Wes Burns has thanked Craig Bellamy for the backing that he believes kept his Wales career alive during a year on the sidelines, revealing that he pulled the head coach aside to tell him what those months of contact meant to him.
“The world of football forgets you very, very fast when you’re not playing,” said the 31-year-old, who is back with the national team for the first time since earning the last of his 10 caps in October 2024. “But when someone of Craig Bellamy’s stature, the head coach of Wales, is calling me every month, or once every two weeks, to make sure I’m doing well… it’s a massive, massive plus. Rather than feeling a million miles away, it always made me feel I was in touching distance of getting back in.”
Burns had good reason to fear the worst. He was out for almost a year after suffering a torn anterior cruciate ligament during Ipswich Town’s defeat at Liverpool in January 2025, and by the time he returned 11 months later he had missed Wales’ qualifying campaign for the 2026 World Cup, a bid that ultimately ended in the play-offs.
“You just have to remember you’re only one second away from disaster, really,” he said. “That’s how I felt when the injury happened. You feel that could be the end of your career because you never know how bad the injury is initially. And when you’ve had surgery, and your knee’s like a balloon, you’re thinking ‘how on earth am I even going to walk again, never mind play’. Everything heals in time, though, and it was just about making sure I got the rehab right. The phone calls from Craig, knowing he had a similar injury when he was younger as a player, meant so much to me.”
The Cardiff-born former Fleetwood winger is now at Leicester City, having chosen to drop two divisions rather than stay at Ipswich, where he had weighed up another year and the chance to play a full Premier League season.
“I could’ve done another year at Ipswich, and I was weighing up whether to finish the story of playing a full season in the Premier League – a level I’d worked so hard to get back to,” he said. “But I also had to think about the longevity of my career, and in the end I took the option of a longer contract at Leicester and possibly recreating what I’d already done at Ipswich (back-to-back promotions).”
That project has yet to gather pace, with Leicester 13th in League One under former Swansea City boss Russell Martin, having won two of their opening seven games. Burns, though, is convinced the Foxes will come good, drawing a parallel with his own experience of arriving at Ipswich.
“We all know the story – Leicester, Premier League champions 10 years ago, amazing Champions League run, FA Cup winners and now sort of sitting mid-table in League One,” he said. “But it feels like they’re very much in the same spot as when I went into Ipswich. It’s a chance to recreate something that I’ve done in the past with an amazing manager who obviously gets a lot of stick. He has a style of play and a philosophy that’s very, very football-based and high risk but when that works it’s amazing. Trust me – I’ve played against very good Russell Martin teams and they’re very hard to play against, but it’s a process and processes take a long time. I’ve got no doubt it’s going to pick up, for sure.”
On the international front, Burns did not make it off the substitutes’ bench in Lisbon, where Wales began their Nations League campaign with a 1-0 defeat by Portugal. He hopes to get minutes in the second fixture against Denmark in Copenhagen, before a Cardiff City Stadium meeting with Erling Haaland’s Norway and a home game against Portugal later in the group. His most recent outing for Leicester was a 30-minute cameo from the bench at Barnsley on 19 September, and he is relishing the step back up in class.
“Going from the weekly level of football I’m now at to possibly playing against Norway, Denmark or Portugal… obviously the gap in quality is going to be massive,” said Burns. “But I’ve had experience of playing in the Premier League and against very good international teams. The one that stands out for me is when we played Netherlands away in the Nations League (in 2022), and I was on the same pitch as Frenkie de Jong – still to this day the best player I’ve ever played against or witnessed on a football field. So just drawing on experiences like that, and big games I’ve played in, will definitely help if I do get on the pitch against Denmark and Norway. It’s just so exciting to be involved in games like these.”
After the trauma of the injury, Burns is simply pleased to be back in the Wales set-up at all, and hopes to benefit from the new faces on the coaching staff, including Ashley Williams. With his international minutes limited over the past two years, he is keen to make up for lost time.