Wales vs Ukraine

On 5 June 2022 Wales played Ukraine for a place in the FIFA World Cup finals, which are due to be held in Qatar in November and December 2022. I suspect that all right-mined people wanted Ukraine to win. That win would have provided a significant boost to the morale of a nation suffering under an unprovoked military incursion and brutal war. As I write, there is little prospect that the war will have ended by November. Although right-minded people may have wanted Ukraine to win, I supported Wales, and was delighted with their ultimate victory. I felt slightly guilty and, for personal reasons, a little surprised at my delight. My support for Wales is relatively easy to explain. I have lived half my life in Cardiff, and in a period of more than thirty years support of the national sports team, be it soccer, rugby, or any other sport you care to mention, has become ingrained. It is second nature. Added to that, for most of those thirty years I lived in the suburb of Cardiff where Gareth Bale was born and went to school. I passed the Gareth Bale mural on Church Road every time I went to the local shops. Sport can play fast and loose with our political sensibilities. In sport, it seems, we put our national (or even tribal) loyalties above issues of international justice. Indeed, if Wales had let Ukraine win, ensuring their place in the World Cup finals, it can be argued that a sporting injustice would have been committed. In sport, one respects one’s opponent not by indulging them, however worthy the outcome of that indulgence might be, but by playing them as aggressively and fairly as you would in any match. After all, in 2001, the Arizona Diamondbacks did not let the New York Yankees win the World Series, despite 9/ 11. The Diamondbacks showed the Yankees the respect they deserved. So too, Wales respected Ukraine by not letting them win. There are added complexities to all this. Some of these complexities are personal. By June 2022 I had moved away from Cardiff, and back to my native England. Should a change of national loyalties have occurred (perhaps at the precise moment in which I received the keys to my new house)? Should I have become a right-minded neutral when Wales played? Even if a change should have occurred, it didn’t. Second nature, so painstakingly shaped over thirty years, does not, I discovered, change over night. That image of Gareth Bale on a wall in Church Road is surprisingly persuasive. What is significant here is that sport can be a crucible in which one’s sense of identity, and thus the entangled and sometimes contradictory communities and cultures that demand your loyalty, are tested and exposed. Through sport, it seems, one can learn a lot about one’s personal identity politics. In sport one begins to tease out the complexities of who you are, who you have been, and who you might become. SPORT, ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY 2022, VOL. 16, NO. 3, 251–253 https://doi.org/10.1080/17511321.2022.2101284