch embarrassed at doing so knowing his idol, Neville Southall, never made it this far. “For the kids now to be able to have Wales, being able to watch them and have the poster up on the wall to mark out each game will be incredible.”īale, not for the first time, will go where others have failed. “Watching Brazil and Argentina and those big teams play and now to be in that tournament is quite a cool feeling to have, especially as growing up there was not a Wales side ,” he says. Bale and his teammates are determined to enjoy however long this latest ride lasts.Īfter all, it has not always been this way. For Wales to be able to lean on their captain, a player who has a handy habit of calmly rising to the occasion, is something of a priceless commodity at their first World Cup finals for 64 years. Recent evidence has already suggested as much: a fortnight ago he scored an 128th-minute leaping header to help Los Angeles FC lift the MLS Cup. Towards one end of the Corniche, Doha’s opulent waterfront, an industrial-sized image of Bale, plastered on to the facade of a sparkling skyscraper, glistens above the city.īale remains a big deal, a commercial entity in his own right, but the fire in him to prove he can still do the business on the pitch burns brightly. But a moment that perhaps seemed as though it would elude a glittering, superstar career stacked with honours and individual accolades is finally here. “I just remember having this pencil case with the logo on it,” he says. Gareth Bale’s first World Cup memories are a little hazy – probably France 98, he says – not helped by the sustained absence of his country and a team to truly get behind. H e is the boy from Whitchurch, north Cardiff, about to lead Wales on the world stage.
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