England vs Wales: Wayne Hennessey expects to return for Euro 2016 Group B clash

1/30
Tom Dutton13 June 2016

Wales goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey expects to be fit to face England as the two home nations prepare to meet in the Euro 2016 group stages.

The Crystal Palace star missed his country's 2-1 win over Slovakia with a back injury as they moved to the top of Group B ahead of Thursday's clash with Roy Hodgson's men.

The 29-year-old suffered a back spasm on the eve of the tournament and had to drop out, with Liverpool's Danny Ward making his first international start.

"I had one (spasm) and missed the Liverpool game at home for Crystal Palace," said Hennessey.

"I had exactly a similar one. So I'll have an injection now and I will probably be back in 24 hours which sounds crazy.

"It is one of those things that you go from broke to mended in about 24 hours.

"It was an unsettling time for myself, but our motto is 'Together Stronger' and it is all about the boys.

"I thought Danny did really well, it was a big situation for him to come in but I thought he was tremendous."

Aaron Ramsey insists Wales will focus on themselves and not be too concerned about England when they meet in Thursday's Battle of Britain.

"We wanted to start off well in this competition and we've managed to do that," said Ramsey.

"We work hard for each other, we have quality going forward and we are ready to take on anybody.

"They have a lot of good players, who are quite dangerous individually.

"They had a faultless (qualifying) campaign. But we will focus on ourselves and what we need to do to try and get something out of the game."

Ramsey could come up against Arsenal team-mate Jack Wilshere at the Stade Bollaert-Delelis.

Wilshere came on for the final 12 minutes of England's draw with Russia, replacing skipper Wayne Rooney, and the Welshman says he might be in contact with his Gunners' team-mate before the game.

"There might be a couple of texts, but we are simply focussed on trying to win the game now," said Ramsey.

"We'll approach that goal (England) like we did this one, we will work on that in training this week.

"We've been waiting for this moment for a long time, to experience what we experienced against Slovakia was fantastic.

"It was quite emotional when the anthems were being sung.

"We had to pinch ourselves to stop the tears coming down, it was really spine-tingling."

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in