The best way to process the full extraordinariness of Cymru’s 7-1 win over North Macedonia this week is to examine a few statistics.
■In 729 international encounters with 80 different opponents across nearly 150 years, Cymru have scored more goals only twice, both against the pre-partition all-Ireland side:
1888: Wales 11 Ireland 0 (The Racecourse, Wrecsam)
1885: Ireland 2, Wales 8 (Ulster Cricket Ground, Belfast)
■Cymru have scored seven goals only twice previously:
1882: Wales 7 Ireland 1 (The Racecourse)
1978: Wales 7 Malta 0 (The Racecourse)
■The size of the win has only been bettered twice – the aforementioned 11-0 against Ireland and 7-0 against Malta.
■The six-goal margin of victory joins six others as Cymru’s third biggest:
1882: Wales 7 Ireland 1 (as above)
1884: Wales 6 Ireland 0 (The Racecourse)
1885: Ireland 2 Wales 8 (as above)
1992: Wales 6 Faroe Islands 0 (Arms Park, Cardiff)
1996: Wales 6 San Marino 0 (Arms Park)
2018: China 0 Wales 6 (Guangxi Stadium, Nanning)
■The result is Cymru’s biggest ever win in the World Cup, and joint biggest margin of victory in the World Cup along with the aforementioned 6-0 wins over Faroe Islands and San Marino.
■North Macedonia are the highest-ranked team (65th) Cymru have defeated by such a margin since FIFA introduced rankings in 1992.
■Harry Wilson’s hat-trick was only the 17th Cymru hat-trick of all time (see this article for details of the other 16, and this for details of the 28 hat-tricks scored against Cymru). The game was Wilson’s 67th appearance for Cymru and first as captain, meaning he joins Gareth Bale, who was captain when he scored a hat-trick against Belarus in 2021, as the only Cymru players to have scored a hat-trick when captain.
As for the standard of football itself, I am having a hard job remembering a more scintillating and impressive Cymru performance. The Craig Bellamy enigma gets ever more puzzling: is he a bold tactical genius or is he just incredibly lucky? The ‘luck’ here was paradoxical: the misfortune of being without key injured or suspended players (Ampadu, Davies, James (J), Moore, Ramsey and Ward) forced him to go for all-out attack oozing quality, and Wilson along with David Brooks, Dan James, Brennan Johnson and Neco Williams responded by simultaneously producing their best form yet for Cymru, clicking superbly with irresistible skill that North Macedonia just could not withstand. This is all the more amazing because it came just three days after the equally vital game in Vaduz in which an utterly uninspired and profoundly unimpressive Cymru scraped a desperately poor 1-0 win over Liechtenstein, a team ranked 205th (out of 210) in the world. What’s going on?!?
Incidentally, after these two concluding games in Group J of European qualifying for the World Cup, the head-to-head record against Liechtenstein has reached P5, W5, D0, L0, Goals F12-A0, and against North Macedonia P4, W2, D1, L1, Goals F10-A4. The most important thing of all is that Cymru came runners-up behind Belgium in the Group and so go through to the play-offs in March with a home fixture in both the semi-final and, hypothetically, the final – which wouldn’t have been the case had Cymru finished 3rd and relied on their Nations League position to get into the play-offs.
So, following the play-off draw, Cymru will play Bosnia & Herzegovina at Cardiff in the play-off semi on March 26th and, should that match be won, Cymru must then defeat either Italy or Northern Ireland in Cardiff on March 31st to reach the World Cup finals for a second successive time. March is a long way off; for now, it’s quite sufficient to look at Cymru’s head-to-head record against those three countries:
v Bosnia & Herzegovina: P4, W0, D2, L2, Goals F2-A6
v Italy: P10, W2, D0, L8, Goals F5-A24
v Northern Ireland*: P96, W45, D24, L27, Goals F191-A132
While we digest all this, the impending horror of the 2026 World Cup which monsters D Trump and G Infantino are busy collaborating to create a fiesta of fascism that would make Mussolini wince, creeps ever closer. The question may well arise in Cymru – and other countries too – whether we actually want to participate in such a foul and frightening farce.
*NOTE
The record against Northern Ireland includes the 36 matches Cymru played against pre-partition Ireland between 1882 and 1922 (W17, D7, L12, Goals F98-A61).