Rob Page believes Wales should be proud to be among the top-ranked teams in the Nations League and believes it will aid their improvement.
Wales won promotion to League A in the last edition of the competition and Thursday’s draw for the next version put Page’s team in a group alongside Belgium, Holland and Poland.
The Dragons have come a long way in recent years, qualifying for successive European Championships, reaching the semi-finals in 2016 with victory against Belgium en route.
Page said: “I hope all the supporters at home watching it were really, really proud waiting for that League A – the top division. Waiting for the top teams to come out and us being part of that.
“We’ve come a long way in recent years but we are not here by fluke, we deserve to be in this top division.
“If we want to evolve and improve and develop our young players, and our senior players as well, we have to play against the top teams in Europe. And the teams who we have been drawn against and the other top teams in the competition will certainly do that.
“As players, coaches and managers you want to play against the best in Europe and we are certainly doing that against these teams.
“Four or five years ago if you’d said to Wales fans we’d get to the semi-finals of the Euros then they would have said ‘yeah, alright’. But we did it and we’ve used the finance and experience we got from that to build.
“We’ve had two consecutive qualifications for the Euros. We want to keep evolving and keep improving, we don’t want this ‘Will they qualify? won’t they qualify?’. We want to qualify for major tournaments regularly and we want to get into the knock-out stages.
“We did it in 2016 and we did it again last year and we are two games away from hopefully qualifying for a World Cup. If we don’t then we will be very disappointed, but if we do then that won’t surprise a lot of people either.
“So we are in that transitional stage and playing teams of the quality of Belgium, Holland and Poland will mean we keep progressing.”
On renewing their rivalry with Belgium, who Wales also played in their World Cup qualifying group, Page said: “We fully respect the talent and the individuals they have got but we showed against them that we can more than handle that.”
