Will Vaulks, one of football’s good guys, has had his fair share of disappointment in recent years, for both club and country. More often than not, he has found himself on the outside of Robert Page’s Wales squad, rather than inside. That in itself must be hard to take, but there is an added layer of humiliation in that Wales and Cardiff both train at The Vale, so he would often be effectively relegated to the next set of pitches to his international team-mates.
That melting pot environment came to the fore again recently with Cardiff’s unlikely pursuit of Gareth Bale. What at first seemed like an absolute fantasy became more likely over time and then suddenly, briefly started to feel inevitable. It was shaping up as the ultimate marriage of convenience.
Bale, with both family and business interests in the city, needed somewhere to initially ply his trade for the first three months of the season, to keep him ticking over for the World Cup, which starts in November. Surely moving anywhere else would represent too much upheaval for such a short space of time and as Vaulks knows all too well, Cardiff and Wales are bedfellows.
