I’m angry. The decision to force Wrexham to play the last game of Phase One of the Adran Premier on Wednesday night isn’t just unfair on us; it’s an insult to the teams and players of the league, delivered by its own administrators.
As I’ve constantly suggested, with a bit of imagination and willingness to take advantage of the unique situation Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds have created, Wales has the opportunity to achieve something genuinely remarkable. By exploiting the added exposure Wrexham are enjoying, we could become the first country in Europe – arguably the world – whose women’s league is more significant than the men’s.
After all, Wrexham average 555 in the Adran Premier this season. Only two men’s teams can better that:
Have a look at the all-time JD Cymru Premier’s biggest ever attendances, going back 33 years to its inception in 1992:
| 17/05/2025 | 3,250 | Porthmadog v Bangor City |
| 26/01/1997 | 2,745 | Barry Town v Caernarfon Town |
| 11/04/2004 | 2,741 | Rhyl v TNS |
| 27/12/2011 | 2,593 | Bangor City v Prestatyn Town |
| 27/12/2008 | 2,126 | Rhyl v Prestatyn Town |
Then, compare Wrexham’s 5 largest attendances since reforming in 2018:
| 26/03/2023 | 9,511 | Wrexham v Connah’s Quay Nomads |
| 19/11/2023 | 3,859 | Swansea City v Wrexham |
| 29/09/2024 | 2,088 | Wrexham v Swansea City |
| 05/05/2024 | 1,734 | Wrexham v Cardiff City (n) |
| 29/09/2024 | 1,337 | Wrexham v Swansea City |
See what I mean?
Sadly, the game’s administrators seem to have no interest in such an exciting thought and seem keen to resist being forced into facilitating such an outcome, kicking and screaming or otherwise.
Why has the decision to enforce a midweek round of games enraged me so? There are four areas of concern which fuel my objections:
- A total failure to prepare an adequate response to a problem that was just waiting to happen.
- The creation of a dangerous competitive imbalance at a key stage in the competition.
- The damage done to the competition’s reputation and image.
- Fuelling the notion that there is an inherent anti-Northern bias in the FAW.
Let’s go through them one-by-one:
An Avoidable Problem
I’m very conscious of potential hypocrisy when I start moaning like this. I’m also averse to criticism which fails to look at a problem from the opposite perspective. However, I feel 100% comfortable on this issue, because I’ve been complaining about it for a few weeks now!
When the January 5th round of games were wiped out by bad weather, followed by the subsequent postponements of both Adran Trophy semi-finals the following weekend, the Adran League bit the bullet and did exactly the right thing: they rescheduled the entire remainder of Phase One. However, they failed to announce the further tweak which had to accompany that news: the setting back of Phase Two by at least a week.
There clearly needs to be a gap between the first and second phases of the season in order to avoid the exact situation we find ourselves in now: postponements on the final day of Phase One leaving us in the ludicrous situation of starting Phase Two next weekend when we don’t know which teams are in which section on Wednesday evening!
Failure to have an appropriate failsafe in case something unforeseen happened last weekend is an astonishing oversight. Do I really need to point out to the administrators of Welsh football that they’re organising a winter sports competition in Wales? It can get a bit wet and nippy up here, you know!
We’re not dealing with the Premier League here either. We don’t have fabulous, expensive pitches, massive groundskeeping budgets, or nice big stands to shield the pitch from the elements. Instead, the league is generally played on exposed pitches which need to cope with both men’s and women’s matches. Did they see our game at Y Felinheli in the Welsh Cup? The men’s team had played on it the day before, and we had to battle through a mudbath to get the win. The quality of football we managed that day was astonishing considering the conditions.
That’s certainly not a criticism of Y Felinheli, by the way. They were a brilliant club and could do nothing about it: their men’s team had played on it the day before and, y’know, winter. Soon afterwards their women’s team had to play at Bangor’s ground because the pitch couldn’t take the strain, and we’re talking about November last year: there were another 5 months of games left before the season’s end!
Don’t try to tell me they’re a special case; they’re a typical case. And don’t throw the artificial pitch argument at me either: you have to be able to afford a non-turf pitch in the first place, and as we’ve seen in recent weeks, they’re not the guarantee against postponement which many seem to think they are.
By failing to legislate for the possibility of the Welsh winter not playing ball, we find ourselves squeezing games into midweek with no notice.
