Former Wales captain Ashley Williams sympathised with Ampadu, telling BBC Match of the Day Wales: “I didn’t think Ethan Ampadu’s was a yellow.<\/p>\n
“He has every right to go for the ball. His foot’s high, so is the other player’s foot, and [Ampadu] gets to the ball first. I don’t even think it’s a foul.”<\/p>\n
As head coach Craig Bellamy has previously explained, Wales are not blessed with many central midfielders even when everyone is available.<\/p>\n
It is a major blow, therefore, to be without both members of their first-choice pairing against North Macedonia.<\/p>\n
“It’s disappointing to get booked,” said James. “You don’t think about it on the pitch, they were on the counter-attack and I had to stop it.<\/p>\n
“I think we have enough in the squad to win it on Tuesday. I am disappointed, but I’ll be supporting the lads from the sidelines.”<\/p>\n
Bellamy had to watch from the stands in Liechtenstein because he was suspended after receiving a second yellow card of the campaign for dissent during last month’s defeat by Belgium, meaning assistant boss Piet Cremers led the team in his absence.<\/p>\n
“We will adapt [without James and Ampadu]. We have a big group. They have all played before,” said Cremers.<\/p>\n
“It’s going to be a hard game [against North Macedonia]. They have had some really good results. It’s important we create some opportunities and stay patient.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Wales captain Ashley Williams sympathised with Ampadu, telling BBC Match of the Day Wales: “I didn’t think…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-265350","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\/265350","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=265350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}