“Dafydd Iwan!” a man with a big belly shouts at the bottom of a hill which overlooks Caernarfon Castle and offers views of the Menai Strait, Anglesey and the mountains of Snowdonia. Iwan, the 79-year-old composer, turns and smiles. There is a long pause as he is also a politician, a preacher and now the unofficial leader of the Red Wall of football supporters who will follow Wales at their first World Cup in 64 years.
Eventually the man just lifts his hand and, in dazed surprise, says: “Yma o Hyd.”
Iwan waves back and repeats the title of a song he wrote almost 40 years ago, a paean to Welsh defiance and nationalism which has become an emotional World Cup anthem. Yma o Hyd means “still here” in English and it is sung in a way which says that, despite persecution and suffering, the Welsh remain as proud as ever. “I can’t escape it,” Iwan says as the wind howls in Caernarfon. “When they can’t think of anything else they say: ‘Yma o Hyd!’”
It reminds me of the Red Wall joining Iwan in a booming chorus of the song before Wales beat Austria in a World Cup playoff semi-final in March. Tears ran down Iwan’s face as he sang Yma o Hyd with wonder at the way the Welsh language and a vibrant national identity were celebrated by a choir of 33,000. He returned to sing again in June before Wales beat Ukraine to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1958.
Iwan was imprisoned four times in the 1970s for his activism on behalf of the Welsh language – a fact not lost on Chris Gunter, the most-capped male Welsh footballer in history, who told me how he added Yma o Hyd to the team playlist years ago. After beating Ukraine, Gunter called for Iwan to join the players on the pitch.
Gunter, who has left AFC Wimbledon in League Two to join the Welsh squad in Qatar, explains how Wales were ranked 125th in the world and below the Faroe Islands as recently as 2010. Tim Hartley, the author and Wales fan, watched the national team away from home long before then. Against Azerbaijan in 2002, Hartley was one of only 58 hardy Welsh souls who made the arduous journey.
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Hartley (above) who sings Yma o Hyd before every home game of his beloved Cardiff City, as his club also play Iwan’s song, will be in Qatar. “God can strike me down five minutes after the kick-off [of the first group game] against the USA,” he says, “because I’ll have realised a lifetime’s ambition.”
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A match at Pentre where the manager who took Wales to the 1958 World Cup, Jimmy Murphy, grew up; A red ballon floats over the goalposts that were inserted into the ground at Ynys Park more than 50 years ago by local miners. Nobody has been able to move them since; The home fans watch Ton Pentre attack as they take on Merthyr Saints in a South Wales Alliance League match.
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The Ton Pentre players in the dressing room after their 7-0 win over Merthyr Saints; The blue plaque on the wall of a house in Treharne Street, Pentre where Jimmy Murphy lived.
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Yet Hartley’s joy is curbed by disdain for the choice of Qatar as tournament host. “Do I feel conflicted? Yes. Do I wish it were somewhere else? Absolutely.”
Iwan will be in Qatar, too, with the same tangled pride and disquiet. But before we reach his home in the village of Caeathro, I remind Iwan how the actor Michael Sheen quoted his song when a rollicking homage to Wales on a television gameshow went viral.
A League of Their Own does not usually feature poetic words but Sheen lit up the screen as he fused Iwan’s song with resurgent belief in Welsh football. “Yma o Hyd, Yma o Hyd,” Sheen whispered as he closed his eyes and spread his arms:
I hear the voices singing, speed your journey, bois, bois bach
One nation, singing with one voice
A song of hope, a song of courage
A victory song that floats through the valleys like a red mist
Rolls over the mountain tops like crimson thunder.
A red storm is coming to the gates of Qatar
It crackles with the spirit of ’58 and Jimmy Murphy’s boys.
Sheen built to a crescendo, reaching catharsis with England, the troublesome neighbours from back home whom Wales will play in their final group game on 29 November:
When the English come knocking on our door
Let’s give ’em some sugar, boys, let’s give ’em some Welsh sugar!
They’ve always said we’re too small, we’re too slow, we’re too weak, too full of fear.
But Yma o Hyd, you sons of Speed,
And they fall around us, we’re still here!
In his front room, Iwan suggests “the idea you’ve survived echoes the Welsh way of thinking we’ve had a hard time or we’re hard done by. It’s a song of defiance and survival, of the Welsh language and people.”
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The big screen at Cardiff City Stadium displays the words to Yma o Hyd, along with the English translation, as Wales fans sing after the win over Ukraine.
