With a star and an anthem, Wales forges a new national identity on and off the pitch.
“For a nation of 3 million people to be on one of the greatest sporting stages in the world,” said Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford, the nation’s head of state, “is hugely significant for the people of Wales who have been waiting 64 years for this to happen.”
It’s no wonder the acclaimed Welsh actor Michael Sheen , asked during a televised British game show last month to improvise a speech to the Welsh national team, first gathered himself, then unleashed a spirited oration that sounded like it could have been delivered by Shakespeare’s Henry V at the Agincourt battlefield on St. Crispin’s Day:
The U.S. men’s World Cup squad will face off against Wales, Iran and group favorite England in the group stage of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. “I know that’s a really dramatic way of putting it,” she said. “But it does really feel like a shift.”As Drakeford, Wales’s first minister, put it, “When you’re a small nation alongside a much bigger nation, and the English language being such a global language, in some ways the most remarkable thing about Wales is its survival as its own place and with its own history. We haven’t just been submerged by the size and the reach of a country that we are next door to.
“It’s such a proud, wonderful thing for the nation actually to be proud of itself. Lots of your readers would think, ‘Well, of course you’d be proud of yourself as a nation.’ But it’s been a journey for Wales, and it’s a long time coming.”In the early 1970s, a young leader of the nationalist Welsh Language Society was jailed briefly for defacing road signs — he had painted over their English words with Welsh ones.
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