An Uneven Playing Field
Let’s have a look at why organising the games with no notice is a major problem. In a professional league, where players’ responsibilities lie squarely with representing their employers, it’s not that much of a big deal, especially as the people who run the game are more concerned about armchair fans than those who have to arrange their lives around fixtures. However, the Adran Premier is not a professional league, which is why playing these games midweek is a massive error, not to mention an injustice.
Wrexham’s players have other jobs. When they rolled up to work on Monday and asked for time off in two days’ time, did they all get a sympathetic hearing? I doubt it. I was a teacher, and I don’t know whether I’d have even bothered asking for time off in those circumstances: you’d need a particularly understanding head teacher to allow you to walk out on your teaching responsibilities for a football match. Pulling a sickie feels like a bad option too: the lack of media coverage of Welsh women’s football is a disgrace, but I still reckon you’d be rumbled if you follow up a spluttering call to the absence hotline with a stirring box-to-box performance in South Wales 9 hours later!
So, will we be able to select a full strength team? I suspect not. But don’t worry – Swansea will be fine. The youngsters we could be forced to use to fill the gaps won’t be available either because they will be at school. I know that’s a line Denis Smith used to use when he picked Matty Done for midweek games, but in this case it’s completely serious.
It’s a hell of a slog to Swansea too, and obviously Wrexham would prefer to stay overnight to give the players a chance to be rested. However, our normal arrangements for the game will be logistically impossible. We simply can’t prepare for this match as we normally would.
Oh, and did I mention that it’s the decisive game which, essentially, will decide the fate of our season? A top four spot, after starting the season with 3 consecutive defeats, would be a magnificent triumph: it’s a shame we’ve had an extra obstacle thrown in our path by the competition itself. It’s like UEFA locking Vinicius Junior, Eder Militao and Thibault Courtois in a cupboard before the Champions League Final. If you genuinely think Aleksander Čeferin will be swallowing that key next May, you have a very different idea of how a competition should be administered to me. Indeed, you may well be an FAW board member!
Making the League Look Foolish
The Adran Premier is a semi-pro league, but the administration is amateurish. For the reasons outlined above, they have devalued their own competition massively. The word “tinpot” won’t leave my mind, and I’m genuinely unhappy to report that. I am a huge advocate of women’s football in Wales, attacking the task with the zeal of a convert after the Wrexham team made me fall in love with it. I will fight against anyone who tries to denigrate the Adran League, and yet the people running it seem to be its main problem!
Wrexham are the main losers, but not the only ones. Two more games are being rearranged for midweek, and they will present their own problems for the away teams. Cardiff’s game at home to Aberystwyth was abandoned at half time on Sunday: Town face a 120-mile midweek slog south themselves, or rather those who can get time off will. I accept that a home win was very likely anyway, but the league shouldn’t organise itself on the basis that the league leaders are bound to beat Aberystwyth anyway, so who cares what adverse circumstances the away team have to deal with?
Results from the first phase carry over to the second phase anyway, so while they might be treating the Cardiff v Aberystwyth and Briton Ferry v Barry matches as unimportant, they shouldn’t be. Briton Ferry have staged a magnificent attempt to win the title straight after promotion from the Adran South. Dropped points on Thursday (yes, they’ll have just two days’ rest before their Phase Two opener, after playing on their heavy Old Road pitch-possibly on the same surface!) could scupper those hopes.
And why is Tuesday not an option, at least allowing teams time to recover for the weekend if this insane midweek round has to happen? Because the national team are playing on Tuesday. I understand why the FAW would want to avoid the clash, but let’s be honest: there’s only one substantial audience for the Adran Premier games, and that’s Wrexham’s fans on the live stream. By shifting the game to Wednesday, they kill that audience, as the men’s team are playing for a Wembley cup final place that night. A round of applause for the people in charge of promoting Welsh women’s football, please.
I haven’t even mentioned the distinct possibility that, with Briton Ferry’s pitch having been problematic all season, their match might be called off again. That would mean that forcing us to get the game played in midweek would have been completely pointless, as the second phase wouldn’t be able to start next weekend anyway. Rain is forecast from 4 a.m. until early afternoon the day before the game in Briton Ferry, by the way.
A Southern Agenda
I don’t want to make this point, but I must. Pro-Southern bias is a massive factor in Welsh life, and football has never been an exception to that. The major conurbations of Wales, apart from Wrexham, are in the south, of course, and that must be taken into consideration. However, the sense that in the south they feel that anywhere north of Abergavenny is someone else’s problem is merely compounded by these sorts of decisions.
