A National Rugby Obsession and the St. David's Day Welsh

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

This coming Saturday is the most important day of the year in Wales. The national rugby team – the country's envoys to the world beyond the Severn Bridge – play their bitter rivals England at Twickenham in a game that will probably decide the winner of the 2016 Six Nations Championship. Towns and villages across the nation will come to a standstill as fans watch shoulder-to-shoulder, their pint glasses sloshing to the floors of a thousand pubs. If Wales win they will get drunk and sing; if they lose they will get drunk and sing.

It is like Saint David's Day, but with a limitless supply of booze and a major sporting event as its centrepiece. In fact the country might want to consider moving its patron saint's day to coincide with the annual England clash. Because this, not 1 March, is the day most likely to prompt unabashed patriotism; it is a day that brings out what is best and worst in the Welsh.

The second line of the national anthem that will be sung before the game describes Wales as a land of bards and singers ("gwlad beirdd a chantorion"). Few would consider The Stereophonics' Kelly Jones to be foremost among those. But his song, As Long As We Beat The English, used in the past to advertise the game on TV, sums up the nation's mood. With its refrain of "As long as we beat the English we don't care" it may sound like overblown hyperbole, but it is probably the most honest lyric Jones has ever written.

Throughout Wales, and especially in the densely populated south where three quarters of the population live, rugby is more than a national sport: it borders on religion. It is a symbol of Welshness as powerful as Saint David or Snowden, and is celebrated as a sphere in which the Welsh not only compete, but often triumph. The minister for sport in Wales, Ken Skates AM, has suggested that moving the Six Nations to pay-per-view TV could "endanger the Welsh psyche". Again, this wasn't hyperbole. Conversely, the average Englishman isn't hugely fussed about the game. They'd like England to win, but there will be no national mourning if they lose. Rugby union is a second-tier sport in England, undeniably popular but still some distance behind the national obsession of football.

Any national psyche so fragile that it hangs by the thread of a televised sports tournament is clearly not healthy. But would you say any different of Brazil without football, or the U.S. without the Super Bowl?

And it is no real surprise that the Welsh feel so psychologically frail, having spent the past two hundred years trying to figure out their place in the world. 19th century industrialisation created a population explosion that transformed Wales from a land of hamlets and villages into a modern nation. Rugby began to spread through its growing towns in the 1860s, carried along a spidering rail network built to transport coal, tin and steel to Cardiff's bustling docks. As the industries boomed migrants flooded in, many of them from English rugby strongholds such as the West Country, bolstering the game's popularity in Wales. But the biggest group of incomers were native Welsh, who abandoned the depressed and dwindling agricultural hinterland for booming towns. They arrived to find a bustling rugby scene and adopted it as their own.

By the early 20th century it was established as the national sport. In 1905 Wales toppled the previously undefeated All Blacks in Cardiff, a victory that mingled with a sense of prosperity and self-confidence in the growing industrial nation to solidify rugby's place in Welsh life. It provided a small country that saw itself as tough and quick-witted with a platform on which to compete with the best in the world.

Welsh society underwent another radical change during the 20th century. Mining, heavy industry and religion all collapsed, creating a vacuum in Welsh culture. But rugby remained, offering a tenable link to the past for a country coming to terms with its post-industrial identity. It also offered something for the future: the chance of more success on the pitch, more Six Nations titles, perhaps even one day the World Cup.

Growing up in small-town Wales, rugby's importance to the national psyche was obvious. A framed photograph of former international Ieuan Evans hung in the foyer of my secondary school, lit up like a portrait of The Holy Mother on a Catholic mantelpiece; on Saint David's Day we were told to wear red to school, preferably in the form of the national rugby shirt; and the town's two powerhouse clubs were as much Masonic Lodges as drinking dens, dark rooms where councillors and businessmen shook hands on development contracts over a pint.

Rugby players were the only local stars who hung around to be worshiped on their own turf. As well as Evans there was '70s hero Ray Gravell, the son of a collier from the teetering hilltop village Mynydd-y-Garreg; Jonathan Davies, who emerged from the lawless badlands of Trimsaran to play internationally in the '90s, then forged a broadcasting career; and more latterly Ken Owens, the well-mannered Welsh-speaking lad from upmarket Carmarthen. Who else did we have? John Cale had left for London at the first opportunity, then disappeared to New York to write avant-garde drone music with a needle hanging from his arm. He was no more a local possession than Lou Reed; the rugby players were Gods who walked among us.

In Wales, rugby union is a game for working class kids, passed down from fathers who toiled in steelworks via grandfathers who went down mines to earn their living. In England it remains largely a possession of the public schools where it was born. English rugby stars marry into royalty; their Welsh equivalents think Charlotte Church is a bit posh.

Crucially, rugby still allows Wales to take on and defeat the old enemy. "As long as we beat the English we don't care", right lads? Ahead of the 2016 tournament, Wales have won the Six Nations and its forerunners 26 times, the same as England and more than any other competitor. When they met in an equally decisive fixture three years ago Wales ran out 30-3 winners. To the fans, the fact that this secured them the title was no more important than that single result. Better was to come at last year's World Cup, when an injury-ravaged Welsh side beat England at Twickenham to effectively knock the old enemy out of the tournament. What could be better than beating the English at a game they invented, in their own back yard?

The England game is the zenith of a patriotic fervour that rugby stirs in this fragile post-industrial nation. It is a day when Welshmen and women can be at their best. There will be songs in Welsh and English, from the national anthem and the hymn Calon Lân to Tom Jones' Deliah (which former Plaid Cymru president Dafydd Iwan believes should be banned for its promotion of domestic violence). They will be jovial and sociable. You will see far more women in the crowd than you ever would at a Premier League football game, and how class distinctions do not exist in the same way in Wales as in England, because a Welshman is a Welshman whether he's a doctor or the girl from behind the tills at Tesco – so long as they follow rugby.

But it will also bring out the attributes those who have left the country, as well as many who remain, wish to forget. The hatred of the English is not simply a party costume dug out of the cupboard for the match. There is significant anti-English sentiment and, though not everyone feels the same, it can sometimes become very uncomfortable to speak with an estuary accent west of the Severn Bridge. The match can turn Wales into a tribal, insulated nation that sees a rugby game as its sole opportunity to make an impact. It paints Wales as nothing more than 15 huge blokes on a pitch, rather than a picturesque land that has produced volumes of great literature, countless radical politicians, and six good Manic Street Preachers albums. It turns us into the Saint David's Day Welsh: dressed in red, waving inflatable leeks and daffodils, and drunkenly singing along in a language no one else understands.

On Sunday the people of Wales will be hungover and, ill feeling or not, they will go back to peacefully co-existing with the English. But Saturday will be different. Everything that is good and bad about Wales will be laid bare.

@jim_weeks