It's the Hope That Kills You: How a Lifetime of Welsh Football Misery Comes to a Head Today

'Wales are in the semi-finals of Euro 2016' is a strange, borderline obscene sentence that isn't supposed to exist anywhere. It's absurd. At an absolute push, you might find it in the back of a schoolboy's homework diary as part of some extremely tepid fan fiction, and even then it would most likely have been frantically scribbled out in a moment of self-aware shame.

I watched Wales despatch Belgium in the quarter final fixture with some childhood friends. We grew up in Wales, and with Wales. Wales, who hadn't qualified for a major international tournament since 1958, are in the semi-finals of Euro 2016. Wales, whose population of 3 million is only marginally greater than that of the Midlands, are in the semi-finals of Euro 2016. Wales, the only country in Europe to have a national side that have performed so consistently and perversely poorly that rugby is regarded as the nation's favourite, are in the semi-finals of Euro 2016. Up is down and down is up. Nothing makes sense in this land of fragile Welsh hope.

(A rare instance of Wales being good)

My face is contorted in the sort of quizzical expression you might pull if you saw someone you recognised on the news or if your local had just popped up as a location in a blockbuster film. I am in France, and Gareth Bale just scored his first – Wales' first – ever goal at the European Championships. It's a sight I hadn't ever thought I'd see. After 60 minutes, Steve Wilson utters the fateful piece of commentary: "still no real threat from Slovakia…" Robert Mak promptly walks into the Wales box and squares it. Four Welsh defenders watch it meander in front of them, until its swept into their net by substitute Ondrej Duda, his first touch of the match. This is the Wales I know, this is the Wales I've seen before and spent more than two decades watching.

As the game looks to be slipping away from us, a rendition of the anthem starts spontaneously from the stands. It's a special thing. Where chants are usually lost to an amorphous cacophony on television, the thunderous Gwlad! Gwlad!s come through crystal clear. The commentators fall silent in reverence. This is the first tournament the Welsh fans have seen their national side at in their lifetime, but it could also be their last. If it is, they're going to enjoy it, but they're also going to do everything possible to make sure it isn't.

Then something weird happens: Joe Ledley plays Aaron Ramsey through the middle. The ball looks agonisingly out of Ramsey's control, but he somehow prevents himself from falling over with a touch that jinks past an onrushing Martin Skrtel. It's now beyond Ramsey, but recently released ex-Championship striker Hal Robson Kanu is there. Hal Robson Kanu opens his body to shoot. The keeper dives, a defender hurls himself in front of the shot. Foolishly, they have gone the direction the ball should have gone in. Hal Robson Kanu is no respecter of 'shoulds'. Hal Robson Kanu points at 'should', looks 'should' directly in the eye, properly squares up to 'should', and then punches himself in his own dick.

In the position Hal Robson Kanu receives the ball here, a professional striker should confidentially place the ball in a corner. They would look left and right, pick the most open option, and plant it with power. By kicking it. With their foot. Hard. But we are dealing with Hal Robson Kanu, a limitless agent of chaos, who instead expertly scuffs the ball against his shin and, somehow, slowly into the net. Wales to pick up their first ever tournament win and the Eiffel Tower is lit up in our colours. Which should never happen.

* * *

There's an old cliché in football that says 'it's the hope that kills you.' With the Welsh national team, it's the tiny morsel of hope – the chink of light at the bottom of an oubliette – that sustains you. It's the kind of Hail Mary optimism that leads people to buying scratchcards and ask out celebrities on Twitter. With hope, there is expectation, and with the Welsh sides of my lifetime, there has been no expectation beyond: I'd like our qualifying campaign to last longer than a couple of months this time.

I'm not old enough to get misty-eyed about the bygone days of Ian Rush and Mark Hughes. Nobody is old enough to have eyes that could be misty of the 1958. Bobby Gould was the first manager I remember. Bobby Gould is an odious chump. His first action as Wales boss was to gleefully retire Rush and Hughes. He then proceeded to award captaincy to Vinnie Jones, cap himself at the age of 50, force John Hartson to fight him in training, lose 2-1 to a Leyton Orient team that had finished 89th in the Football League, hold training sessions in actual Usk actual prison, and use a racial slur in reference to Pierre Van Hooijdonk after a 7-1 battering by the Netherlands that saw Nathan Blake withdraw from the squad.

