No return for retired dragons Savage and Speed

JOHN TOSHACK has dismissed suggestions he should look to the Wales old guard to bolster his young squad.

And the national team manager has suggested some of the senior players from former boss Mark Hughes’ squad now believe they “retired too soon”.

A roller coaster five days has seen Toshack’s side lurch from a 5-1 mauling at the hands of Slovakia to Wednesday’s hugely-improved performance which brought a 3-1 win over Cyprus to boost to Wales’ Euro 2008 qualifying campaign.

The Slovakia defeat brought calls for the recall of players like former captain Gary Speed and even the long since discarded Robbie Savage.

But the comfortable win over Cyprus gave Toshack the platform to end such speculation for good.

“This is a squad we are trying to put together. I am sure further down the line in years to come people will reap the benefits from what I am doing,” he said.

“What amuses me is that at the start we had a year of this talk about Savage and Speed but we won back-to-back games against Northern Ireland and Azerbaijan and we never heard anything about it for a while.

“We won another couple of matches, we did well against the Czechs and Brazil and still there was none of this talk about bringing people back.

“Then we lose one match, 5-1 at home. You expect criticism but suddenly from somewhere all these things crop up.

“Nobody talked about the half-dozen players missing through injury, including our captain and top player Ryan Giggs.

“All people wanted to talk about was the ones that had retired. We have to push on, we can’t think of filling holes for nine months by going back to these people.

“I have the utmost respect for Gary Speed, I wrote to him when he retired saying what a magnificent career he’d had, thanking him for what he had done and wishing him all the best in the future.

“Maybe he is performing like he is now because he is not involved in these two matches in four or five days.”

Toshack added: “As a manager I would love to have an extension of my thinking on the field, an experienced player who has been around for a long time.

“Sometimes you want field craft out there. Someone to realise how long there is to go, look at the clock and have the brains to steady things down and keep control.

“It is very difficult for youngsters to always understand those sort of things and some of our older lads are not quite ready yet to shoulder that sort of responsibility.

“A lot of the old hands retired over a 12-month period – I think some of them think that their decision was a little too quick.

“But we are two years on from that now and we can’t think of going back now.”