Wrexham and Aberystwyth are the losers, Swansea and, potentially, Cardiff Met are the winners – the Uni team are bottom of the league, and Aber are the only side they have a hope of overtaking. You can’t help feeling that our protests about the unfairness of having to return to Swansea in midweek will have been met with a shrug. I’m confident that would not have been the response if Cardiff City or Swansea City had been the teams inconvenienced. It’s almost feasible that there’d be media coverage of the scandal if they were the victims.
You might argue that our injured players will have more time to recover for this match. Well, perhaps the rearrangement might help Lili Jones out, after she took a nasty blow to her achilles when we played Swansea last week, but it won’t be any use for Liv Fuller, who was the victim of a particularly unpleasant challenge which means she’ll not be back any time soon. That challenge came from a Swansea player too, incidentally. Between them the perpetrators got one yellow as punishment for possibly eliminating two of our most important players from an all-or-nothing confrontation. Just sayin’.
I suppose the FAW will compensate us (because two wrongs make a right) by making sure the neutral venue for our Bute Energy Cup semi-final against Pontypridd will be closer to Wrexham than they would normally allow. It’ll probably be played in Bridgend.
I consistently find myself bewildered by the administration of the Adran leagues. It might be hard to believe for those of you who are used to my constant ranting on the matter, but I genuinely want to see the other side. I’m inclined to recognise that humans are pre-programmed to rail against authority and want to fight that instinct. However, each act of self-harm by Welsh football’s administrators screams out at me whenever I try to adopt a reasonable position!
I guess the women’s game isn’t the only victim. After all, the FAW currently seems to be operating a policy of indulging in wild flights of fancy to see if one of them sticks. AI is all well and good, but it feels like someone in Cardiff has popped “come up with 5 mad ideas the Welsh football authorities could enact” into ChatGPT and then tried to turn them into policy. *
I could appreciate the thinking behind some of them, even if the actual application seemed fraught with issues. There were clear, interesting benefits to the plan to parachute Wrexham, Cardiff, Swansea and Newport into the Nathaniel MG Cup, and I’m not just referring to the importance of publicising a competition which is clearly named in my honour. Boosting the JD Cymru’s coefficient would have been a laudable consequence, and it was a cute example of thinking outside the box to come up with a solution to a problem, but how we’d have fitted it all into our schedule was much more problematic. The other EFL clubs, catching a whiff of the 4 Welsh teams potentially gaining some sort of financial advantage, despite assurances to the contrary being baked into the plan, were always likely to lobby against it anyway, guaranteeing it never got beyond the planning stage.
Likewise, changing the identity of the national teams from Wales to Cymru is a commendable idea, but it hasn’t had much impact. Does anyone actually call Turkey Türkiye? Not that I’m aware of, and I’m afraid that, despite liking the idea of acknowledging our national language, I don’t call the team Cymru. It just doesn’t occur to me, as I’ve called them Wales all my life, and I don’t think I’m in a minority.
Other ideas, though, have been just plain cuckoo. I’ve genuinely assumed, when hearing a couple of them, that they were jokes, and poorly conceived jokes at that. I mean, all humour should be rooted in reality. I’d argue FAW policies should be too.
Let’s start with a proper classic: the offer of £6m to Merthyr Tydfil to join the JD Cymru. Apparently there are FAW board members who are incredibly eager to see the fifth Welsh side in the English pyramid return to the fold, having failed to force them to join the new Welsh league in the 1990s. That’s all well and good, but please talk me through the finances of the offer. At what point will paying such a huge sum to tempt Merthyr into the Welsh system start paying dividends? How are they worth over £6m to Welsh football? And where does that £6m come from, exactly? How flush are the FAW, exactly?
And without wanting to continue the theme of southern bias, were they so desperate to hoover up a North Walian team which refused to come over the border? Colwyn Bay refused to join the League of Wales when it was launched. Did they try to tempt them in with a similar deal?
Well, let’s just say that I can find no evidence that such a sweetener was offered, and the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests there was nothing on the table to tease them across. When Colwyn Bay joined the JD Cymru system in 2019 their logic was clearly to downsize financially without suffering a decline in performance on the pitch by shifting to a lower standard of play.
Merthyr turned the offer down anyway, as reported by the BBC in an article which featured the glorious sentence: “They unanimously rejected the proposal with 96% voting against joining the Cymru Premier.” If you don’t snap the FAW’s hand off in accepting such a wild offer, there must be something really wrong with it, I reckon! Merthyr are heading for the National League South, attracting crowds of nearly 2,000 to home games. Would you throw that away for what amounts to a suicide payment? Thankfully, Merthyr are a fan-owned club, so rather than a rich owner pocketing the cash and dumping the Martyrs into a ditch, the supporters voted for something more valuable than money. Hope.