Iwan wrote the song in 1983 when “it was a terrible time and the Thatcher regime hit Wales heavily. Coal mines and steelworks were closed and I was in the middle of a terrible divorce. Ymo o Hyd is about how we’re still here, despite everything and everyone and even ourselves. But it’s lovely that all these years later the song is driven by the Red Wall. It has become the focal point and Ian Gwyn Hughes has worked on this diligently for he believed that, to get the Welsh team giving their all, they needed a broader view of Welshness.”
Hughes, the head of PR at the Welsh FA, asked Iwan to sing before the World Cup qualifiers. He says Yma o Hyd is “a political song, in Welsh, but it has a rousing tune the fans love. It has been quite a journey for Wales, politically, the last 40 years. From the miners’ strike to devolution so much has changed and we now have a renaissance with people wanting to learn Welsh. We’re also trying to reflect that, in football, it’s been a journey. There have been bad defeats and near misses but in the last [seven] years we’ve qualified for three major tournaments. Yma o Hyd and football go hand-in-hand.”
For Iwan there was still “an element of doubt it would work when I sang before those games. But when 30,000 people sing along at the top of their voices, and in good tune, it struck me like a thunderbolt. God, I was crying. And against Ukraine I felt like a rock star because the crowd were even better.”
Yma o Hyd is very different to a tired old reprise of Sweet Caroline or a sentimental chorus of “football’s coming home”. Instead, Iwan and the Red Wall singing in compelling union is the sound of a new Welsh confidence in its identity and language. Hartley suggests that only 20% of the population are fluent in Welsh – but around the national team the desire to speak the language, and sing in it, is consuming and inspiring.
“After the game Chris Gunter called me down to join the players in front of a sign which said Diolch i’r Wal Goch [Thank you to the Red Wall],” says Iwan. “To have the team behind me singing their hearts out was brilliant and then Gareth Bale carried one of his children and, still singing, we walked to each other to shake hands. We were full of joy.”
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Dafydd Iwan singing Yma o Hyd along with the victorious Wales squad after the World Cup playoff final match between Wales and Ukraine.
Hughes remembers another galáctico being swept away when Wales played Poland in their final home game before the World Cup. “That night I focused on Robert Lewandowski,” he says, “and after the [Welsh] anthem he just looked up at the crowd and said: ‘Wow…wow!’”
Red Wall fervour did not exist the last time Wales made the World Cup. “There’s a story about Terry Medwin who played in 1958,” Hughes says wryly. “When he came back with his suitcase someone said: ‘Been away, Terry?’ He said: ‘Yes, I played in the World Cup.’ There was not much coverage. One Wales World Cup match report in the South Wales Echo was 10 paragraphs long. There was more on the selection of the Welsh swimming team.”
Wales’s manager Robert Page, pictured below, comes from Tylorstown in the Rhondda valley – 25 miles from Cardiff. It remains an impoverished area but, in a sign of the inclusivity permeating from the national team, Page announced his World Cup squad last week in the Tylorstown Miners’ Welfare Hall. It is a fitting coincidence that Page grew up three miles from Murphy’s home in Pentre. Murphy managed the 1958 team which reached the quarter-finals and lost only 1-0 to Brazil – with the goal scored by a teenage sensation called Pelé.
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Fifty eight years passed before Wales played in another major football tournament. They shocked everyone, including themselves, by reaching the semi-finals of Euro 2016. Even more than beating Belgium in the quarter-final, Hartley suggests: “We’ll never top that feeling in Bordeaux before the first group match [a 2-1 defeat of Slovakia]. Years ago we’d sit in an Indian restaurant after watching Cardiff City and play this game. Cardiff in the Premier League or Wales in an international final? Wales. Cardiff to win the FA Cup, or Wales win the Euros? Wales. We never thought we’d make it so Euro 2016 was like your best party and it lasted three weeks. We had arrived. It had all been worth it.”
Instructing the Red Army to keep their chins up after a narrow loss to England, and entertaining everyone with his parents’ dilemma of whether to watch the semi-final or attend his brother’s wedding in Mexico, Gunter represented the Welsh heartbeat in 2016. He still does in 2022, even if at 33 he does not play many games. After remembering how his parents chose Wales over the wedding, Gunter reassures me there will be no clash of dates in Qatar.
Gunter, with 109 caps, is a valuable witness to the dark days Wales endured in the first half of his international career which began in 2007. “In the bad times,” he says, “we played Luxembourg in Llanelli [in 2010] and there were only 4,500 [fans].”
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Chris Gunter, who plays for AFC Wimbledon in League Two, won the first of his 109 caps for Wales in 2007.
For Gunter and his best friend Aaron Ramsey, the lowest moment occurred with the death of Gary Speed in 2011. Hughes left the BBC, where he had spent decades commentating on Wales games, to join the FAW in 2010. Speed soon took over as manager and in his short tenure he transformed expectations and standards. Hughes says: “Gary brought discipline and commanded such respect. He had a real presence even though he had no ego.”
