They say never meet your heroes. Perhaps this is an extension of that. A first World Cup in 64 years feels endowed with hero status anyway. Only, this – Wales heading home from a first World Cup since the advent of ramen with one point and one goal to show for their trip – feels profoundly more complicated than being called the wrong name by your decades-long sporting idol, ushered through a cursory queue outside a Waterstones book signing without so much as an oblique glance or the correct name inside the now freshly-inked cover page.
It is not a punch to the face but, somehow, it is worse.
Football, though, is inherently more complex than such pure black and white fist-to-face violence. Welsh football, in particular, is. It is crashing disappointment commingled with that stubbornly, still gurgling sense of unmitigated pride. Of not removing the bucket hat. Of remaining in one’s seat and pouring one’s soul into a serenade for the very team which has just torturously catapulted you through three separate 90-minute blackholes.
The manifestation of these two competing emotions in the last 36 hours has been a debilitating nausea, at least for this writer. It brings on a lucid sense of feeling unmoored and drifting, like a cartoon astronaut who suddenly realises the tether hooking them to their spaceship has, miraculously, been cut. And space is cold.
Sift through the various Welsh Twitter post-mortems and two camps begin to emerge from the debris: those of the crushing disappointment demeanour and those of the 'look how far we’ve come' mentality. Neither exists in a vacuum but the notion that both can exist harmoniously after this World Cup risks verging on the ridiculous. Somewhere, a camp will have to concede.
Still, it should be said that, at least for now, both camps can and should exist in harmony. Is it possible to be both disgustingly crestfallen and stupidly proud? Convention says no, but convention also maintains that a footballer with as many minutes as seasons one and two of Derry Girls on Netflix should not be capable of dragging his nation to the apogee of footballing success.
Yet, here we are.
That Wales’ World Cup finale exists in this level of paradox – disheartening though, when considered, exhilarating – feels more than on brand. Contradiction has been the raison d’etre of this Wales squad for eight years now, the juice fuelling a kaleidoscopic and dizzying romp out of footballing purgatory. Wales have come to dish out, innumerable times, a direct rejection to all of the regular footballing conventions that state, loudly and in red, inerasable ink: THIS SORT OF STUFF DOES NOT HAPPEN. Football is romantic, yes, but it is not ludicrous. Knock it off, Wales.
And yet, Wales always managed to flout that, to manipulate the system and curb it in a manner that was nothing if not intrinsically Welsh. What other team can boast with such cheek that their two star players not only do not play regular minutes at club level but do not need to, that such normal pillars of the footballing world are too ordinary and constrictive for them?
The charms are straightforward, appealing to the eternal underdog in all of us and delighting that wanna-be renegade buried deep below. Somehow, it never gets old, the resplendent habit of Wales proving to everyone it is, somehow, still here. To exist as a complex, ineffable anomaly. Put that to a soundtrack like that the Welsh seemingly have on eternal hand, and you are dealing in gold.
For the first time in the last eight years, however, Wales were unable to break the system, and arguably this is where the grinding of camps begins to be mined. Because before the World Cup began, there persisted the quiet sense that for the first time Wales did not have to rely on upturning the status quo. They arrived in Doha on the back of their own sporting merit like everyone else, slipping their big boy trousers on in their qualification matches to reach this place.
It explains, partly, why the performances, as meek and blanched as they were, riddled so many. Of course, those who momentarily take on a more rational football hat might consider the trail of red flags in performances lying in the wake of this past week. When, in the last few months, have Wales put in a comprehensive team performance that undeniably convinced? That did not come littered with caveats and sighs of relief? That did not hinge, solely, on the momentary flashing brilliance of Gareth Bale to gloss over more pressing tactical quandaries?
But that, there, is the problem. To place a more rational hat on one’s head at a time like this, to dig into that still raw, painful flesh, feels rash, if not to forget that taking on that hat is a sort of odd indulgence in a reality which is still technically new. It has not even been 10 years since Wales ended its 58-year celibacy from the international stage.
Is that a cop-out? Sure. No other nation seems to accrue this level of leniency and soft scrutiny after suffering three successive pallor defeats. And to a certain mentality, such behaviour is even embarrassing. Well done Wales. You’ve just crashed out of the group stages.
Yet, Wales have crashed out of the group stages of a World Cup. They earned the first red card of the tournament. And they scored a goal. At a World Cup. Gareth Bale scored at a World Cup.
Such statements were impossible to utter just one month ago, let alone a decade.
It is more than warranted to be disappointed with the results, but it is acceptable, perhaps even necessary, to feel proud too.
That double existence will be challenged in the next few months, and rightfully so. Evolution does not come easy. Ugly moments will be inevitable. But Wales, for many, has come to outgrow that identity of a country "happy to be here". To still exist. Of "being" at a World Cup. They want Wales to thrive, as they have come to expect Wales to thrive.
And why not? It is the inevitable psychology brought on by the likes of Bale and Aaron Ramsey, players who have come to personally embody the very sentiment when they offered a tangible taste of what commanding attention on the international stage can feel like. Of not only demanding respect in the Wales shirt but receiving it.
Perhaps, then, this World Cup should not be viewed so bilaterally: as a disappointment or a pounding moment of pride. Rather, through the prism of a middle space, the passage from one era to the next, as much in personnel as in mentality.
Such a graduation would never come painlessly or seamlessly. Wales fans, for so long, were programmed to expect the worst, conditioned to respond to the softest of football kicks with the acute knowledge that things will go spectacularly wrong. It was as much a coping mechanism as a form of self-preservation. If it’s the hope that kills, then mute the hope.
But that self-imposed training began to crack eight years ago. Slowly, Wales fans became what can only be described as the Year 2 Dog, the one you trained to the utmost, telling yourself that he would not sit on the couch. He would not lick food off the dinner plates. And no, he would not be given his own advent calendar and Christmas stocking at holiday time. But here he is now, rolling on the couch beside you, his new Christmas turkey dog-friendly dental chew stick dangling at an adorably lopsided angle from his hairy, slobbery mouth.
He has been spoilt, sopping with hope. That is fine. Wales fans have opened themselves up to hope, and more critically, expectation. It is the next step in evolving. Disappointment is a tax which comes with it.
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