Dafydd Iwan to take centre stage with stirring folk song before Wales playoff

Rested and recharged, Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey will be among those returning to the Wales starting lineup against Ukraine on Sunday, but another, and more typical in the literal sense, headline act will take centre stage in the minutes before kick-off in the festival atmosphere at the Cardiff City Stadium.

As he did before Wales’s World Cup playoff semi-final victory against Austria, Dafydd Iwan will perform Yma o Hyd (“Still Here”), a stirring Welsh folk song born 40 years ago on a scrap of paper in his attic in Waunfawr, a village four miles from the foot of Snowdon. It has snowballed into an unofficial national anthem and a slogan for the supporters who will again not hesitate to sing along. “I knew that there would be some audience participation but I wasn’t quite ready for what happened,” Iwan says.

Together with Bale’s preposterous free-kick, Iwan’s prematch rendition in March made a lasting impression that evening on the thousands there and beyond. So much so that when the 78-year-old recently went for lunch at the Sand Martin pub, on the site of the stadium, the landlord made sure his meal was on the house.

“Everybody who sings songs likes to be acknowledged but this is something else because it is tied up with the national team, with the Welsh consciousness and it has caught the mood of the times … I’m stuck with it now,” he says, laughing. “A number of people have told me: ‘I was watching that video last night and I had goose pimples, I was crying.’ I can’t fully understand it.”

Last summer, the words Yma o Hyd loomed large on the big screens at Wales’s Euro 2020 training base, the Tofiq Bahramov Stadium in Baku, and Robert Page, the Wales manager, previously said he plans to invite Iwan to meet his squad,