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.
Together with Bale’s preposterous free-kick, Iwan’s prematch rendition in March made a lasting impression that evening on the thousands there and beyond. So much so that when the 78-year-old recently went for lunch at the Sand Martin pub, on the site of the stadium, the landlord made sure his meal was on the house.
“Everybody who sings songs likes to be acknowledged but this is something else because it is tied up with the national team, with the Welsh consciousness and it has caught the mood of the times … I’m stuck with it now,” he says, laughing. “A number of people have told me: ‘I was watching that video last night and I had goose pimples, I was crying.’ I can’t fully understand it.”
Last summer, the words Yma o Hyd loomed large on the big screens at Wales’s Euro 2020 training base, the Tofiq Bahramov Stadium in Baku, and Robert Page, the Wales manager, previously said he plans to invite Iwan to meet his squad, some of whom are big fans of the song.
Chris Gunter, who last year became the first Welshman to win 100 caps, was behind Yma o Hyd being played before training and on the team coach, while Connor Roberts, who will start against Ukraine, told how he has the song on his headphones before every Wales game. “It just puts a little bit of fire in the belly and makes me want to run a little bit more,” Roberts said last year.
The song has long been an anthem for the Scarlets rugby club in Llanelli, whom Iwan considers his team, and for Cardiff City. Welsh football supporters have sung impromptu renditions of it for a few years and broke into an a cappella version during the second half of their Nations League defeat to Poland in Wroclaw on Wednesday.
But almost the entire stadium bellowed every word in March, when a teardrop rolled down Iwan’s face as he looked to the Canton Stand, home to Wales’s red wall of fans. “It was as if it was rehearsed,” he says. “They came in on the chorus, on the dot, on the button and with such power, it hit me.
“I tend to be an emotional singer because I write my own songs, I write about things I feel strongly about – I’ve been known to shed a few tears here and there – but that night I couldn’t help it. The power of that crowd singing was just great. It just hit me and I let everything go.”
Iwan acknowledges he is a political animal. His grandfather was one of the founding members of Plaid Cymru – Iwan was president of the party between 2003 and 2010 – and on Sundays, he does a bit of preaching, “although the audiences are dwindling”.
Two years ago, the pro-independence campaign YesCymru helped Yma o Hyd beat Stormzy and Dua Lipa to the top of the UK iTunes chart.
“Bob Dylan influenced my generation in the sense that he uses songs to get messages across. Pete Seeger was a campaigning singer who used his songs to promote his ideas and support the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King and he used his concerts to tell the story, adding verses as things were happening, and encouraging his audience to come with him. I used my songs in a similar kind of way.”
On Sunday, however, Iwan, who has “adopted football as my first game”, is engaged. He talks about being old enough to remember Cliff Jones and the Charles and Allchurch brothers playing in the 1958 World Cup, Wales’s only appearance in the tournament, and says the first match he attended was Everton v Leeds at Goodison Park.
“The respect shown by all the crowd to John Charles was quite immense,” he says. “He had lost a lot of his speed by then but there was something about his stature on the field. I remember the ball being kicked out and he ran quite a distance to fetch it for the other team and he was cheered to the rafters. It wouldn’t happen today but he was that kind of player.”
It is no longer difficult for Iwan to put his finger on his best gig. “I was always in a quandary answering that question because I’ve had some great nights but when I am asked now, 24 March 2022 will always be No 1,” he says. “But hopefully 5 June can equal it.”
