Rhian Wilkinson didn’t tell anyone. The Wales Women’s manager just woke up and left with the sunrise, bound for the top of Wales’ highest peak, Yr Wyddfa.
Wilkinson knows this mountain well (known as ‘Snowdon’ in English). She was born in Canada, but her family relocated to Cowbridge, Wales, where her mum, Shan, is originally from, for a year when she was eight — the same age she first went up Yr Wyddfa — before moving back to Canada permanently. They would travel to Wales quite a lot after that.
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The former Canada international’s parents were married in the pub at the bottom, with their honeymoon spent at the top.
And just beneath the summit, overlooking the mountain’s west side, is where Wilkinson held a ceremony for her father, Keith, the former head coach of Canada’s national rugby team, after his passing six months before she was named Wales head coach at the end of February 2024.
It’s here where runs into Wilkinson before the train of assembled media and Football Association of Wales (FAW) representatives arrive for Wales’ Euro 2025 squad announcement.
“My dad used to make me visualise as a kid,” Wilkinson says as the wind whips across scrags of rock. “He tried all the time going to training, going to games, in the car. He’d be like, ‘Can you picture yourself? Can you feel the grass?’ I’m like, ‘Oh God, shut up’. Even now, it drives me wild.”
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Wilkinson is smiling because, you know what, maybe the visualisation thing works. On her first national camp, Wilkinson showed the squad a photo of Yr Wyddfa with the Euro 2025 qualifying matches assembled in an upward trajectory to the summit imposed over the top. The Wales badge sat at the mountain’s base.
“At first, we were like: ‘What is this?’” says goalkeeper Olivia Clark, laughing. “But then we began making it up the mountain. Now we have posters of it dotted around the food room, the training room. It’s this metaphor.”
And maybe it’s the thinning oxygen at 1,085 meters (3,560 feet), but there lurks an irrepressible urge to make obvious poetry: this being Wales Women’s final summit before their first major tournament summit. A manifestation of the team’s grisly, uphill battle — first for recognition, then for funding, then for qualification for Euro 2025 — finally conquered. Today, Wilkinson and her squad stand atop their own history and can look out to the vastness beyond. To new mountains to be scaled.
If you squint hard enough, you can even see Switzerland.
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That last part isn’t true (you can see Bangor and, apparently, the coast of Ireland on a good day). And while the gloriously hot sunshine and baby blue skies feels like an omen — the FAW and weather gods somehow complicit in wishing the team good fortune — a mountain is also a good place to be reminded of one’s size. Wales are the tournament’s lowest-ranked squad (30), with a group consisting of the Netherlands (11th in rankings), France (10th) and England (fifth).
They are one of two major tournament debutants, alongside Poland. There is a nine per cent chance of Wales making it out of the group, according to Opta.
But at 8:45am the boldness of the setting is dizzying; the sensation of feeling puny, in the ascent and, eventually, from the top, inescapable.
“I love heights,” says Wilkinson, who led Portland Thorns to the 2022 NWSL Championship in her first year in charge at the club. “In Vancouver, I live on a mountain. I like the exertion of climbing, the fatigue. I beat everyone up here. They didn’t even know they were racing me.”
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There’s a temerity in forcing assembled media to the top of a mountain before 9am for a squad announcement, a boldness in preparing to defy the fickleness of Welsh weather in the summer and internet signal at 1,000ft above sea level, that is not readily synonymous with Wales.
But the boldness is welcomed. The FAW is the third-oldest football association in the world. Yet a national women’s football team was not formed until 1973, three years after the near 50-year ban of women’s football in the nation was lifted.
The FAW refused to formerly recognise the women’s national team until 1993, a 20-year window in which the team suffered countless “deaths” according to players from the time, the result of volunteer energy and benevolence running dry.
Ten years after recognition was granted, funding for the senior women’s team was cut for three years amid the men’s team’s Euro 2004 qualification campaign.
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But always by some divinity (or, let’s call it by its real name, the stubbornness of women), the team resuscitated.
“It’s the mentality of the why not,” Wilkinson says. “People outside of Wales can think whatever you want, they can look at rankings. Our goal is to be really present and deliver to the best of our ability.
“People will be looking up Wales on a map soon.”
Wilkinson’s squad is as strong as it can be. Sophie Ingle’s inclusion is a boon, the former Chelsea midfielder having returned to fitness after tearing her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in a pre-season friendly against Feyenoord last September.
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The remaining faces are familiar: Seattle Reign and Wales centurion Jess Fishlock, fellow Reign team-mate Angharad James-Turner, Leicester City forward Hannah Cain, Everton defender Hayley Ladd.
And for any potential claims of big-headedness that might come with making assembled media scale a mountain (most actually took the train, though did not) before 9am, there’s a still a palpable humility.
As Wilkinson waits at the top for the entourage to arrive, three members of the Swiss embassy to the UK stand near her. When they clock her Wales-branded trousers, one asks: “You’re the head coach?”
She nods. She obliges with a photograph, answers questions of her nerve.
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While walking to the top (accomplished in “just under an hour and a half” she says with no air of bravado), she listened to The New York Times’ Daily podcast, happy to have time to herself. “I actually debated whether I listen to anything, and I decided I’m going to listen to something because I feel ready.”
Full squad:
Goalkeepers: Olivia Clark (Leicester City), Safia Middleton-Patel (Manchester United), Poppy Soper (Unattached)
Defenders: Charlie Estcourt (DC Power), Gemma Evans (Liverpool), Josie Green (Crystal Palace), Hayley Ladd (Everton), Esther Morgan (Sheffield United), Ella Powell (Bristol City), Rhiannon Roberts (Unattached), Lily Woodham (Seattle Reign)
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Midfielders: Jess Fishlock (Seattle Reign), Alice Griffiths (Unattached), Ceri Holland (Liverpool), Sophie Ingle (Unattached), Angharad James (Seattle Reign), Lois Joel (Newcastle United)
Forwards: Rachel Rowe (Southampton), Kayleigh Barton (Unattached), Hannah Cain (Leicester City), Elise Hughes (Crystal Palace), Carrie Jones (IFK Norrköping), Ffion Morgan (Bristol City).
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Wales, UK Women’s Football, Women’s Euros
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