Gareth Bale is donating almost £1m to assist health workers combating coronavirus in both Wales and Spain. The Wales captain and his wife Emma have made a £500,000 donation to help NHS staff fighting the crisis in Cardiff and will follow that up with a further €500,000 for the health service in Madrid, where he and his family have been on lockdown since 14 March. Bale made the donation to the Cardiff and Vale Health University health board and released a video thanking NHS staff for their work amid the crisis.

Welsh golf star Phil Price rates winning the Staysure Seniors Tour Order of Merit last season as being right up there with his Ryder Cup heroics. Following Ian Woosnam as the only Welsh player to top one of the main golf order of merit tables was also enough to earn 53-year-old Price the Wales Golf Tour Pro of the Year Award. Of course he is best known for beating Phil Mickelson in the singles of the 2002 Ryder Cup at The Belfry, helping Team Europe to victory, but last year’s European Seniors Tour win represents reward for consistency.

Pontypool’s plans to reach the Indigo Group Premiership may have been scuppered by the coronavirus crisis, but they have pledged to honour all contracts with players through to the end of the season. The reigning champions of the Specsavers Championship, they led the table by five points from Bargoed when the WRU called an end to the season and ruled there would be no promotion or relegation. At that stage Pooler were unbeaten in 16 games and had extended their unbeaten run in the league to 62 matches.

Less than four year ago, Craig Parry was co-driver for Elfyn Evans as they lifted the British Rally Championship. Two years later, that world came to a shuddering halt – but a whole new one has opened up as Paul Evans discovered. It had started as just another ordinary day for Craig Parry. He was in Germany, at the vast Baumholder military training range near the Luxembourg/France border to be precise, testing in preparation for the following week’s Rallye Deutschland.

Despite lockdown, over 500 deliberate grass fires have been recorded in Wales in recent weeks. Each one wastes the valuable, time, energy and resources of firefighters like Barry-based Wales rugby league captain Rafiuke Taylor – crews who are busy enough dealing with the impact of coronavirus, as she told Graham Thomas. Firefighter Rafiuke Taylor has a simple message for those setting fire to Welsh hillsides: “Please, stop!” The dual code Wales rugby international is busy enough at the best of times, combining captaining the Wales women’s rugby league side and playing rugby union for Pontyclun Falcons with motherhood and her job with South Wales Fire and Rescue Service.

Cardiff City, Swansea City and Newport County should learn more about plans to re-start the football season after talks on Tuesday. The Football League clubs are scheduled to hold a conference call and plans for the resolution of the season are expected to be discussed, with reports suggesting some League Two clubs are ready to pull the plug on the campaign. The EFL told its member clubs earlier this month to prepare for the season to be completed in 56 days behind closed doors once it was deemed safe for a restart following the coronavirus lockdown.

As part of his mission to re-watch some classic moments in Welsh rugby history – and ponder them in the era of lockdown Britain – Harri Morgan has now stepped out of his time-machine in 1987. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister, Whitney Houston is No.1, and little Harri is watching Wales v England through the bars of his cot. What are my memories of Wales v England at Rugby World Cups? I have two absolute classics. They have different narratives, context and outcome, but both were important days in my experience as a supporter of Welsh rugby.

Any athlete in need of motivation right now, in the ability to endure, need look no further than Dai Greene. Having hit the heights of becoming world champion in 2011, he’s been sorely tested in the nine years since. But he’s still unwilling the throw in the towel as he told Rob Cole. He hasn’t got a track to train on, hurdles to jump over, a gym to work-out in or a coach to meet up with, yet still Dai Greene is refusing to give up on his Olympic dream. It seems as though everything is conspiring against the 2011 world 400m hurdles champion at the moment, and all at a time when he thought he was back on course to race injury free.

Like most clubs, Cardiff City have had their share of strange transfer deals over the years – the ones that leave fans scratching their heads. Terry Phillips remembers a record transfer from 38 years ago that even now takes some unravelling. Godfrey Ingram’s move from North America to South Wales during 1982 proved to be one of the oddest transfers in Cardiff City’s history. The former Luton Town forward was reported to have joined Cardiff City from San Jose Earthquakes for a club record £180,000 fee.

The coronavirus crisis is set to claim its first football club victim this week with Rhyl FC heading for liquidation unless £175,000 can be found by the end of Monday. The four-time Welsh Cup and two-time Welsh Premier League winners, who play in the Cymru North second tier of Welsh football, have had a final extension placed on attempts to come up with a rescue package. A Go Fund Me appeal by the Rhys Fans Association has so far raised only £3,000 of an attempted £20,000.

