Highly anticipated as any meeting between these neighbouring nations might be, the bigger picture for Wales was always the Belgium match.<\/p>\n
As preparation for that game and future major tournaments, Bellamy chose England for this friendly because he wanted to expose his players to world-class opposition.<\/p>\n
With his team trailing 3-0 after only 20 minutes, he may have been regretting his decision.<\/p>\n
Wales were completely overwhelmed by their rampant hosts and, rather than pressing high and attacking as Bellamy demands of his players, they were woefully passive as they were penned back in their own half.<\/p>\n
The head coach had actually picked a strong team – a demonstration of how seriously he was taking the game – but friendly or otherwise, the first 45 minutes were the worst of his tenure.<\/p>\n
There was a slight improvement in the second half as Bellamy replaced several first-team players to protect them for the Belgium match, and the substitutes injected some much-needed energy and urgency into what had been a listless performance.<\/p>\n
But by that stage, with more than an hour gone, the game was well beyond Wales.<\/p>\n
That did nothing to deter the 7,000 or so Wales fans at Wembley, who waved their shirts above their heads and created a joyous atmosphere in spite of what they were witnessing on the field.<\/p>\n
The real judgement for Wales will come on Monday. Only after their World Cup qualifier against Belgium will they know if this Wembley experiment will have been worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Highly anticipated as any meeting between these neighbouring nations might be, the bigger picture for Wales was always…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-189258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}