The play-off final first leg will be played at the Cardiff City Stadium on Tuesday, 1 December before the return leg in Norway four days later.<\/p>\n
Norway, the 1995 world champions, have reached every Women’s World Cup since the tournament began in 1991.<\/p>\n
They will begin as firm favourites against Wales, who are ranked 17 places below them by Fifa and who have never beaten a top-20 ranked side in a competitive fixture.<\/p>\n
But Wilkinson insists Wales, whose only previous major championship appearance was at Euro 2025, can cause Norway problems.<\/p>\n
“They’re a team that’s performing well, that’s doing well, as are we and we’ve got some fantastic players that can absolutely go toe-to-toe with them,” she added.<\/p>\n
“I’ve just talked to the staff I think everyone needs a few days off to rest and recover.<\/p>\n
“Then we’re going to go again, do the best we can to deliver a team that’s going to fight for their country.”<\/p>\n
The complex nature of the qualifying process means that even if they were to upset Norway, Wales may not be guaranteed a place at next year’s World Cup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The play-off final first leg will be played at the Cardiff City Stadium on Tuesday, 1 December before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":801990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-801989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801989","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=801989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/801990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}