HOW DO YOU FOLLOW THAT?
The welcome home was some spectacle. Dazed Welsh stars walked through Bute Park, reflecting on a month so magical it felt fictional, then emerged from Cardiff Castle to find it had been besieged by an army – not of warriors but fans, waving flags rather than swords. It was no less surprising.
“We were in a bubble in France,” Aaron Ramsey tells FourFourTwo. “My family and friends said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like back home – it’s going absolutely mental’. Coming home, we saw people lined up along the streets. We got closer to Cardiff and there were even more. About a quarter of a million turned up. It was unbelievable.”
As a pair of open-top buses crawled through a sea of red in Wales’ capital, one thought crystallised the feeling of an entire nation.
Could it ever get better than this?
“THE WELSH ARE NOISY, AND HOLD THEIR BEER BETTER THAN OTHERS”
Let’s begin at the beginning. Wales’ Euro 2016 adventure started with a slice of fortune, preventing a bleak humiliation that would have ended their momentum, confidence and qualifying hopes immediately.
On a horrendous rubber-crumb pitch, they were drawing late on against Andorra when Gareth Bale blasted a free-kick straight at the goalkeeper. The referee ordered a retake. Bale blasted it into the net, cue an unlikely pitch invasion calmed by Bale himself, but most crucially: a 2-1 win.
Cue, too, an extraordinary qualifying campaign. Wales kept seven clean sheets in their next nine games, drew in Brussels and beat Belgium 1-0 at home to reach their first ever European Championship. Their manager’s last job had been in the Greek second tier.
Chris Coleman had answered his nation’s call in the worst circumstances imaginable. The
