The emergence of Cardiff City centre-back Lawlor is a prime example of what Adams is describing.<\/p>\n
Having only turned 20 on 1 January, he already has more appearances for Wales’ national team than their Under-21s, earning the first of his three senior caps in September.<\/p>\n
“It’s going have a huge impact on the performance of your under-21 squad when you’ve got between five and seven players being named in each [senior] international window who could be in an under-21 squad,” Adams added.<\/p>\n
“Full credit to Craig for putting a lot of trust in young players and giving Wales an opportunity to keep building a successful squad for the future.<\/p>\n
“The knock-on effect of course is then you’re going to be less competitive at under-21 level but the reality is our strategic goal is to consistently qualify for tournaments for our men’s and women’s senior teams.<\/p>\n
“So there’s no specific KPIs (key performance indicators) around what our under-21 performance looks like. The most important measure of success for our under-21 head coach is to graduate players through that system which obviously we’ve done relatively successfully in the last few years.”<\/p>\n
As well as Lawlor and Cardiff team-mate Kpakio, fellow Bluebird Joel Colwill and Coventry City midfielder Kai Andrews all made their senior Wales debuts in 2025 and are all still eligible to play for the Under-21s.<\/p>\n
That has reduced the pool of players available to head coach Jones, but Adams added: “That’s not an excuse for some of the performances.<\/p>\n
“I think the Belgium game, losing by that number of goals, there’s obviously going to be a review into the tactical plan, how we set the team up to be competitive.<\/p>\n
“Some of these under-21 squads are closer to our men’s senior team transfer market value, so there’s also got to be realisation that of course we want to be competitive every game – and we never give up, that’s our mentality as Welsh people – but there’s also a realisation that you’re playing against some of the best talent in European football.<\/p>\n
“Their players have played 100 games, some played in Champions League games, whereas a lot of our boys are not playing in league football or they’re playing under-21s football, which we all know is not a good barometer for successful transition into international football.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The emergence of Cardiff City centre-back Lawlor is a prime example of what Adams is describing. Having only…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5010],"tags":[748,4884,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-675526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wales","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115842873065962946","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}