And not too shabby a keeper either.
When you have even 11 fit and committed guys you can go a long way in international football.
England's problem has always been constant picking of flavour of the month players and low commitment to the cause.
Hennessey has been superb, agreed.
Its an odd one really, Wales' national team has been viewed as a waste of time by most of the players for a long time. Players retiring before their time, not turning up to friendlies and just not being bothered about Wales in general. It lead to not even the fans or media even caring about the team. After Mark Hughes left and Toshack took over it was quite a grim time because almost all of our senior players and the core of our more successful side under Hughes (Giggs, Hartson, Speed, Delaney, Melville, Jones etc) had retired and we had nobody to replace them. But its resulted in us being almost forced to review our whole structure and youth development, and a lot of that credit should go to Toshack & Brian Flynn who changed everything about the set up and put a lot of faith in youngsters, partly because they were forced.
I think the fact that a lot of these youngsters were given a chance at international level before they were established regulars at club level and a lot of them had release from club troubles when they came into the team (Bale at Spurs, Ramsey at Arsenal etc) has also added their loyalty and the fact they enjoy turning up to international duty.
England need something like that but as a bigger nation they can't really afford 4 or 5 years of youngsters learning on the job and making mistakes as they'd be slaughtered and their reputation tarnished for a few years at least. They could do it with players like Barkley, Kane, Sterling, Oxlade, Stones, Shaw etc but no way would Hodgson risk something like that despite it probably being more beneficial in the long term than persisting with players like Milner, Jagielka, Cleverley etc who will never really be good enough.