There is a story that Rob Page enjoys telling.
It is an anecdote more than a story, one which flitters familiarly through time and is tethered to no specific date, but a story nonetheless. Of the time, as a child, the front door of the Wales manager’s home in Tylorstown would never endure a lock, lest he lock out the irresistible shrills of the friends of his mother, the clacking of their hush puppies on the wooden flooring announcing their unexpected but expected arrivals, like a bus station’s incessantly whirring intercom.
It is the clacking which Page recalls most viscerally, then the scent of a freshly-baked, still-warm something wafting through the tight hallway that he, on any given day, would instinctively sprint through and out of the unlocked door, down to the streets, the fields, in the open air of an inexhaustible Rhondda valleys sky to play kick-a-can with friends until daylight slipped behind the ridges – and then he’d play for a little while longer, until he knew he had exceeded his mother’s patience and his tea was irreparably cold.
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Page enjoys telling this story, however simple it may be. It is the faint yet conspicuous tug on his stubbornly grizzled face that is the tell, as if corporeally he is doing his darndest not to melt into the memory.
The temptation to slip back into that echo with Page is more alluring than ever, to a place where the concepts of hard work, camaraderie and honesty were viewed not as noble pursuits of a promising academy product or bullet points on a LinkedIn job application but as unshakeable tenets of society.
Back then, those concepts worked like an easily digestible equation. If you worked hard enough, stayed honest and helped those around you, life merited a good return. That reality was born more out of necessity than providence. The mines were not a place for phoneys and cheats.
These days, the orthodoxy operates differently. Working-class ideals are becoming relics of a hackneyed era in which such modest enterprises like honest labour and community are now the sole preserve of the business fool. Here, massaging the nearest ego is best practise; benevolence is a death sentence.
Yet, listening to Page talk of his childhood, the sense of collective struggle and strength which underpinned it as a once-bustling area began to wane, does not incite an inner dirge, but rekindles some semblance of enthusiasm for the upcoming World Cup, definitively more so than watching hours of France ‘98 or Italia ‘90 goal compilations on YouTube, or successfully sealing £800 worth of Panini stickers.
Arguably never before has such an honest, unblinking commitment to one’s working-class roots been needed. In a month on the cusp of welcoming the most perverted World Cup in history, when fans from every nation have proven capable of being stripped down to transactional PR projects, Page represents something of a direct repudiation to the version of the world that this World Cup is reflecting back onto itself, a version which says hard work and honesty are qualities that can be bought and bent for an appropriate price.
There was nothing sexy about Page in the football sense when he was thrust into Wales’ managerial hot seat two years ago. He was a man whose CV before November 2020 could have been scribbled onto a used napkin, whose player pedigree was respectable enough but never headline snatching, whose name never tickled the lips of Uefa or Fifa officials. He was the accidental manager of a country who had failed, fantastically, to make it to a World Cup since the invention of Ramen noodles.
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Over the past two years, however, Page’s authority in and outside of Wales has grown like a tree. Indeed, what Page has done for Wales on the football stage is, in the remotest of isolated football reflections, monumental. His tactical nous has even come to be mildly accepted among the most esoteric of fan tacticians.
But the warmth felt towards him by so many is not merely a tribute to a man who has managed to turn doubters into believers and lead Wales to a promised land. It is a recognition that, for all his technical assets — an ineffably confounding Gareth Bale, a just as wildly still whirring Aaron Ramsey, an ever-present Ben Davies, the composure of Joe Allen, some of the most exciting young talent in recent history — the essence of Page’s managerial success in getting Wales to a first World Cup in 64 years is rooted in his loyalty to his working-class roots.
It goes some way in explaining why anybody cynical enough to view the gesture of Page’s squad announcement in the miners' welfare hall of his childhood town as another maudlin and shrewd social media stunt by the Football Association of Wales does not know much about the power of the Valleys, or the identity that Page carries with him as he travels to Qatar next week.
Roots are important, as is an incorrigible sense of security around them. There has never loomed the danger that Page would be contaminated by the shinier, sound-bite age of the TikTok manager. He has not degenerated into the venal temptations that have ensnared most former footballers handed some teaspoon of power, nor has he become some repository for marketing slogans and bland altruism.
No, Page hasn’t even succumbed to the touchline fashion of pundit sneakers, black turtlenecks and flash zip-ups. His head remains unapologetically un-buffed, his chin an honest stumble. His matchday tracksuit is a carbon-copy of the one before and before and before. His Rhondda accent, as smooth and patient as a storm cloud pulling over a horizon, was never in any more risk of being lost as Page’s desire to employ its soft textured cadence to deliver a vociferous put on a tin hat and dig a trench when required.
With Page, what you see is what you get. Verbal pyrotechnics aren’t his game. Rarely, if ever, do his post-match diatribes exceed tamely candid reflections, never drifting into the bombastic currency of mind-games or self-aggrandising ploys.
That is not to say there aren’t those who find Page’s old-fashioned ways frustrating. Roots are vulnerable to sentimentality, and Page, for all of his talk of tin hats, boasts as soft an underbelly as any. Should Chris Gunter be anywhere near this squad? No. Nor, arguably, Jonny Williams. Though, if form and level are the standards for team selection, one would have to erase many a name from the list.
Because football is not the place for sentimentality. A World Cup against a backdrop of atrocious human rights records certainly is not. How radically impudent, then, of Page to inundate his squad in the saccharine liquor of the stuff. How delightfully refreshing, too.
The balance is critical. Wales has always been a country of the collective, Page has simply reintegrated the fundamentals. His strength has always been in his silent bearing of standards and his capacity to not only charge those around him to the same principles but to make them want to do so. To make others do more for the collective than they would for just themselves.
As manager, it is merely an elaboration of the same theme, such is the requisite ingredient to transform 11 players and tens of thousands of fans into one sanguine pulse on the largest of stages. A sense of loyalty intertwined with the non-negotiable of hard work. The practise is straightforward, hardly revolutionary. But the results have proven epochal.
Perhaps it is the Rhondda, whatever is in the water there, as they say. Regardless of the faith one places in such fickle notions like coincidences, there feels a dimension more than narrative symmetry regarding the roots — just six minutes apart by car — shared by both Page and Jimmy Murphy, the only Wales managers to ever bring the country to this pinnacle.
Over 64 years, those six minutes by car will look different on the surface. Today, the Rhondda carries its share of baggage. A chipped tooth. A crooked nose. A peeling outer layer.
Nevertheless, the Rhondda and its character prevail, as does the belief that modest hard work does pay off, even now. Page is living proof of that. Never has that visibility of that proof been more critical.
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