Ambassadors for a Travelling Statelet: Fan Culture at Home and Away
From Planet 233
by Dan Evans
Dan Evans celebrates Welsh football fan culture – its music, clothes, grassroots media and ethos of egalitarian hedonism – and furthermore how this contributes to national unity, internationalism and working-class self-organisation. Can the spirit of Wales away be transported back home?
I’ve been following Wales in football for as long as I can remember. Iconic moments are seared into my memory: beating Germany one-nil in the Arms Park in 1991, the look of shock on Ian Rush’s face as he celebrated; that bleak night in 1993 when Paul Bodin missed a penalty against Romania that would have sent us to the World Cup.
I think about these games as if I was there, even if this makes little sense historically, as I would have been far too young to be in the stands behind the goal, which is how I remember them in my head. Live events and televised events have blurred into one to create one long, grainy montage of footage.
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