Having steered the national side safely into joke territory, Gould's embarrassing tenure came to a thankful end in 1999, and Mark Hughes took over. Hughes presided over an – if not quite golden – unusually bright generation of Welsh players. Ryan Giggs, Gary Speed, Craig Bellamy would have walked into most national sides, while the likes of Simon Davies, Robert Earnshaw and Danny Gabbidon provided a very decent core. This group provided my (until recently) only fond memories of watching Wales. Robert Earnshaw nabbing a debut goal in a 1-0 win over Germany and me briefly getting my hopes up that he could be the Welsh Thierry Henry. Craig Bellamy's second as we beat the Italy of Fabio Cannavaro, Andrea Pirlo and Alessandro Del Piero 2-1 during qualification for Euro 2004.

I can recall Craig Bellamy latching onto a Hartson through ball and rounding a hopelessly-off-his-life Gigi Buffon, then slotting into an open net without any reference materials, because I've already seared it into my hippocampus rewatching the clip over and over. It's so familiar because there are literally no other clips from any of the Wales games I traipsed my resentful father to take me to see that are worth rewatching. As plainly as I can visualise Bellamy's goal, I can also picture a thousand balls hoofed aimlessly towards the Cardiff skyline by a dozen lower league cloggers, matched by an equal thousand exasperated Ryan Giggs hand-on-hips grimaces. We had no 'Gazza moment', no 'Hand of God' or Michael Owen wundergoal. We have ticket stubs from watching lifeless draws with Azerbaijan.

Hughes came within a thwarted appeal to UEFA of taking us to Euro 2004, and gave way to John Toshack. Whatever aptitude Toshack had had for club management dissolved on contact with the national side. Likely under the influence of Sir Alex Ferguson, Giggs starts refusing the call-up for all but the most crucial games to focus on his United career. This had a knock-on effect among the other players. If their best player didn't want to play for the country, what hope did they have of winning, and why shouldn't they prioritise their clubs also? The average-sized fish left the tiny spit-sized pond and we started plummeting through the FIFA rankings, until we eventually plumbed the depths of 112th.

After an insipid 2-0 home defeat to Finland towards the end of Toshack's time, the infamously frank Bellamy gave a brutally candid post-match interview, wearing a defeated, soul-searching, George-Bailey-on-Christmas-Eve expression. "Two sides without a glimmer of hope. Where do we go from here? God knows, but it's the same old story: out of the group."

Enter Gary Speed. Speed became Wales manager in 2010 and immediately set about rectifying the fundamental faults he'd witnessed over 85 caps as a player. He secured desperately needed funding so that there wasn't an immediate, amateurish drop in training standards from those players were used to at their clubs. He brought in sports scientists and discipline, demanding every player learn the national anthem. He blooded in the precocious young crop of players: Joe Allen, Gareth Bale, Joe Ledley and Aaron Ramsey. He changed the tactical philosophy; Wales would no longer lump and chase, they would play it out from the back, retain possession and build attacks.

Though this didn't yield immediate results by way of the scorelines, the performances were revelatory to anyone who had sat through the preceding years of godawful lumpers and even worse chasers. Wales were actually, in spite of everything, exciting.

On November 12th 2011, Speed's Wales tore Norway apart 4-1, playing properly free-flowing, scintillating stuff. They leapt to 45th in the FIFA Rankings, the highest climb of anyone that year.

Just two weeks later and Speed was gone and the football community went into mourning. All of the tributes spoke of his talent as a player and manager, his guidance as a mentor, but mostly of his warmth as a friend. The world, and particularly Wales, was – and is – a less hopeful place without Gary Speed.

* * *

Chris Coleman took over the vacant Wales job semi-reluctantly, having been a close friend of Speed's. Initial results under Coleman seemed to be a gigantic two steps back, losing five in a row, including a 6-1 defeat to Serbia which he considered resigning after.

They faced Scotland in the following game from their Serbian humbling, the game which began Gareth Bale's rise to talisman. Trailing 1-0, the then-Spurs player wins a penalty, dispatches the penalty and then scores a ludicrous long-range last-gasp winner to boot. As Bale blossomed from 'promising left back' to 'prodigal winger', the results started picking up and Coleman started looking like the luckiest international manager in the biz.

