Why Euro 2016 Run Has to Be Seen as Just the Start for Beaten but Proud Wales

Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal were the eventual and deserving winners of the Euro 2016 semi-final in Lyon on Wednesday night, but for a beaten and emotionally drained Wales, there was the acknowledgement of a different kind of victory.

The battle for relevance, never mind prominence, on the international football stage is one that has long since consumed Welsh footballers of several vintages.

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Since the country’s previous qualification for a major tournament in 1958, Wales teams full of terrifically talented players—often ones plying their trade at the top clubs in Britain—have fallen short in their attempts to rub shoulders with the elite. At Euro 2016, the Welsh didn’t just rub shoulders with the elite, they put their hands on their shoulders and leapfrogged them into the last four.

Surpassing the achievements of the likes of Spain, England, Italy and, of course, Belgium—thrillingly in that astonishing quarter-final in Lille—Wales created memories that will stay with their supporters for a lifetime, but that lifetime now has to start making experiences such as these less infrequent.

“Please don’t take me home” was a refrain often heard from the travelling Welsh fans while out in France, but it wasn’t their home towns or their families that they were trying to hide from, it was something more.

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“Home” for the Welsh football team and supporters has been decades of underachievement, of near misses and of being treated as an afterthought in their own nation, which is widely perceived as being too obsessed with the national sport, rugby union, to bother with what is going on in the round-ball game.

But what has gone on is remarkable.

Less than five years ago, Wales sat 117th in the FIFA world rankings, a position that Niger, Thailand and Swaziland all currently hold together.

Twenty years ago, as 16 countries—12 of whom were in France—prepared for the European Championship in England, a Wales team featuring Ryan Giggs and current boss Chris Coleman were losing in a friendly to Leyton Orient, who’d just finished the English league season as the 89th-best side out of the 92 professional clubs.

The sudden and shocking death of then national team manager Gary Speed in November 2011 gives this story a very emotional, very human turn, and there hasn’t been a moment which has gone by since then that Speed wasn’t uppermost in the thoughts of everyone within the Welsh setup.

The Football Association of Wales coined the hashtag #TogetherStronger at the start of the Euro 2016 qualifying campaign, and at times that has been a necessity rather than just a throwaway marketing phrase. Everyone involved has needed each other, from fans to players to manager.

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Yet now this wild ride in France is over, it is time to look to the future and to make sure that the massed ranks of red—the “Red Wall,” as the Welsh players called them—that were visible in Bordeaux, Lens, Toulouse, Paris, Lille and Lyon this summer become regular sights at future tournaments.

With a new world ranking of 11th expected to be confirmed next week, as reported by James Whaling of the Mirror, there won’t be a Welsh fan in France or elsewhere who won’t be casting a glance at the schedule for the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers right now.

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Austria, Serbia, the Republic of Ireland, Moldova and Georgia represent the barriers to qualification for the finals in Russia, with what was once seen as a somewhat tricky group now looking a lot simpler following the summer Wales have had.

They’ll start off with a home match against Moldova in Cardiff on 5 September, and that will almost be treated as a glorious homecoming for a nation who now need to ride the crest of this wave.

Generations of Welsh football fans had long since given up on seeing their team qualify for a major tournament, and those who’d suggested that they could make it to the semi-finals of this one would have been laughed out of pubs and living rooms up and down the country.

But they did it, thrillingly and unexpectedly, and with a squad that was the seventh youngest out of the 24 in France, per BBC Sport.

The task now is to make sure that they can do it again and again, ensuring that future generations of Welsh fans can come to regard tournament football as the norm, even if consistent semi-finals would be pushing it a bit.

After years in the footballing wilderness, please don’t take Wales home. They’re enjoying the view from here.