Wales left with plenty to prove after painful throwback defeat to Armenia

T he inquest into Wales’s humbling by Armenia began in earnest on Saturday morning, a few hours before an afternoon flight to Samsun, the Turkish city on the Black Sea where suddenly it all feels rather make or break when it comes to qualifying for Euro 2024.

The grave mood in the stands at full-time in Cardiff, as the remnants of a sold-out crowd wondered whether they had inadvertently been teleported back to the bruising days when Wales were nestled below Guatemala and Guyana in the Fifa rankings, married with what is now a bleak forecast.

In recent years Wales have never had it so good, but Friday provided an unwanted and brutal throwback to more testing times. The nation has simply, owing to their own unprecedented success, come to expect much better.

The last time Wales conceded more than three goals in a competitive home game a 17-year-old left-back by the name of Gareth Bale registered his first of 41 goals for his country, a stunning free-kick in a 5-1 defeat by Slovakia.

In isolation, being picked off 4-2 at home to Armenia is unquestionably one of the worst results this millennium for Wales but burrow a little deeper and the cold reality is that it had been coming. Since qualifying for the World Cup 12 months ago, via a deflected Bale free-kick, they have won one of their 11 matches.

A blinding result in Split in March, when Nathan Broadhead salvaged a 1-1 draw with Croatia on debut with Wales’s only shot on target, in the third minute of second-half stoppage time, masked a poor performance. Wales edged past Latvia a few days later and at that point all appeared dandy.

Perhaps that was what Rob Page, the Wales manager, was getting at when he said everybody was getting starry-eyed as he tried to explain the