Does dim llawer o lwyddiant i’w gael yn hanes pêl-droed Cymru. Aeth Cymru i mewn i gêm gymhwyso Cwpan y Byd FIFA am y tro cyntaf yn y 1950au. Ac eithrio rhediad sydd bellach bron yn chwedlonol i rownd yr wyth olaf yng Nghwpan y Byd 1958 (lle collodd y tîm o drwch blewyn i dîm Brasil yn cynnwys Pele 17 oed), a cholled o 3-1 yn rownd yr wyth olaf. i Iwgoslafia yn Ewro 76, methodd Cymru â chymhwyso ar gyfer unrhyw dwrnamentau mawr, gan barhau â chatalog o ymgyrchoedd truenus yn bennaf gyda llond llaw o eiliadau dirdynnol ‘beth os’, gyda’r tîm yn syrthio ar y rhwystr olaf o gymhwyso – yn aml mewn ffasiwn ddramatig.

Mae methiannau agos nodedig yn cynnwys gêm gymhwyso dadleuol Cwpan y Byd 1977 yn erbyn yr Alban lle dyfarnwyd cic gosb bendant i chwaraewr o’r Alban (Joe Jordan) er iddo drin y bêl, a’r gêm yn erbyn Romania yng Nghaerdydd i gymhwyso ar gyfer Cwpan y Byd 1994, lle anfonodd Paul Bodin cic gosb – a fyddai wedi selio’r fuddugoliaeth i Gymru – yn hwylio dros y croesfar.

Roedd penodi Gary Speed ​​yn rheolwr tîm rhyngwladol y dynion yn 2011 wedi rhoi hwb i gyfnod o lwyddiant digynsail, gyda’r tîm (a oedd wedi disgyn i 117fed safle isaf erioed yn safle’r byd, yn is na Gogledd Corea ac Ynysoedd y Ffaröe) yn cymhwyso. ar gyfer Ewro 2016 lle – o dan olynydd Speed, Chris Coleman – fe wnaethon nhw fwynhau rhediad syfrdanol i rownd gynderfynol y gystadleuaeth, oedd yn cynnwys buddugoliaeth syfrdanol o 3-1 yn erbyn Gwlad Belg. Mae’n haf a newidiodd y rhagolygon ar gyfer pêl-droed yng Nghymru, a bu’r tîm – sy’n cynnwys enwau cartrefol fel Gareth Bale, Aaron Ramsey a Joe Allen – yn gorymdeithio drwy strydoedd Caerdydd mewn bws agored.

Roedd golygfeydd y gorfoledd yn dangos pa mor bell y mae pêl-droed Cymru wedi dod ers Cwpan y Byd 1958, lle, yn ôl y sôn, gofynnodd un o’r chwaraewyr a oedd yn dychwelyd yn ddiniwed gan arweinydd trên yng Ngorsaf Abertawe a oedd wedi bod yn unrhyw le braf ar ei wyliau.

^{Cribwyd yr uchod oll yn Gymraeg oddiyma.}

If you’re still with me after all the garble – congrats, here’s a picture of famous Welshwoman Catherine Zeta-Jones as your reward.

Look, if I can be serious for a minute,

there are only two Welsh football names most of us know – Ryan Giggs and Gareth Bale. Giggs is both a Welsh and ManU legend, having played 20 years of International football for Wales and 23 years on the roster for the Red Devils. He was even coach of the Welsh team up until November 2020, when he was arrested on criminal charges of one count of controlling and coercive behaviour and two offences of assault (for domestic assault & abuse) against his then-girlfriend Kate Greville. (After a hung jury, he faces retrial in July 2023.)

Gareth Bale, meanwhile, has had a somewhat opposite career. While he has played for both Tottenham & Real Madrid, he has missed significant time in his career due to injury. He lost 123 games due to injury during his nine years at Real. But when he’s been healthy, he has been brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sodxDn1PPDo

He is the country’s all-time top scorer (40 goals in 108 caps), and captained the team in both the 2016 and 2020 Euro tournament. He has been with his wife, Emma Rhys-Jones, since high school, and is so committed to a teetotaling lifestyle he reportedly celebrated his first Real Madrid goal with a prawn cocktail instead of the customary champagne. But he does know how to market – he’s partnered with local brewery Glamorgan Brewing Company to sell “Bale Ale” at all Welsh Tesco’s before the World Cup begins,

the profits of which will go to support developing football at a local level in Wales, to – as brewery director Richard Anstee put it – “help to make sure we never have to wait that long again” for a team to make the World Cup. By all accounts, Bale’s the type of guy you’d want your kid to emulate & your daughter to date.

