Bale and Ramsey take on final World Cup mission of enthralling Wales era

Behold. For he is risen. Gareth Bale is feeling better. Pictures of Bale training happily in Cardiff this week confirmed there are no lingering effects from the back pain (or “not feeling right”, according to Carlo Ancelotti) which had kept Bale out of Real Madrid’s 4-0 shellacking at home against Barcelona on Sunday night.

And as miracles of healing go, this is a timely one, after an absence which just happened, by pure coincidence, to fall four days before the biggest (and surely last) opportunity Bale is going to get to lead Wales to a World Cup. Let’s face it, he was never going to miss this one.

Nobody could ever accuse Uefa of dumbing down or oversimplifying its qualifying pathway. But at the end of that labyrinthine process Wales have been presented with what is, on the face of it, a highly favourable route to Qatar.

Robert Page’s team are well capable of winning Thursday’s home semi-final against Austria, who got here by finishing as the sixth‑highest ranked Nations League group winner, came fourth in qualification Group F, and are ranked 10 places lower than Wales by Fifa. The same goes for a final home eliminator against Scotland or Ukraine whenever world events permit – Uefa’s June scheduling already looks optimistic.

If this still feels like a complex chain of events with the World Cup itself only eight months away, there is at least a streamlined quality to the chat around the latest chapter in Welsh football’s grail quest of the past 64 years. We will, of course, be talking about Bale and Aaron Ramsey. Let’s do this one more time. Because it is always a little later than you think.

There are good reasons for focusing on those star names. Bale and Ramsey remain hugely potent figures. Together they have 56