What now? How Wales can handle the future without Bale
The day was always going to come when Gareth Bale decided to hang up his boots, and at the age of 33 he has now decided that he is going to leave behind both club and international football for good. As sites on wishcasinos.com immediately rated down the national team’s chances of reaching Euro 2024, Welsh football fans have been left wondering what the future will look like without a player who has been arguably the best ever to come out of Wales. The truth is that in the near term, it’s not nearly as bright - but if it was going to happen eventually, it might as well be after the team’s first World Cup in 64 years.
There will be some question over how the team goes about replacing Bale, and the awkward truth is that it may not be possible, given the free, all-encompassing role he played in the national team’s attack. There is no escaping the fact that after half a century of not appearing in major tournaments, Wales got to three in six with Bale at the centre of everything. For fans of Y Dreigiau, there is sure to be some concern that the relative feast of recent years is now to be followed with famine. Is that a reasonable concern? Let’s deal with the key questions…
There is no replacement for Bale
When a club sees a player leave, they can turn to the transfer market and seek out the best possible replacement (budget permitting, of course). When a player departs the international scene, the available player pool simply shrinks by one. And when it’s a player of Bale’s impact, it’s all the more pressing a departure. Bale’s function as a Wales player was to take set pieces, roam the attacking third of the pitch, make and score goals. Any team would miss a player of that quality were they to suddenly leave. Robert Page’s first task is not to find another player who can do what Bale did. There isn’t one. The key is to find a way of playing that minimises the loss.
Don’t bank on Aaron Ramsey sticking around
Some people have unkindly referred to recent Wales teams as “Bale and ten others”. Others have said it’s more like “Bale, Ramsey and nine others”, and with the departure of the talismanic captain, Ramsey does now have the chance to be the man at the heart of the national team. However, Ramsey is 32 and has been injured a lot during his career. It would be folly to build anything around him. Any new formation that is devised to account for Bale’s absence will need at least one midfielder who performs a box-to-box role. If Ramsey decides to keep going at international level, he’s welcome to play in that role; he just can’t become the main man in the way Bale was, because he’s on borrowed time as a top-level player.
The Euro 2024 qualifying group is not the worst we could have
With Bale in the team, Wales could (and did) beat some of the best sides in Europe, and were competitive against others. Without him, there’s no doubt the overall squad drops a level. That will make it hard to compete with Croatia for top spot in Group D. However, two teams qualify automatically, and the other opponents are Turkey, Armenia and Latvia. The latter two have never been great, and Turkey are a shadow of the sides of the early 2000s. Given the fact that Turkey and Armenia have … let’s call it a complicated rivalry, even without Bale there is a chance for Wales to emerge as the best of the rest. But they need to get over his departure now if that’s to be the case.
[ Main photo embedded from FAW Cymru ]