Whenever Gunter hears the clip of Sheen exalting “you sons of Speed” he feels raw emotion. “That line touches us because Gary was a giant. His fingerprints are still on Welsh football.”
Chris Coleman did an admirable job replacing Speed. His empathy carried the squad through those bleak times even if Coleman was in charge when Gunter remembers their nadir in 2012. “We had a real bad 6-1 defeat in Serbia. A major tournament seemed a million miles away.”
Hughes grimaces. “The FAW were trying to market the team in a new way and we had this strapline: Time to Believe. After that game it was: Time to Forget.”
Hartley, a long-suffering 62-year-old fan, remembers all the defeats. “We used to sing: ‘We’ll nev-er quali-fy, we’ll never qual-ify …’ Some would say those trips were a fantastic holiday ruined by 90 minutes of football. Now, with this new success, football’s gone mainstream. I know people I’ve travelled with for years who feel a bit aggrieved. They say: ‘Who are these Johnny-come-latelys?’ But I think it’s great and Welsh football is now very special. When the crowds go away, I’ll have the team back all to myself.”
Hartley laughs but he is a key figure in ensuring that the ferocious enmity between Cardiff and Swansea fans, which once scarred away trips, has been set aside. Rival supporters reject their club colours to unite as one with Wales.
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Cardiff and Swansea fans during their Championship match in October. The two sets of supporters are bitter rivals but have united behind the national team.
Cardiff and Swansea fans
Gunter, meanwhile, picks out an unexpected game that began the transformation in tiny Andorra in September 2014. Andorra led 1-0 to wailing from the Red Wall. Then after Bale equalised in a Euro 2016 qualifier, his 89th minute free-kick changed Welsh football for ever. It was blocked but, when the referee ordered it to be retaken, Bale curled in a trademark beauty.
“Knowing what we know now, that could be the most important goal Wales and Gareth have scored,” Gunter suggests. “It was the opening qualifying game but we struggled on the 3G pitch. If we hadn’t won I think the fans would have given up on us because we had Belgium and Bosnia in our group. Then Gaz scored in the last minute and it carried on from there all the way to the Euro semi-finals.”
In September 2017, Wales won a World Cup qualifier 2-0 in Moldova and two of Iwan’s four sons travelled as supporters. Iwan recalls: “One of them called me after the game and said: ‘I’m in a club in Moldova and all the fans and the players are singing your song. I’m standing next to Aaron Ramsey who is singing Yma o Hyd like nothing you’ve seen before.’”
Over tea and scones at home, Iwan remembers some of the violent prisoners with whom he had shared a prison cell after defacing public signs written only in English in the 70s.
“An especially frightening man was very big, erratic and he’d assaulted somebody. He asked: ‘What are you in for?’ It was nonpayment of fines. When I explained I could pay the fine but decided not to for the cause of the Welsh language he thought it was bonkers. It’s different now. So many non-Welsh speakers have recently told me the language belongs to all of us.”
He smiles when I say that scary prisoner might be telling people now that he once shared a cell with Dafydd Iwan. Late afternoon darkness stretches across north Wales but, as we step outside, the bumper sticker of Cofiwch Dryweryn gleams on Iwan’s car. Those Welsh words mean Remember Tryweryn.
The following morning we stop alongside the Tryweryn valley which was flooded and turned into a reservoir in order to supply water to Liverpool in 1965. The entire village of Capel Celyn was lost after its residents were forced to abandon their homes for the benefit of an English city. Remnants of the flooded village still jut above the water. They are another reminder of why beating England is always a delicious prospect for the people of Wales.
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The phrase ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ – which translates to Remember Tryweryn – has become a prominent political slogan for Welsh nationalism, and is graffitied on a stone wall near Llanrhystud, Ceredigion. It originates from the decision by Liverpool city council to flood the Tryweryn Valley, including the community of Capel Celyn, to create the Llyn Celyn reservoir which supplies water to Liverpool.
Ten minutes from Tryweryn, Bala Town are currently third in the Cymru Premier League and, in the words of their chairman, Nigel Ackroyd, they resemble the national team in “punching miles above our weight. The population of Bala is less than 2,000. We’re the Premier League minnows. But for the last 20 years, since [Bala’s manager] Colin Caton joined we’ve been on a road of success. We were three tiers below the Premier League then but we’ve been here for 12 years. We’ve won the Welsh Cup, finished second four times in the Premier and played Europa League games.”
The achievements under Ackroyd and Caton, who were born in England, are shown by the thriving academy and nine Bala FC teams who play on a 3G pitch which cost £500,000. That investment allows football to be played every day at Bala’s little ground at Maes Tegid. In previous rain-sodden winters they were lucky to play once every five weeks.
