Football: Hughes and Wales hope Finland feel the force of Giggs

Independent, The (London) ,  Mar 29, 2000   by Guy Hodgson

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YOU CAN imagine Mark Hughes' heart sinking as his mobile phone rang on a depressed Everton coach on Saturday evening and "Giggsy" appeared on the visual display. "What's wrong this time Ryan, the leg fallen off?" The reply will have wiped away the gloom inspired by a 2- 1 defeat at Sunderland.

Ryan Giggs does not do international friendlies. Since his debut for Wales as a 17-year-old in 1991 he has managed only 25 caps and all of them have been in World Cup or European Championship qualifiers. Eighteen non-competitive matches have come and gone and the Manchester United winger, mysteriously, has always been injured. Anyone would think Sir Alex Ferguson is reluctant to release him for anything less than the real thing.

So Hughes, starting his transformation from a player to an international manager, could have been forgiven for wondering if he was the victim of a practical joke when a Giggs-like voice announced that he would be fit to play against Finland tonight. He was, after all, the first Welsh manager to get good news in these circumstances.

The Welsh supporters, you suspect, will probably not believe it either until they see Giggs take the pitch tonight, but there will certainly be enough of them to verify it. Some 66,000 have been attracted to the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff which compares so favourably with the 5,064 who bothered to turn out for the last home match in Wrexham that any comparisons become invidious.

Even more so because the Giggs factor played no part at all. The same crowd - beating the previous Welsh record of 62,634 against England at Ninian Park in 1959 - would have been attracted to the national stadium whether or not he played. Partly that is due to Cardiff's insatiable appetite for anything going on at the new venue, but also because of some astute marketing by the Football Association of Wales. Rather than face less than top-drawer opponents in front of empty stands, they reduced prices to pounds 5 for adults and pounds 3 for children.

The FAW will pick up around pounds 250,000 in receipts and will now be able to contemplate finding pounds 500,000 to tempt Brazil to Cardiff on 23 May. It is estimated that with even a modest price rise to around pounds 10, they will get another full ground for that glamorous fixture and enough money to meet the fee.

Both tonight's match and the prospective one against the Brazilians are part of Hughes's programme to prepare Wales for a World Cup qualifying campaign that includes Norway, Ukraine and Poland. For the Finns, the game will provide practice against another team with many of Wales' Anglo-Saxon virtues and vices. They go by the name of England.

"For us this is where the real build-up towards the World Cup qualifiers starts," Sami Hyypia, the Finnish centre-back at the core of Liverpool's drive towards the Champions' League, said, "and those very hard games against England and Germany in our group. It was disappointing not to maintain our form in the Euro 2000 group, because at one time, after we had won in Turkey, it looked like we had a very good chance of qualifying. In the end we didn't play well at the end of the group matches, we just couldn't keep it up.

"It must have been very similar for Wales. They are very much like us in size and resources. We do not have too many players to chose from and we are a small country. We have five million people and the big countries in Europe have five million footballers."

Certainly Wales know they have one in five million in Giggs, who would walk into the England team, his hamstrings willing. "We are just lucky to have him," Hughes, a former team-mate at Old Trafford, said. "He is in such a rich vein of form at the moment, I'm absolutely delighted he's available for selection."

WALES (possible): Jones (Southampton); Savage (Leicester), Melville (Fulham), Coleman (Fulham), Page (Watford); Robinson (Charlton), Pembridge (Everton), Speed (Newcastle), Giggs (Manchester United); Blake (Blackburn), Saunders (Bradford).

FINLAND (from): Enckelman (Aston Villa), Moilanen (Preston), Hyypia (Liverpool), Reini (Genk), Tihinen (Viking FK), Saastamoinen (HJK Helsinki), Tuomela (Tromso), Helin (Jokerit), Litmanen (Barcelona), Kolkka (PSV Eindhoven), Nurmela (Heerenveen), Taino (Auxerre), Riihilahti (Valerenga), Lenkosuo (HJK Helsinki), Paatelainen (Hibernian), Valakari (Motherwell), Wiss (Moss), Forssell (Chelsea).