Ain’t no mountain high enough as Wales try to reach their peak

As an assorted group of media trundled up Yr Wyddfa, Snowdon as once was, on the only public rack and pinion railway in Britain to find out who was in Wales’s Euro 2025 squad, Rhian Wilkinson was striding up the mountain at a brisk pace.

Powered by political podcasts in her ears – she’s been too busy to keep up with the news recently – she reached the summit in an hour and a half.

This is a place that means a lot to the Wales manager. Her British parents honeymooned here – her mother Shan is Welsh and her father Keith was English. Six months before she was offered the Wales manager’s job, they held a ceremony here to commemorate his death.

“It is one of those things I think happens in life occasionally where everything seems to be meeting,” Wilkinson said, reflecting on the coincidences that led her here.

The Canadian, capped 181 times by her country, is responsible for helping Wales achieve something some feared was impossible. For years, the women’s team were tortured by near-misses when it came to qualifying for an international tournament.

They missed out on a play-off for the 2019 World Cup due to not being a high-enough ranked second-placed team. Their away goals record scuppered an attempt to be at the 2022 Euros. Most heartbreaking of all was the injury-time winner from Switzerland in the 2023 World Cup play-offs.

“A few players used the term ‘cursed’,” Wilkinson said. “When you’ve gotten close so many times, you feel that maybe it’s not for you.

“That was when I was like, we need some support for the mental part of the game. This is not a physical thing. This is not a football thing. This is a mental block.”

Wilkinson brought in Kate Green, a performance psychology expert who has worked at Arsenal and the FA, to help the players move on from what had happened before.

“What we talked about is that the past is the past – it’s gone. You’re not the same team, I’m not the same coach. Bringing in the past is helpful when it’s helpful, and really detrimental when it’s not.

“You can’t just forget about the past, but equally you can’t bring that baggage forward.”

One technique Wilkinson and Green used was a visual representation of Wales’s journey to qualify for Euro 2025. On posters around training camps was an image of Yr Wyddfa, with the opponents they faced next to it.

First the teams in their qualifying group – Croatia, Ukraine and Kosovo. Then Slovakia in the first play-off, who they beat thanks to an extra-time winner from vice-captain Ceri Holland. Finally, the Republic of Ireland where they finally broke that curse, winning 3-2 across two legs.

“We used the mountain as a theme because it was always going to be an uphill battle. It was always going to be one where we were going to have little setbacks. What is mountaineering other than that?”

Legend has it the mountain is where King Arthur slayed the giant Rhitta Gawr, who demanded the beards of the kings he killed. They covered him with stones to form Gwyddfa Rhitta, or Rhitta’s Cairn, which became Yr Wyddfa – “the tomb”. It is a fitting representation of Wales’s journey to slaying a demon.

Their reward in Switzerland is the “Group of Death”. Wales face the Netherlands, France and, in a final tasty game, England.

“I don’t think we can shy away from the fact that we are not going to be a team people consider a top seed,” Wilkinson admitted.

“When England play us, the expectation is on them. There is nothing to fear and that is a powerful thing.

“The worst case is we lose and that’s all right. We’ll be OK. It’s football. We’re going to give it everything we have and that is the only thing I can ask of them.”

The name everyone wanted to see in the squad was 33-year-old Sophie Ingle, who captained Wales for almost a decade. The midfielder, who left Chelsea at the end of the season, tore her ACL in September, leaving her in a race to get fit for the summer tournament.

The night Wales qualified, she was doing rehab exercises at 3am as the party went on around her. It paid off, and she will be in Switzerland alongside Wales’s most-capped women’s footballer, Jess Fishlock, 38.

As the media packed up and headed back down the mountain, Wilkinson managed to squeeze on to the train with us. She had wanted to walk back but had more engagements later in the day.

She was relaxed about Wales’s chances. “Outside of Wales, people can think whatever they want,” she said. “Something is impossible until it isn’t.”

Photograph by Nick Potts/PA Wire