Our hotel was ‘The Royal Hotel’, here’s a pic. It was the strangest hotel i’ve been in as it was above a pub, reception was on the second floor and you couldn’t get in to the hotel without buzzing in and getting reception to remotely unlock the door.
So very private and nice from the point of view it’s literally only hotel guests that are allowed in to the hotel – no rif raff 
Anyway, Cardiff was a nice city… not the usual British run down city i’d expected. It was clean, compact and quite modern yet had a sense of history around it.
This was my second away trip with Ireland, i’d been in Stuttgart, Germany last year. We lost that one 1-0. This time, we drew 2-2.
We went 1-0 down, then pulled away to 2-1 and carelessly gave away a penalty late on which brought it back to 2-2. So disappointing result and performance in many ways as Wales are no world beaters. That said, we are managerless and it didn’t mean anything so it’s tough to say whether they gave it 100%.
The match was on the Saturday and we arrived early Friday so we got a tour of the 75,000 seater millenium stadium. At the match itself the attendance was 25,000 so it looked very empty and that killed the atmosphere at times. Still, the Irish fans tried to start the mexican wave in a half empty stadium 😆 Check out these fine panormaic shots..
We also got a ‘Russia’ chant going which i’m sure didn’t go down to well with SkySports (Russia had a chance to knock England out of the tournament that evening). Then there was ‘You’re supposed to be at home’ (Irish fans having a go at Wales fans for not turning up and filling the stadium)… so the atmosphere in the Irish end was great as usual, but like i said, it’s hard to keep the noise up in a half empty stadium.