If some footballers take time to reach their potential, others seem to be the finished article before they’re able to drive. A teenage Aaron Ramsey was firmly in the latter camp. After only 11 league starts for Cardiff he had made his international debut for Wales against Denmark, turned down Manchester United in favour of Arsenal, and given Cardiff fans one of the great what-ifs of their club’s modern age after Dave Jones chose not to start him in the 2008 FA Cup final against Portsmouth, with Ramsey being the tender age of 17.
Success-starved supporters who should know better will pin their hopes on to the narrowest of young shoulders, and yet it all seemed so easy for the teenager from Caerphilly who was captain of his country by the age of 20, would go on to play in a World Cup and two European Championships and this week retired as an icon of the Welsh game.
It may be over 17 years ago, but the landscape in which Ramsey made his debut for Wales is almost unrecognisable. Years on the periphery of international football had caused a sporting public largely to lose interest, as a painfully young team beset by withdrawals, injuries and retirements under John Toshack made qualification seem a fantasy. During one of Ramsey’s early standout performances, a 3-0 victory against Scotland in front of a sparse crowd in which he scored one and set up the other two, Gary Speed was effusive in his praise for the then 18-year-old, before warning the viewers at home: “If Wales are going to do anything, those players out there need to try their utmost to get to every game and play for Wales.” Less than seven years later, 11 of the players involved that day would make the squad for Euro 2016.
For the small band of true believers who had remained faithful to the national team, the expectation around a young Ramsey was titanic. Partly because he was a schoolboy who seemed to thrive on the challenges being thrown at him, but also because Wales doesn’t produce players of his type. The most comparable Welsh precedent is Ivor Allchurch, but unfortunately for generations of Welsh goalscorers in need of a playmaker Ivor was born in 1929, and until Aaron’s debut in 2008, some of our greatest footballers had been sharpshooting strikers playing in front of creatively bereft midfields.
Finally, we had a teenager who could run games and orchestrate, and all in the age of colour TV and protein bars. He was blessed with excellent technique, guile and footballing acumen, and Wales looked to build a team around him and the supernaturally talented Gareth Bale. Results were patchy, but the future seemed promising.
Fate of course, would intervene. Two months after his 19th birthday, Ramsey sustained a severe double compound fracture of his right tibia and fibula, after a challenge from Ryan Shawcross during a game for Arsenal against Stoke. It was a chilling injury with no guarantee of recovery, and yet over the next seven years he scored the winner for Arsenal in two FA Cup finals and helped a Wales team that hadn’t qualified for a major tournament since 1958 to the semi-finals of Euro 2016.
Chris Coleman was blessed with two outstanding attacking talents in Bale and Ramsey, as well as a supporting cast of Premier League regulars in a situation unrecognisable to most Wales managers. To get the most out of his two best players, Coleman used Joe Allen and Joe Ledley as holding midfielders, allowing Bale and Ramsey to play as No 10s, a duo to make Welsh hands rub with anticipation. A defence superbly marshalled by Ashley Williams made Wales hard to beat, and the huge amount of experience the squad had accumulated by the time they had qualified made Wales quietly formidable.
At the Euros in France Wales supporters were simply determined to enjoy the uncharted territory of qualification, and yet Allen and Ramsey were chosen to be in the Uefa team of the tournament as Wales defied expectations. Ramsey was sublime, a scurrying, creative menace, providing four assists and one goal in his five appearances. He was suspended for the semi-final and his ingenuity was sorely missed as reality intervened and Wales were eliminated by the eventual winners, Portugal.
John Charles was injured for the 1958 World Cup quarter-final against Brazil. Mark Hughes missed the final qualifier for USA 94 against Romania through suspension. Ramsey’s absence provides the biggest what-if in the history of Welsh football.
It was to be his zenith in a Wales shirt, and the legacy of his broken leg was the slew of injuries that plagued him. If his club career was frustratingly stop-start, his place in the Wales team when fit was guaranteed by virtue of his rare talents. Successive Welsh managers reserved places for him, knowing that when approaching his best, he had gifts only Bale could rival, and late period Ramsey still dazzled at times.
The mind drifts back to qualification for Euro 2020, when he returned from injury to play his first game of the campaign in the final match against Hungary, and scored both goals to secure qualification; also to the victory at Euro 2020 in which he and Bale rolled back the years and tormented Turkey; and to his pirouette assist against Belgium in the 2022 Nations League.
With Wales having failed to qualify for the 2026 World Cup, fans will spend the summer reminiscing as the tournament happens around us, busy concocting our all-time greatest XIs. Ramsey was pivotal to our greatest success. There’s no question that he will be one of the first names on the team sheet.