By the way, the offer to Merthyr was made so they can be part of the expanded top division of Welsh men’s football. It’ll grow to 15 teams, which is ostensibly an excellent idea. After all, the FAW have been keen to establish high standards of ground grading and financial compliance for years – something they have got right, to a great extent – and I’ve always argued that one of the best ways to develop the women’s game is to bite the bullet, accept the possibility of mismatches in the short term, and expand the top division to give experience to more players and more places to teams in north and mid-Wales.
However, even this smart move feels wrong. Surely, having enough teams in the top tier to play a regular season, with everyone facing each home and away, is a good thing? That’s not how it will be done, though – it’s clearly not gimmicky enough. Instead, there will be two phases as there are now, split into three sections. Three sections! I’ll bet the crowds will flock to those gripping “Pointless Section” matches, thrilling to see who can claim that precious 9th place!
And then there’s the insanity of trying to change the eligibility rules for international players. That’s the cunning plan to allow players to switch nations to the country their club is based in if they’d played for them for 5 years. The intention seemed to be to allow Craig Bellamy to select Matt Grimes, who left Swansea for Coventry in January. He’s a good player, to be fair, but whether we ought to change the basis on which British nations select their players so we can pick a 29-year old with 4 Premier League appearances and 25 career goals to his credit is a different matter.
A more pertinent matter is that Ryan Giggs, who signed for Manchester United when he was 14, would have been able to declare for England when he was 19. He made his competitive debut for Wales just before his eighteenth birthday: with the knowledge that he could wait a year and commit to England, he probably wouldn’t have.
Likewise, Gareth Bale was 10 when he signed for Southampton, so he could have switched to England as a 15-year old, long before he made his Welsh debut, Craig Bellamy would have been able to choose England a full 5 years before Wales selected him and Ian Rush also could have chosen to play for England before Wales called him up. Mark Hughes and Kevin Ratcliffe made their first Welsh appearances when they were close to being eligible for England and might have turned us down.
However, the FAW’s idea was a fantastic idea: after all, isn’t it worth gambling on losing those players for the chance to select, as the BBC article which broke the story suggested, Leon Britton, Angel Rangel and Joe Ralls. No Wrexham examples of course: it was a Welsh media story after all.
In all seriousness, I’d rather not see Cardiff and Swansea (and indeed Wrexham) journeymen selected for Wales ahead of talent brought through the Welsh system. The FAW is supposed to be all about establishing an excellent coaching system and giving our talented youngsters the best chance to fulfil their potential, isn’t it? Not breaking into first team football only to find some time-serving fringe player from Cardiff is blocking his path.
I honestly despair at the decision-making in Welsh women’s football right now. It seems like there’s very little thought given to short term decisions which affect clubs, fans and players on a week by week basis, while long term planning is essentially non-existent. Too much time seems to be spent coming up with madcap ideas for the men’s game to bother thinking about taking advantage of the opportunity Rob and Ryan have presented to the Adran Premier.
I hope Wrexham make a mockery of all this. I hope we go down there and replicate the utterly dominant performance we produced when we played Swansea last week. They were flattered by the 5-0 scoreline. It’s wrong that we have to overcome obstacles put in our path by the people whose job is to ensure an even playing field though.
* Obviously, after writing this I had to do it, so here are ChatGPT’s suggestion. Frankly, I’m not sure they’re much worse than the Merthyr Tydfil thing.
Here are five mad (but entertaining) ideas the Welsh football authorities could enact:
- The Dragon Bonus Goal – If a team scores a goal from outside the box and does a convincing dragon roar celebration, they get an extra half-goal added to their tally.
- Sheep Mascot Substitutions – Each team must have a live sheep mascot on the sidelines. If the game is level after 80 minutes, the sheep is brought on for a golden-goal decider (though obviously, it can’t touch the ball, so it’s just chaos).
- Bryn Terfel Penalty Rule – If a player belts out a flawless rendition of a Welsh hymn before taking a penalty, the opposition goalkeeper must stand still and allow a free shot.
- The Eisteddfod Derby – Once a year, instead of playing football, the biggest Welsh clubs must settle their rivalry through a poetry battle, judged by a panel of retired footballers and actual bards.
- The Gareth Bale Power Play – Each team is allowed to invoke “Bale Time” once per match, where for two minutes, they can bring on a temporary 12th player to honor the legend’s ability to turn a game on its head.
Leave a Reply