Ladies and gentle readers last night for the first time in my lifetime the Wales football team has qualified for a tournament. Over the years we've come close a few times and other times never been in the chase. Only in the last qualifying campaign we finished second bottom of our qualifying group only ahead of Macedonia. In fact over the last decade its been campaign after campaign of building and we now have a team made up of Wayne Hennessey, Chris Gunter, Ashley Williams, Ben Davies, Jazz Richards, Joe Allen, Joe Ledley, Aaron Ramsey and Gareth Bales AND WE FINALLY DID IT!
Last time we even came close was a decade ago when the likes of Captain Fantastic Gary Speed, John Hartson, Simon Davies, Craig Bellamy, Simon Davies and Robbie Savage came second to Italy and we lost a playoff to Russia by a goal. A crazy campaign where we beat Italy with Simon Davies and Hartson coming third and fourth in the goal scoring table to Inzaghi and Del Piero. Sadly we faded after the first four games and it didn't happen.
Before that it was another decade before we came close with the legendary Terry Yoraths team of Ian Rush, Mark Hughes, Dean Saunders, Neville Southhall and Ryan Giggs fell at the final hurdle against Romania. Sadly no matter how many times I rewatched Paul Bodins penalty over the years it refuses to go in.
Recently there have been glimpses of what could be and reasons to keep the faith, be it Wales 2-1 win over Montenergro or a hard fought 1-0 loss to Germany. Finally we've put a string of results together and reached the promise land of Euro 2016 in France. Meaning for the first time this blogger wont be pulling names out of a hat to decide who to support.
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