I saw Ukraine’s football party 10 years ago – and I’ll be supporting them against Wales

On Sunday evening, every football fan in the world – apart from the Welsh – will be joined by many others who do not even care for the game in rooting for the national team of battered and besieged but resilient Ukraine as they face Wales for a place in the World Cup in Qatar later this year.

Watching here in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, even I, with a substantial quotient of Welsh DNA, will be wearing my official Ukraine yellow football shirt with “Malinovskyi 8” on the back.

The game could not be more poignantly, or cogently timed: just 10 years ago this week, a hugely successful football tournament kicked off, hosted jointly by Poland and Ukraine. Euro 2012 was seamlessly set astride the eastern border of the European Union, the frontier across which millions of refugees have now fled their native land over the past 100 days. Now, those 10 short years feel like an unthinkable lifetime.

Not everyone will remember Euro 2012 fondly. Some of the ultra fans that follow Ukrainian – and Polish – clubs are among the most infamously racist crews in football. For that reason, the families of England players Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain stayed home. But I don’t remember anything in summer 2012 to resemble the vicious racism with which England’s Under-21 team was assailed in Serbia that October. It was football and fun – the kind of prolonged, dotty international street party for which we love the game at its best.

With business to see to in eastern Europe that summer, I breezed into Ukraine with a friend from Warsaw for three matches. There is little to mutually embitter fans of Denmark and the Netherlands – or the good citizens of Kharkiv and the fans of its team, Metalist Kharkiv – so that when the two north European