Wales boss Chris Coleman has heaped praise on his injury-hit side after they ground out a narrow victory over Macedonia in their penultimate World Cup qualifier tonight.

Simon Church's late winner proved enough for the Welsh to triumph in Craig Bellamy's final home international, despite Aaron Ramsey's late penalty miss.

Coleman believes that earning three points with a depleted team should be a statement of intent from his young team, insisting that they did enough to merit a hard-fought win.

He told BBC Sport: "It is one of my happier nights. When you get a lot of young players in the squad and then we get a result like that for us it was a show of intent.

"We wanted to show people that we have got a little bit of depth in the squad, more than what we thought by the looks of it, because I thought our lads were absolutely brilliant.

"We played some great football at times, made chances. We rode our luck a bit, they had a few chances but overall I thought we deserved to win it."

Wales now sit fourth in Group A ahead of their final qualifier against Belgium, who have already earned safe passage to next summer's finals after beating Croatia earlier today.

Written by
Liam Power