Chris Coleman Anecdote: While at Real Sociedad, he once blamed his absence at a press conference on his washing machine packing in and flooding his house. It later transpired he'd actually been out clubbing until 5am.

It would be an injustice to say Coleman has been passive in Wales reaching the Euros, just as it would be to say the man is more concerned about his domestic appliances than absolutely smashing it on a school night. He turned developed a 5-3-2 formation (3 centre backs, 2 wing backs, 3 midfielders, Gareth Bale and a striker) that has not only played to Bale's strengths, but harnessed those of the rest of the squad. It became a genuinely excellent system that finally pushed Wales over the line in qualification and he deserves full credit.

But it should also be remembered he has – and we have – Gareth Bale. Gareth Bale is objectively the best player in the world. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi might have scored more, assisted more, be technically more adept, but I don't care. I'm not going to look at your boring as hell 'stats'. Gareth Bale is objectively the best player in the world because he takes the time-honoured anyone-can-do-it park football skill of knock-and-run and elevates it to a world-class level. It's a crazy move to attempt as a professional, downright depraved and very definitely dangerous.

Kicking a football to one side of an opponent and running the other requires you to surrender the ball and give your opponent a headstart, then beat them to it. You not only give them every chance of taking the ball off you, but you also prove how much faster you are. There's the guile of knowing when to execute the knock, the thrill of seeing you've flat-footed your rube opponent, the wind in your hair as you tear past them, the 'I'm gonna make it!' anticipation as you look behind and see them eating your dirt, and the woosh when you do. It's the football equivalent of doing martial arts blindfolded and pinning them, then flicking the Vs in their hopelessly defeated face. It's the most arrogant thing you can do, because it's also incredibly reckless and stupid. Every defender worth his salt learns to read when someone's going to knock-and-run, or else has someone covering behind him. There should never be the space on a football field to pull off knock-and-run. You are basically just giving them ball away and then running off in the wrong direction. And yet, and yet, Gareth Bale does it not just to a professional standard, not just to a world class standard, but to a standard that makes Cristiano Ronaldo actively loathe him. Nobody wants to get humiliated by a knock-and-run. And so defenders stand off Bale, propelling themselves as fast as their confused heels can handle. And this this allows Bale to run at them, onto them. It's the closest thing football has to Zorro.

'This is truly it,' I think. On paper, we beat Slovakia, who are okay; Northern Ireland, who are by no means good; Russia, who were shit; and lost to England, who were somehow worse. We have actually had quite a lucky run to the quarter-final. Belgium, the stats-blog-reader and pseudo-thinking fan's hot tip, had done what no other teams at the tournament had done so far, and ruthlessly crushed the underdog. They squashed Republic of Ireland 3-0 and then dismantled a Hungary side (that had drawn with Portugal) 4-0. This was a step too far, for us. The dream was over. Those long drizzly qualifiers, Gouldy's reign of terror, Ryan Giggs through Gareth Bale: we'd gotten ahead of ourselves, now. We'd gotten greedy.

We go 1-0 down after 13 minutes. I cradle my head in my hands, fearing a drubbing. But something bizarre, something distinctly un-Wales happens. We don't accept that we're jobbing whipping boys and come roaring back. Ashley Williams nods us level with all the grace of someone overstepping and falling downstairs. It's on. It's fucking on.

At half time I evaluate our chances at the penalty shootout. Slim but worth a shot. Hold out boys, we can do this. Let's not get silly now. That's it Gareth, keep it there, no danger around the halfway line. Gareth doesn't keep it there. He plays a wonderful looping reverse pass towards the Belgium penalty area, down the right hand side. Aaron Ramsey collects with all the nonchalance of someone who has forgotten he's wearing a Wales shirt, and players in Wales shirts don't effortlessly pick inch-perfect passes out of the sky. They wait for the ball boys to give them back.

Ramsey charges further down the right as if he's actually intending to do something, but he's alone. Unless you count currently-without-a-club Hal Robson Kanu as support. He's alone. Hopelessly alone. Blasting himself off headfirst into eternal solitude and pain like Bruce Willis at the end of Armageddon. Then he does something wild. He plays it into the box. He pulls off a wonderful cross that both goes over the head of a Belgian defender and lands at the feet of Hal still-waiting-on-Reading-to-post-the-P45 Robson Kanu.

