Gareth Bale: A Figurehead of Post-Devolution Wales
As Gareth Bale calls time on an extraordinary football career, Nick Davies explains why his on-pitch heroics have contributed to Wales’s cultural self-confidence as much as to our sporting success.
As Gareth Bale calls time on an extraordinary football career, Nick Davies explains why his on-pitch heroics have contributed to Wales’s cultural self-confidence as much as to our sporting success.
At the turn of the millennium, historian and sportswriter Huw Richards concluded the book, For Club and Country: Welsh Football Greats, with a chapter titled, almost with ironic resignation, Hope Springs Eternal: “We cannot expect to win, or even qualify for, the World Cup […] but it is important that we are good enough to dream.” Our collective ambition in 2000 was merely to entertain the notion of having collective ambition. Two decades on and a nation of apathetic dreamers is a nation of bucket-hatted global participants. And for that, one man has been largely responsible…
Read the article, in full, at Wales Arts Review.