Josh Sheehan Prepares for Tough Test Against Ghana

Josh Sheehan will walk out at Cardiff City Stadium on Tuesday night with promotion in his legs and a World Cup hangover in his head.

Fresh from steering Bolton Wanderers up to the Championship via the League One play‑offs, the midfielder has swapped club euphoria for international frustration. Cymru are still nursing the wound of that March penalty shoot-out defeat to Bosnia & Herzegovina, a night that slammed the door on their FIFA World Cup dream.

Sheehan is not interested in sympathy. He wants edge.

“Of course there’s disappointment,” he said in camp this week. “We all wish we were preparing for the World Cup right now, but we’re not. It’s disappointing, but we have to learn from it.”

That sense of unfinished business now drives everything Craig Bellamy’s squad do. The World Cup is gone; the anger stays.

“We believe we should have been there, but now our focus is on the Nations League and the challenges ahead,” Sheehan added. “We’ve got to learn from what happened and look forward. We’ve got some big games coming up and that’s the level we believe we should be at. We want to keep moving forward as a group.”

From heartbreak to heavyweight company

The calendar offers no time for self-pity. Ghana arrive in Cardiff on Tuesday, World Cup-bound and sharpening their tools. For Cymru, it is the first real staging post on the road to the UEFA Nations League in the autumn, where Bellamy’s side will be thrown into League A alongside Portugal, Norway and Denmark.

No soft landings there. No hiding places either.

“They’re a good team and they’ve got some very big, important players who are at the top of their game,” Sheehan said of Ghana. “We know going into the game it’s going to be tough.

“It’s a warm-up game for them going into the World Cup, and I think they’re a nation going into it looking to give it a real go. So we know it’s going to be a tough game, but we’re more than confident that if we do what we do and perform to our levels, then it’s going to be a good game.”

The respect is clear, but so is the intent. Cymru want to test themselves against World Cup opposition because that is where they believe they belong.

“It’s one of those games where, going forward, we know they’ve got threats we’re going to have to be wary of,” Sheehan said. “But we also look at it from our perspective as well, we know we can hurt them too.”

A familiar face in different colours

Among those threats could be a player Sheehan knows only too well. Ghana forward Antoine Semenyo, once his team-mate at Newport County, has since surged into the Premier League and become one of its most dangerous attackers.

The rise does not surprise him.

“I’ve played with Antoine Semenyo before, and he’s done so well in his career, now at Man City,” Sheehan said. “He was a quiet boy, but when he stepped on the pitch, honestly, straight away he was so strong, so fast, so direct.”

You can hear the memory in his voice. A teenager, barely filled out, bullying defenders who should have known better.

“You could tell from that moment he was going to go on and have a good career,” Sheehan recalled. “He did well in that FA Cup game [2-1 win against Leicester City] and from then he was already being linked with big clubs. So from that point you knew he was going to go on.”

At Newport, Semenyo was only 18. He didn’t play like it.

“When he was at Newport he was only 18, but he carried himself on the pitch like he was a lot older,” Sheehan said. “You could see it straight away, good with his left foot, good with his right foot, strong. Even at 18, he wasn’t fully developed yet, but you could tell in the next few years he was going to kick on.”

Now, if selected, the pair could meet again – one in red, one in Ghana’s colours, both symbols of very different journeys.

For Cymru, that is the point of nights like this. Use the sting of what slipped away in March, measure themselves against a World Cup side, and prove that League A and the company of Europe’s elite is not an aspiration but a standard.