Meet the Great Britain flyer staking a claim for a Wales shirt

Two rounds into the new Celtic Challenge season Nia Fajeyisan has staked a claim for a place in Sean Lynn’s senior Wales squad.

At the weekend the wing scored a try as Gwalia Lightning registered a 38-7 win over Welsh rivals Brython Thunder at Cardiff Arms Park. Across two weekends the former Cardiff City academy goalkeeper has matched her appearance total for last season and scored her first try for the side.

Already the youngster has packed a lot into her career. This has included representing Wales at the 2023 Commonwealth Youth Games in Trinidad & Tobago, age grade Rugby Europe competition and at age grade level for her country.

Her early season good form comes just after Fajeyisan made her Great Britain Sevens debut on the HSBC SVNS Series in Dubai and Cape Town.

For the opening two rounds of the 2025/26 Series season, Fajeyisan and Great Britain – which was a team largely comprised of age grade internationals from Wales and England – placed bottom of the standings on consecutive weekends.

On the second weekend in Cape Town, Fajeyisan scored her first Great Britain try. She played in the same team as her Wales Under-20s teammates Hanna Marshall and Jorja Aiono, who she played with at the Six Nations Women’s Summer Series.

A bright spark for Jonathan Hooper’s side in South Africa, her experiences on a sevens field coupled with her early season form for Gwalia means that the teenager could have Test honours in her immediate future.

After Wales’ early exit from the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup, Sean Lynn discussed the importance of players playing Celtic Challenge competition.

His squad for the tournament contained a number of young players (Molly Reardon, Tilly Vucaj, Seren Lockwood and Nel Metcalfe) that had thrived in the six team competition earlier that year.

At the Women’s Rugby World Cup, Wales scored the third least tries in the competition (six), behind only Brazil (one) and Samoa (zero).

A perceived lack of firepower, combined with a probably changing of the guard ahead of the 2026 Guinness Women’s Six Nations it is plausible that Fajeyisan’s name will be added alongside the likes of Jasmine Joyce-Butchers and Lisa Neumann.

Recently the Welsh Rugby Union announced that they intended to increase their rate of annual investment into women’s rugby from £3.7m to £5.7m by 2030.

This included a plan to more than triple their annual investment into their two Celtic Challenge teams over the next five years.

Fajeyisan is already a familiar face in Cardiff. In 2023, while still a student, her depiction was unveiled in Adamsdown as part of Urdd’s 2023 Peace and Goodwill message of anti-racism.

At the time Fajeyisan described it as “surreal” and “freaky” to see her image on the side of a building but was not “embarrassed by it”.

Lightning are next in action on Saturday 10 January when they travel to play Glasgow Warriors.