Dai Sport

Lauren Williams returned to competition after Tokyo 2020 with a gold medal winning performance at the Dutch Open in Eindhoven. Williams, who marked her Olympic debut in Japan with a superb silver medal, stepped up from -67kg to -73kg for her first fight of the Paris 2024 cycle. “Tactically, it was a lot different,” said the Welsh star. “The girls weren’t as quick and as intense as I am used to.

Lewis Prosser believes Welsh hockey is on course for a year to savour after he helped Wales men’s team qualify for the World Cup for the first time. Not only did Prosser set a new record mark of 159 caps for his country last weekend, when he made his 159th appearance, but he guided his team to the tournament finals in India, which take place at the start of 2023. The unparalleled achievement means Wales can look forward to a bumper few months of elite hockey competition with the Eurohockey Championships, the Commonwealth Games and the World Cup all in the space of less than a year.

Sophie Ingle has admitted not so long ago she would never have believed Wales could stand on the threshold of a record crowd by means of a fixture against Estonia. But that is exactly where Wales are poised to be for Tuesday night’s qualifier for the Women’s World Cup which is taking place at the Cardiff City Stadium. The Football Association of Wales are confident that the current highest attendance for a Wales women’s international match – the 5,052 who saw Wales play England at Rodney Parade in 2018 – will be eclipsed.

Two Welsh endurance athletes were in national record breaking form in Yorkshire over the weekend. On Saturday, race walker Bethan Davies set a new British 35k record in Leeds, while Sunday saw Charlotte Arter break the 37-year-old Welsh 10k record in the same city.

Jason Pritchard has won the Protyre Motorsport UK Asphalt Rally Championship title for a third time in a row after scoring maximum points on the final round, the Ford Parts Cheviot Stages Rally.

Of all the strange revelations given to Cardiff City supporters groups last weekend in a meeting with chairman Mehmet Dalman, surely the least surprising was that owner Vincent Tan has a preference for “a direct style of football.” Of course, he does. This is a man, lest we forget, who told the players when he met them back in 2016 to “shoot more”. Providing secretly mined data previously unknown to club coaches and analysts throughout European football, the Malaysian billionaire said: “If you shoot 30 times you'll get three goals, 40 times will be four goals, 50 times and you'll get five goals.