Rested and recharged, Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey will be among those returning to the Wales starting lineup against Ukraine on Sunday, but another, and more typical in the literal sense, headline act will take centre stage in the minutes before kick-off in the festival atmosphere at the Cardiff City Stadium.
As he did before Wales’s World Cup playoff semi-final victory against Austria, Dafydd Iwan will perform Yma o Hyd (“Still Here”), a stirring Welsh folk song born 40 years ago on a scrap of paper in his attic in Waunfawr, a village four miles from the foot of Snowdon. It has snowballed into an unofficial national anthem and a slogan for the supporters who will again not hesitate to sing along. “I knew that there would be some audience participation but I wasn’t quite ready for what happened,” Iwan says.
