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Wales national under-21 football team
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Nickname | Young Dragons | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Association | FA of Wales | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Coach |  Brian Flynn |
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| Captain | {{{Captain}}} | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Most caps | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top scorer | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| First International 1992 |
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| Largest win Wales 6-2 Cyprus 1993 |
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| Worst defeat Italy 8-1 Wales Pavia, September 5, 2003 |
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| UEFA U-21 Championship | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Appearances | None (First in n/a) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Best result | 3rd of 5 in Qual. group, 1996 |
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The Wales national under-21 football team is the national under-21 football team of Wales and is controlled by the Football Association of Wales. The team competes in the European Under-21 Football Championship, held every two years.
In terms of youth football, this team is the highest age group team in which the best young, professional footballers who have were born in Wales, or have Welsh parents or grandparents, can be selected to play in. The team's players have the hope that they can successfully play international football with some success and possibly be called up to play in the full senior Wales team.
The current manager is Brian Flynn, most famous for managing Welsh club sides playing in the English league: Wrexham and Swansea City. He also had previously coached the under-21 team for a while in the early nineties. Some of the most successful players to emerge from the under-21 team (also called the u-21 team) recently have been Lewin Nyatanga, Derby County's Young Player of the Year for 2005-2006, outstanding left-sided player Gareth Bale of Southampton and Richard Duffy, a young player who started with Swansea, before being snapped up by Portsmouth. All three players are defenders.
In recent decades, the team has been viewed by the Welsh national management as more of a hole to be filled than a team to be used to nurture young international players, many of the great Welsh players of recent years having not spent long in the under-21 team. Ryan Giggs, to name a famous Welsh footballer, only got one Welsh u-21 cap, before making his senior debut against West Germany the next day! In times like this, the team has often been padded out by young players from the lower leagues whose careers promptly sank into obscurity.
More recently however, Wales's current manager, John Toshack and youth manager Brian Flynn have been seen to use the u21 team for the purpose of creating a pool of youthful Welsh talent. The team can now boast a much better tracking system of young Welsh players, and has seen a marked improvement in players and their playing. Recent perfomances have seen them achieve big wins agains Estonia (5-1) and Northern Ireland (4-0).
- UEFA Under-21 website Contains full results archive
- The Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation Contains full record of U-21/U-23 Championships.