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Football has a longer history and bigger support in a rugby-infatuated region than most people give it credit for. Grahame Lloyd reports

Welsh rugby fans might not like it – some probably won’t believe it – but Wales are currently the best-supported team in European football. Even though they lie 108th in the FIFA rankings, an average attendance of 63,000 for the last three internationals at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff has put the Welsh ahead of Italy, Germany, Spain and co-Euro 2000 hosts Holland. Cheap tickets – £10 for adults and a fiver for children – and a magnificent setting have combined to satisfy the huge appetite for football and given the lie to the longstanding but often overstated claim that the national sport of Wales is rugby.

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Football is becoming more popular in Wales, but Chris Hughes thinks there will soon be an unhealthy rivalry with the country's favourite sport

It’s never taken much to make the men who run Welsh football act like battery hens following an appointment with the guillotine. But it was still impossible to predict that the game in Wales would once again lapse into farce after the signing of a new, lucrative television contract… for rugby.

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It was an unhappy captaincy debut for Vinnie Jones as Wales are torn apart by a classy Holland. Chris Hall reports from Eindhoven

10:30: While their supporters shake off some well earned hangovers and prepare to catch up on sleep during the one and a half hour journey south from Amsterdam, the Welsh squad stroll purposefully into PSV Eindhoven’s Herdgang training complex. New captain Vinnie Jones is lost in his own thoughts, coming to terms with his surprise elevation from hod carrier to standard bearer. Had the group included some of its missing stars – Giggs, Hughes, Rush, and er, Horne – it’s unlikely they would have created much more than a ripple of mild curiosity apparent in the faces of the onlookers. One of PSV’s many youth teams were waiting to take the field, hoping to impress the ex-internationals who coach them, and the gallery of parents cooing encouragement from the safe confines of the cosy clubhouse. Bobby Gould looks tense and wary, perhaps still clinging to the belief that those absent talents would have made a difference to tonight’s daunting encounter.

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