Saturday 29th November 2025 ko 14:00

European U19 Women’s Championship Qualifying League A Group A7

CYMRU 3 (Bowen 63 Selan Yarayan 67og Em Cole 86)

TÜRKIYE 1 (Yaran Ersan 53)

Att c200 at Dragon Park, Newport

Entry FREE but you do have to be on a guest list

Sometimes you see somewhere that piques your interest, and Dragon Park certainly did that for me! Based in Newport it’s the national football development centre intended to develop the Welsh under-21, Women’s and age-based squads. . The centre also provides an based for the Welsh Football Trust, the game’s development body, so the main building also includes facilities for sports science and education too.

The centre also includes two grass pitches and one 3G pitch, with one of the grass pitches being part of a mini stadium. A stadium then.. all things considered I’m surprised I was the only hopper there! Perhaps the issue was getting in, while entry is free you do have to be put on a guest list to gain entry, and thanks to a couple of contacts there for their help. That said, the list wasn’t exhaustively checked, so it is possible that someone could have just walked in.

The stadium is an oddity, as there’s an extended “Arena” stand on the far side, some standing room nearby and nothing else. Catering as via a van and the toilets are of the portaloo-type, and you need to exit the ground to make use of either. It does the job, but no more, and if a club in a league were to want to move in that would need to be rectified!

Of course all of this is part of something much bigger. The Newport Sports Park also includes Spytty Park athletics stadium now home to Newport City but once staged Conference games for Newport County. You can see their floodlights in plenty of the photos. Opposite is the Geraint Thomas National Velodrome, Wales cycling headquarters and featuring 500 seat indoor velodrome. Those do mean the parking is somewhat limited; if you come by car I’d suggest getting here early!

For this round of women’s under-19 championship qualifying all the games in Wales’ Group consisting of the hosts, France, Norway and Türkiye were played over a fortnight between here, Spytty Park and the Cardiff International Sports Stadium. Here I got the unusual fixture with both countries having, in effect having changed names, Wales to the Welsh Cymru and Turkey to Türkiye to avoid reference to poultry with a dislike of Christmas!

It proved to be an entertaining game too. Here the hosts took an age to get into their collective stride and the Turks scoring against the run of play clearly shocked the Welsh. Once roused though, the Welsh rained in crosses and ran in 3 goals to deservedly win the game.