It is an evocative image that captures the raw emotion of sport and what it meant to everyone connected with Wales to be within touching distance of qualifying for Euro 2016, yet when Osian Roberts first looked at that photograph of Gareth Bale sprinting towards him in Cyprus after scoring a late winning goal, and the wild celebrations taking place all around him, he cringed. “Personally, I was embarrassed,” Roberts says.
For Roberts, who is the Football Association of Wales technical director and Chris Coleman’s No2, attention to detail is everything, so there was something troubling about a picture that showed him with a huge grin on his face and preparing for Bale to run into his arms, rather than thinking about what Cyprus could do as soon as the game restarted.
“I’ve spent 25 years training coaches, saying how important it is to be calm on the touchline when you’re a frontline coach. And looking at us on the touchline, we’re vulnerable in the next two or three minutes because we got caught up in the emotion. Once in my lifetime I allowed that to happen because of the situation we were in and if we’d conceded straight afterwards I’d have thought: ‘Shit. You haven’t practised what you preach.’”
Over time Roberts has learned to be not so hard on himself and to see the deeper meaning within, and behind, a picture that in many ways defines this Wales squad with their “Together Stronger” slogan. “Of course, now I’m looking at it saying that it’s an iconic photo,” he says, smiling at the memory of not just how everyone reacted to Bale’s goal in Nicosia nine months ago but also the way that Ashley Richards, a relative unknown, delivered the pinpoint cross that was headed home by the world’s most expensive footballer.
“First of all it’s a team goal, great feet by Rambo [Aaron Ramsey], the quality cross by Jazz – he’s an unsung hero – and then you’ve got Gareth coming in as the main man and scoring a header like John Charles would have done 50 years ago. So everything comes together, the unsung hero and the iconic figure both contributing to a victory and that’s what the team is all about. Gareth can’t do that without these guys, and those guys know that they have to step up to his level for him to be able to make a difference. It’s just perfect pieces of a jigsaw on a pitch.”
The off-the-field puzzle is just as important and nobody within the Wales camp underestimates Roberts’ contribution at all levels. Appointed as the Wales technical director in 2007 and part of the senior setup ever since the late Gary Speed was appointed manager three years later, Roberts has his fingerprints all over the recent success and is also heavily involved in bringing through the next generation.
He is a practitioner as well as an educator, which means that he teaches the theory in the classroom – Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Mikel Arteta have enrolled on his FAW coaching courses – but he also gets his boots dirty, and it is measure of how highly Roberts is regarded at home that he has been described as the most influential man in Welsh football.
“I don’t pay any attention to that,” Roberts says. “I just focus on the role I have to play, and that role is to support Chris, working as part of his staff to make sure that we get things right. From a technical director viewpoint it’s making sure that we’ve got this seamless pathway that’s producing players and that’s hopefully going to give us sustainability at first-team level, so that we can regularly qualify or at least regularly compete to qualify, rather than what it previously was, which is qualify once every 60 years and come close once a decade.”
The challenge now that Wales have made it to a first major tournament since 1958 is to hang around long enough in France to feature in the knockout stage. They take on Slovakia in Bordeaux on Saturday in their opening group game, yet it is that “Battle of Britain” with England in Lens, five days afterwards, that has captured the imagination of everyone.
“It’s not like the rugby,” Roberts says. “In the Six Nations, for the Welsh fans if Wales lose every game but they beat England it’s been a good Six Nations – that’s what the supporters I speak to are like. If we beat England and lose the other two we’re probably out, so it means nothing. If we lose to England and win the other two we’re through. So that game is of little relevance to us until we come to play them. It’s Slovakia and that’s it.”
No stone has been left unturned in terms of the preparation and when it comes to the tactics – which Wales got spot-on time and again during qualification – Roberts is seen as the brains behind the operation. Wales’s favoured system is 3-4-2-1, with Bale and Ramsey operating alongside one another as two No10s, but Roberts insists that nothing is set in stone.
“Where’s Gareth going to play? Is he going to play as a No9, as a No10, is he going to play as a double No10, is he going to play out wide? That’s for other teams to work out, we certainly haven’t got one way of approaching it, because in the qualifying campaign we played six different systems in 10 games. The players believe in all of it, and it will be the right game plan for the right game, hopefully – that’s our challenge. And that’s a major part of what I enjoy doing.”
In many ways Speed’s decision to give Roberts the opportunity to work with the senior team is another part of his legacy. Born in Anglesey, Roberts never made it as a professional footballer in Britain – he played for Bangor City in the Northern League – but the 51-year-old has a wealth of coaching experience going back to the late 1980s, when he started working alongside the former Liverpool winger Steve Heighway in the United States after taking up a soccer scholarship at Furman University in South Carolina.
Speed got to know Roberts when he enrolled on one of his courses at the FAW, yet it still felt like a big call when he asked the former Porthmadog Town manager to join him with the national team. “Questions were asked about there being inexperienced staff behind an inexperienced manager, and that was thrown at Gary and rightly so,” Roberts says. “But all that mattered to me is that Gary had belief in me. I didn’t want to disappoint him – and I didn’t feel as though I did. My sole aim was to make sure that Gary never felt: ‘Blimey, I made a mistake here.’”
The two men became extremely close and it is clear that Roberts has never really come to terms with Speed’s death in November 2011. “We brought psychiatrists into camp early on and I don’t know how other players and staff have dealt with it, but I know I didn’t deal with it very well and probably still haven’t. Maybe that’s the male ego thing. It’s still difficult for me at times. Very difficult.
“I did ask myself at one point whether I wanted to carry on. At the time I was so deflated that you don’t want to. Then you think about it in terms of: ‘What would he want?’ And I firmly believed that Gary would want his work continued. He believed in the players, he believed in what we were doing, and he would want that carried out, and there will be no prouder man than him when we step out in France in the first game.”
It is also a personal triumph for Roberts. At one stage or another he has held almost every job within the national setup other than manager – even now he is still in charge of the under-16s, along with his other roles with the FAW – which means Euro 2016 represents a chance to see the fruits of his labour on one of the biggest stages.
“It’s what you dream of,” Roberts says. “When I was not involved [with the senior team], pre-Gary, the aim was to make sure that we try to develop players ready for whoever is now in charge. So when you’ve seen players in the group who came through in the beginning, and you see them now when they’ve achieved something – and at first hand, you couldn’t ask for anything more rewarding.”
