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.