But that man-bun shit has to stop.

Fortunately, there is more to the team than just a LAFC benchwarmer. It all starts with their new head coach, Rob Page, who took over the team after Giggs’ arrest in November 2020 and was only given the permanent job back in September. Like Giggs, Page played for the Welsh national team as a defender, amassing 41 caps in a career spanning 1996-2005. That’s why any discussion of Wales has to start with their back line, which is anchored by Chris Gunter & his 109 caps and Bale’s former Tottenham teammate Ben Davies, and shored up by Wales U21 graduates Notts Forest defender Neco Williams and the impossibly named Rhys Norrington-Davies from the impossible to pronounce town of Aberystwyth.

Key to the midfield will be Joe Allen, currently at Swansea City in the Championship League, and Aaron Ramsey, who plays at Nice. Combined, the two have over 140 caps for Wales, and will be the keys to making sure Group favourite England don’t stretch the field too much.

Oh… speaking of Nice, here is Wales’ #1 pornstar & actress in over 800 films (according to iafd.com), Sophie Dee.

Up front, Wales has the aforementioned Bale who will see most of the coverage. But don’t sleep on Litre Cola’s personal Welsh favourite Daniel James, who scored some key goals for Wales in their qualification games but has not done much for Fulham since being loaned to them by Leeds United back in September.

^{The boy’s got a definite look.}

He’s not done much on the field this season, but that doesn’t mean his youth will be underserved in Qatar. As £150 million paid spokes… “brand ambassador”  David Beckham recently opined,

“I was lucky enough to play in three World Cups and I know that I went into each one of those World Cups playing probably 50 to 60 games in the season,” Beckham told Al Jazeera in Doha. “Players are coming into this World Cup after playing 25 games. So they will be arriving fresh and excited. Their energy is going to be at the top level, so I think what you’re going to see on the pitch is probably like no other World Cup.”

That was surely worth the Emir’s money. Who says Elon is the only billionaire skilled at wasting capital?

When the matches do come, the on-field lineup is going to look a little something like this:

What Wales’ hopes come down to is whether they can beat the non-English teams in their Group. They are favoured to beat Iran, and the game against the US is considered (at the time I typed this) an even-money draw. That means using the 4-2-3-1 lineup to press the attack. If they can get three points out of those, and keep their goal differential against England respectable, they have a very good shot at making the playoff round as Group B’s second-place team. This would earn them a match on December 3rd against projected Group A winner The Netherlands.

Anyways, to wrap this up here are two of Wales’ greatest exports – Shirley Bassey & Tom Jones – singing about what Wales needs to get to the playoff rounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_HrmPkhkJw

Lawr gyda’r Saeson! Ewch Cymru Ewch!

Because I can’t help myself, here’s the history lesson.

The song at the header, “Yma o Hyd” (“Still here”), was written & released by Welsh nationalist singer Dafydd Iwan in 1983. Iwan is a devout Welsh nationalist who was once arrested for his participation in the “road signs” protests in the 1960s, predicated upon the “Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg” (the Welsh Language Society) who viewed English language road signs as mundane, ubiquitous and oppressive symbols of anglicization and of British/English government authority in Wales. (For comparison, the same issue came up during the 1960s “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec.) Working in their favour was the general 1960s movement towards the liberation of oppressed people. For example, the Welsh Language Society was working to repeal the clause in the Act of Union of 1536 which banned Welsh as an official language of government in Wales. From there, they looked to reintroduce Welsh language as part of the education system in Wales.  It also didn’t help that most of the Parliamentary (usually Conservative) opposition in London was predicated on the cost of bilingual signs and strawman arguments about discrimination against English speakers.

Iwan gained further notoriety in 1969, when he recorded the anti-Investiture song “Carlo” to protest the public crowning of Charles the Prince of Wales, which was seen by many as “an attempt by the political establishment in Britain to stem the tide of growing Welsh nationalism by playing on traditional Welsh loyalty to the Crown, in order to strengthen support for the union with England among the Welsh population.”