Hal. Hal! Neil Taylor's open Hal! Look, he's right there Hal! Slot him in Hal! He's open! He could score! Hal! For fuck's sake Hal! Pass it! Hal. Seriously. Hal. What the fuck. Hal?!

Ignoring the collective will of millions of Wales' gasping fans, ignoring all conventional logic and wisdom, ignoring all established laws; including those of physics, relativity, thermodynamics and the Crown Court, Hal Robson Kanu scores the second goal he shouldn't have scored at this tournament. He executes such a perfect Cruyff Turn that the Dutch maestro would probably be happy to posthumously relinquish the title. The Robson Kanu Turn. He's a ship sailing past them in the night, except he's sent them so far past him in the night they've ended up in yesterday. It's a pirouette of such exquisite grace that would make Billy Elliot's dad whimper as he beheld and understood beauty for this first time. He's one on one with Thibaut Courtois now. Courtois a smart keeper, a modern keeper. He's done his research, watched his clips. He knows Robson Kanu favours the aimless shin bobble over a firm placement. He should adjust his bod – Robson Kanu's already taken the shot. He knows what people think he should do and instead sticks so far out of reach of Courtois gangly lollipop-lady arms that he's going to need a hand getting it back out of the net. Wales 2 Belgium 1.

There's a very fair penalty shout. Lukaku and Fellaini miss two absolute sitters. I feel like I'm going to be sick. I go to the bathroom and try and have a ten-minute piss. I wash my hands for ages, like. I return, dismayed, to find I've only had a three-minute piss. There are still seven minutes to go. Chris Gunther has it down the right hand side, he's running towards the corner flag. Instead of decamping their for five minutes, he whips in a cross. A cross for Sam Vokes, Hal Robson Kanu's replacement. The cross is placed between two Belgian defenders, if he can force a corner from this, he's golden. He doesn't. He scores a goal.

It's hard to describe this moment. Sam Vokes is to mobility what trees are to mobility. He shouldn't be able to beat someone while running away from goal. He's also running away from goal, towards the corner of the 18-yard box, with his back to goal. He's also got Courtois' Mr Men reach guarding the near post, the only post anyone without an owl neck would be able to twist to see. But Vokes is working out the spin of the ball, the position of Courtois' feet, clocking the extra step he's taken towards his near post. He's internally computing how much force he needs to apply to the header and how with what angle of incidence he needs to whip his neck for his forehead to meet it. In that moment, Sam Vokes is far greater than the sum of his entirely competent Championship frontman parts. He's Pythagoras squared by Batistuta. The ball hits the back of the net. I nearly collapse from relief.

Robbie Savage's voice, overcome with emotion, cracks like a dad giving a speech at his daughter's wedding, barely able to stop the lump coming out of his throat but persevering: "Wales… are in ….the semi… final!" he's able to pant before passing out. The final whistle blows and his words come true.

* * *

I've found getting older has lead to the world continuously seeming more miserable, and this has, in turn, lead to the things I like seeming more trivial. Even, football, escapism preserve of my childhood, wasn't immune. I began to feel like I'd most combinations of goals that could please me aesthetically, that these moments needed investment I wasn't willing to give to mean more, because investing in football was to inexplicably tie my happiness to something I had no control over. I became less and less interested in the Premier League. If my club lost, I wasn't that unhappy. More worryingly, I wasn't happy when they won. It would all be rendered meaningless by next week anyway.

Wales are different, though. You don't get to pick whether you support Wales if you're Welsh. You have the Welsh side thrust upon you. And this is different, though. There won't be a next week. There may never be a moment like that again. Five days on and I'm still beaming. A moment I'd waited a lifetime for and it came. It was a perfect, perfect moment. A moment where Wales were the team I've probably wasted cumulative months of my youth trying to achieve via the miserable conduit of video games: a nation to feel proud of. The envy of England. The envy of Europe.

You can double check the score, blinking and rubbing your eyes until you bore them clean out of their sockets, pinching yourself until you'd torn off all of your skin, and it would still be true, and will always be true. It doesn't really matter what the result is against Portugal. Wales. Are in the semi-finals. Of Euro 2016.

@tristandross

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