Leighton James played against Norman Hunter throughout the 1970s – both for club and country – and insists the former England and Leeds United defender, who died this week, was far more than just a hard man, as he told Graham Thomas. Leighton James can still recall the tackles, the shoves, the pushes and the clatter of bone-on-bone whenever he played against Norman Hunter. But the supremely canny former Wales winger has a more painful memory of damage inflicted by Hunter in January 1973 when Wales played England at Wembley in a key qualification tie for the 1974 World Cup.

Think of a number that sums up the best of Welsh rugby players throughout history and most people plump for 10. Max Boyce would be among them. But Owen Morgan reckons that just doesn’t add up. Max Boyce got it wrong! Instead of celebrating the mythical Welsh outside-half factory almost 40 years ago on his iconic Live at Treorchy album, Glynneath’s finest should have been singing the praises of Wales’ scrum-half seams.

Just four short years ago relief was the overwhelming emotion for Jazz Carlin as she booked her spot for Rio 2016 in her final race at the British Olympic trials at Tollcross, Glasgow. Although she had finished first in the 200m and 800m free, neither time had been inside the qualifying mark and it all came down to the 400m. The pressure was almost intolerable as she lined up on 16 April 2016 but 4mins 04.33sJecs later and Carlin had made it, to bring to an end four years which had started with the Welsh swimming great almost walking away from the sport after glandular fever scuppered her chances of competing at London 2012.

Not many Welsh footballers, men or women, win a European football trophy. There are fewer than 30 in total, but the first of them was Ollie Burton. Josh Thomas met the man who led the way with a winners’ medal for Newcastle United back in 1969. It meant everything,” says 78-year-old Ollie Burton, recalling being one of only 28 Welsh players in both the men’s and women’s game to have played in the final of a European club competition. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Newcastle United’s victory over Hungarian side Újpesti Dózsa in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, which was the Magpies’ last domestic honour.

Gareth Bale’s return to football in La Liga has been branded a complete “a non-starter” by Barcelona coach Quique Setien. The Barca chief is pessimistic that the Spanish top flight season will be able to be completed and has dismissed the league’s conditions for the return of football due to the continued threat of coronavirus. Wales and Real Madrid star Bale has been sidelined with other players in Spain since La Liga was put on hold on March 10 due to the pandemic, although president Javier Tebas has said matches could start up again on either May 29, June 7 or June 28, most likely without fans.

Former Wales and New Zealand coach Graham Henry has backed Agustin Pichot’s attempt to shake up World Rugby. Henry has voiced his support for Pichot after the Argentine’s bid to challenge WR chairman Bill Beaumont was confirmed by the global governing body. The Kiwi coach – who led Wales into the 1999 World Cup and paved the way for the Grand Slam successes of Mike Ruddock and Warren Gatland – believes the European nations should throw their support behind Pichot’s attempt to revamp the sport in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Tributes have been pouring in for one of the unsung heroes of Welsh rugby, Leighton Davies, the former head coach and long standing PE lecturer at Cardiff College of Education who has died, aged 83. Rob Cole outlines Davies’s influence in Wales. One of the most influential and important coaches in the national game for almost three decades, Leighton Davies nurtured dozens of Welsh internationals and British & Irish Lions, set the standards for thousands of schoolteachers, and planted the coaching seed into the minds of hundreds more. As the news of his death was announced, former students around the world began to recall the days when ‘Mr Davies’, affectionately known as ‘Nutty’, although never to his face, taught them.

Geraint Thomas is desperate for the Tour de France to go ahead this year after it was postponed by two months due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Welsh winner of the race in 2018 is currently raising money for the NHS with three charity rides inside his garage at his home in Cardiff. But the 33-year-old is hoping a delayed tour can now get the go-ahead in late August.

John Toshack has paid this tribute to former Merthyr Town defender Frankie Collins, who passed away earlier this month. Cardiff-born former Wales, Swansea City and Real Madrid manager Toshack was a teenage centre-forward when he played for the Bluebirds against Merthyr’s Collins in a Welsh League fixture during the later 1960s. It was a learning experience for the young striker, who recalled: “In my early days playing for Cardiff City in Welsh League football, I had earned a bit of a reputation for myself as a young goal-scoring centre-forward.

Gary Neville fears there is a “serious problem brewing” for players in the Football League coming towards the end of their contracts – despite an agreement over wage reductions at clubs like Newport County. Neville fears that the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic is such that players whose current deals finish at the end of June will struggle to find new clubs. “There is a serious problem brewing in the next few months. Over 1,000 players in the Championship, League One and League Two are out of contract at the end of June and clubs haven’t got the money to recycle them back into the game,” Neville told Sky Sports News’ Football Show.