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Bala Town players come out of the home changing room for the start of their fixture against Pen-y-bont in the Cymru Premier League on the 3G pitch at the Maes Tegid ground in Bala; Colin Caton, the long-serving manager of Bala Town; A sign all in Welsh in Bala High Street advertising the Bala Town v Pen-y-bont match; An advert for the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru at the ground; Local boys watch the home team attack.
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During Euro 2016 the town rebranded itself as Bale. World Cup fever is now building in Bala, especially in the Spirit of 58 shop, where Tim Williams sells the bucket hats and shirts adopted by the Red Wall. Williams will travel to Qatar and, showing us a pair of Gunter’s old boots, he praises the full-back: “Chris epitomises the spirit of this fantastic team.”
Gunter played alongside Dave Edwards who was capped 43 times for Wales. The 36-year-old Edwards now leads Bala against Penybont in a Cymru Premier League game on a rainy Saturday afternoon. As always Bala walk out to Yma o Hyd.
“Bala is in a very Welsh-speaking area,” Ackroyd says. “So it made sense to start playing Yma o Hyd once we reached the Cymru Premier League. Dafydd Iwan once lived in Llanuwchllyn [near Bala] and it’s a very spiritual song full of emotion for all people in Wales – or Cymru as we say here.”
The FAW plans to call Wales by its Welsh name of Cymru in future internationals. It is another sign of Welsh pride and, watching Bala and Penybont in a fiercely competitive 1-1 draw, it’s hard to shake Yma o Hyd from my head. I remember the last story Iwan had told me the previous afternoon.
“One summer day I heard a car screeching to a halt with a bang. I ran down the road and the car was on its side. Five boys clambered out and one of them had blood running from his head. I said: ‘Wyt ti’n iawn?’ Are you OK?’ He was in a daze and then, recognising me, said: ‘Yma o Hyd.’ They were still here.”
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Tim Williams, the owner of The Spirit of 58, a Welsh football fan shop in Bala High Street. He is pictured holding a replica World Cup and one of his famous bucket hats.
After a long wait of 64 years Wales are not only still here but on their way to the World Cup. Hartley’s bliss, however, is compromised:
“My life has been building towards this but if I were true to myself I wouldn’t be going because of Qatar’s human rights record and treatment of gay people, women and migrant workers. I will be there but I’ll think about Kevin Davies, my groundhopping friend and former trade unionist, who says: ‘I cannot come with you, Tim.’ I will think about Hayley Evans, who runs Wal Goch y Menywod, the women’s Red Wall, and says: ‘I cannot come with you, Tim, because of the way women are treated in Qatar.’ But it’s something I’ve got to do.”
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Like Tim Hartley and Hayley Evans, passionate Wales fans Steve Ward (above right) and son Steffan are split over travelling to Qatar. Steve is flying out to follow Wales but Steffan is staying home and hosting parties in the garage which they converted into a bar and shrine to Welsh football during Covid lockdown.
Iwan, Hughes and Gunter will feel the same bittersweet emotion in Qatar. The Wales team, and the travelling Red Wall, will listen to Yma o Hyd and Sheen’s speech again and again as they draw courage for their tangled adventure. As Gunter says with a grin: “When my English friends hear [Iwan and Sheen] they say: ‘I wish I could be Welsh.”
Hartley echoes this view: “I’m hoping people choose Wales as their second team. We’re the underdogs, always have been. We’re not threatening. You could say that’s a political weakness or a cultural strength but we’re strong enough in our own skins to support Wales aloud and proud. We’re not aggressive or xenophobic. We’re just happy being Welsh.”
Wales’s official World Cup video carries a harder edge. Yma o Hyd is played throughout footage which splices together iconic Welsh football moments with archive film of Iwan and other activists being arrested in the 70s. Images of the miners’ strike bleed into Sheen exalting “You sons of Speed” and Iwan crying as he sings with the Red Wall.
The final words come from an exultant football commentary in Welsh, when qualification for Qatar was sealed, and the video ends with an image of Iwan’s head filling the screen.
Back home in Caeathro, and not long before he flies to Qatar, Iwan says: “It’s a politically charged video. There are clips of our language demonstrations and police clashing with miners, and a shot of me coming out of prison to meet my wife and my eldest son as a baby. The Welsh FA could have diluted it to a nice little song – but they got it. They understood the song.”
Iwan, a lovely old grandfather who has become a symbol for modern Wales and the cherished dream of Welsh World Cup football, sinks back into his chair. He then says those three little words which matter more than ever in Wales: “Yma o Hyd”.