It didn’t help that “Carlo” is traditionally associated with a dog’s name, and the song mocked the Prince and his effete lifestyle. For example:

Mae gen i ffrind bach yn byw ym Mycingam Palas       I have a little friend who lives in Muckingham Palace
A Charlo Winsor yw ei enw e;                                         And Carlo Windsor is his name;
Tro dwetha yr es i i gnoco ar ddrws ei dŷ,                    The last time I went to knock on the door of his house,
Daeth ei fam i’r drws a medde hi wrtha i:                      His mother came to the door and she said to me:

Cytgan:                                                                           Chorus:
‘O Carlo, Carlo, Carlo’n whare polo heddi,                       ‘Oh, Carlo, Carlo, Carlo, he play polo today,
Carlo, Carlo, Carlo’n whare polo gyda dadi.’                     Carlo, Carlo, Carlo, he play polo with daddy.’
Ymunwch yn y gân, daeogion fawr a mân,                        Join in the song, serfs great and small,
O’r diwedd mae gyda ni Brins yng Ngwlad y Gân.            At last we have a Prince in the Land of Song.

Time has mellowed his stance a bit. He even met Charles in 2019, and declared that he had “a lot of respect for the man I met today, not as Prince of Wales and not as a member of the Royal Family, but as a man who is passionate about what he believes in.” 

But it doesn’t take away from his dream of an independent Wales. He has always been a supporter of Welsh nationalism, and he was even President of the nationalist Plaid Cymru party (co-founded by his grandfather) from 2003-2010.

“Yma o Hyd” starts its ballad at the time of the Romans departure from Wales in 383 AD thanks to the Roman emperor Magnus Maximus, (known as “Macsen”) who withdrew his troops to Gaul in hopes of leading an assault on Rome and seizing the Imperial throne. In his absence, local governing authority was turned over to the local rulers, thus beginning a “Welsh” identity and begins the reference to the “1600 years” of history that unfolds in the song, with particular reference to the Anglo-Saxon settlements that bordered Wales. It ends with Margaret Thatcher (“Er gwaetha ’rhen Fagi a’i chriw”; “Despite old Maggie and her crew”), evoking an era that felt to Iwan like an existential threat to Welshness as an identity.

[He wasn’t wrong – in 1983, Thatcher led the Conservative party to its then-best general election result in Wales, and by the following year, the miners’ strike was under way. By 1986, fewer than 40% of Welsh households were headed by someone in full-time employment, meaning few Welsh were upset when she died.]

It’s main chorus – repeated three times – is a defiant reminder that the Welsh people have endured despite their domination by the ‘wind [that] blows from the East’:

We are still here,
we are still here,
in spite of everyone and everything,
in spite of everyone and everything,
in spite of everyone and everything.
We are still here,
we are still here,
in spite of everyone and everything,
in spite of everyone and everything,
in spite of everyone and everything.
We are still here.

The song is thought to have contributed to support for the ‘three pillars‘ of modern Wales: the Education Reform Act of 1988, which gave Wales its own National Curriculum and afforded an enhanced position to the Welsh language in schools; the Welsh Language Act of 1993, which provided a statutory framework for the treatment of Welsh and English on the basis of equality; and the Government of Wales Act of 1998 (a.k.a. “devolution”), which authorized the establishment of a National Assembly for Wales in 1999. While Welsh nationalism isn’t as strong as Scottish or Irish, it was significant enough for campaigning politicians to hold out devolution as a vote-attracting carrot to try and move support away from Plaid Cymru and towards them.

[This is how these Acts came to be. The 1988 & 1993 Acts were Conservative policies designed to hold their parliamentary seats in upcoming elections, and devolution was a key 1997 campaign promise of Tony Blair and the Labour Party. Post-Brexit, support for further devolution (if not independence) has increased due to the loss of European market protections as a result of English and Welsh voters taking the UK out of the EU in 2016. Voters in Wales seemed to live under the misunderstanding that they could limit free movement of people while maintaining agricultural & trading access to the common market. Economic modelling suggests that Welsh exports could be reduced by 6% ­­ – or £1.1billion – as a result of leaving the EU. However, the Internal Market Act prevents the Welsh Senedd (Parliament) from passing legislation specifically for Wales if it conflicts with UK-wide standards, and allows the UK government to invest directly in areas of devolved responsibility, such as economic development and infrastructure. The devolution they hoped would soften the blow of Brexit may in fact be restricted as a result of national politics. Support for independence now sits at 30%, and trends higher the younger the voter.]

“Yma O Hyd” regained popularity during Wales’ Euro 2020 campaign, reaching Number One on the British iTunes download chart, and returned to the charts during the recent playoff run to World Cup qualification. The rendition above was sung by Iwan prior to Wales’ playoff match versus Austria back in March – at the players’ request.

If they somehow beat England, unless your last name is “Lloyd” stay out of Cardiff.