Koumas spent the second half of the 2025-26 season on loan at Hull City, helping them win promotion to the Premier League via the Championship play-offs.<\/p>\n
The Liverpool academy product has previously been on loan at Birmingham City and Stoke City, where he predominantly played on the left flank.<\/p>\n
But whereas Wales are well stocked out wide with the likes of Daniel James, Harry Wilson, Brennan Johnson, David Brooks and Sorba Thomas among their options, they have a shortage of genuine strikers.<\/p>\n
“We started him [as a centre-forward] against Northern Ireland [friendly draw in March], I thought he was OK,” Bellamy added.<\/p>\n
“When he came on today, he needs to be a little bit tidier but that’s normal.<\/p>\n
“I see him as a real future player for Wales who’s going to have a big say. I’m delighted for him.”<\/p>\n
Having missed out on World Cup qualification after losing their play-off semi-final at home to Bosnia-Herzegovina in March, Wales will finish their season with a friendly in Romania on Saturday (18:45 BST).<\/p>\n
Ghana, meanwhile, will travel to the United States to prepare for a World Cup campaign in which they have been drawn in a group alongside England, Croatia and Panama.<\/p>\n
Asked about the Black Stars’ prospects for the tournament, Bellamy said: “You have a tough group, a new manager [Carlos Queiroz].<\/p>\n
“You have some key players who weren’t involved today. I like Inaki Williams, [Antoine] Semenyo. You’re a dangerous team in transition because of the speed you always have in the top line – Ghana have had that for a number of years.<\/p>\n
“If you can keep it tight… counter-attacking ability… your first game is Panama, your tournament is going to be decided on that game. If you win one game, you might get into the knockout stage.<\/p>\n
“Croatia and England are going to be two really difficult games. The way you support your team, you never know.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Koumas spent the second half of the 2025-26 season on loan at Hull City, helping them win promotion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681561,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-681560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}