

Being a Welshman must make anyone feel proud these days, manager Chris Coleman is making history with this new approach and the role he is playing with the Dragons. Wales is on the verge of playing it's most important football match in history and has a very big chance of reaching the final, but they have to defeat Portugal and Cristiano Ronaldo first. The coach has spoken to Ryan Giggs and other football personalities about Gareth Bale's winning gene.
He said: "If I speak to Giggsy [Ryan Giggs] or if you hear Alex [Ferguson] speaking about him, it's about his desire to get better. You see that on the pitch. You see how motivated he is for himself to score, and to win. You can see that a mile off. Ever since he was younger at United he had that desire to train harder than anybody, get better, win as much as he could. Alex said he was one of the best he's ever worked with.
"We've said to our players, talent is a huge distraction to people. I constantly have conversations with players about people who played up to a certain level and were brilliantly talented. But if you look a bit deeper he was missing something: attitude, mentality. With all his talent, Cristiano has that mentality. It's the same with our boy, Baleo. He has that natural talent but he wants to get better and live his life right."
Coleman added: "I remember Ronaldo when I was at Fulham as a manager, and he scored in the last minute, beat us 2-1 when we were fine and comfortable. He went on a mazy run - unstoppable. You remember things like that, great pieces of play from great individuals. They've got one of them. We've got one too. It'll be interesting tomorrow."
But contrary to Ronaldo, Bale is more of a team player according to Coleman: "You can't manufacture or pretend; you're either a team player or you're not. You're either comfortable or not being in a team environment and happy to work to a certain type of ethic or be in a place with a certain bunch of people who enjoy being together, working hard and putting themselves out there. Baleo is exactly like that, like all the lads. But it's not just this tournament. We had a whole campaign to get through to get here where they were exactly the same. Where we find ourselves now, it hasn't happened overnight. The players, the bonds they have, that togetherness. It's easy to say we have great team spirit on a shiny day. It's real but it came from the darker days. Baleo is the same as the other players on that."
Photo credit: Wales FA