He was talking ahead of what at least one Fleet St tabloid billed as a rematch between St George and the Dragon.

But few people were paying attention to what Cymru defender Ben Davies had to say about one of the biggest games of his life, a World Cup clash with England. They were far more worked up about the language he was using: Welsh.

The 29-year-old, appearing at a press conference in Qatar, spoke in his own native tongue.

You would like to think this – for most players from most countries – would be a pretty pedestrian and mundane event. For Mr Davies, it was anything but.

The player’s language provoked rage, abuse and mockery. Twitter lit up with indignant England supporters accusing Mr Davies of “trying to be different”; of being an “idiot”, a “weapon”.

Bizarrely, some objected to the defender’s Welsh because – Shock! Horror! – Mr Davies plays for a London club, Spurs. There is nothing unusual about more voluble and partisan football supporters being boorish about minority languages – as even a quick scroll through Scottish Twitter comments on Scots or Gaelic will show.

But this was a pretty nasty episode.

All Mr Davies was doing was replying to questions from Welsh language media, not making some kind of grand nationalist gesture. As the Welsh DJ Katie Evans tweeted: “It’s not that deep.”

I think the football fans who spewed bile on to their computers, tablets and phones are a minority, quite a small one.

But, flicking through social media this week, what struck me was not how fans attacked Mr Davies, that was just run-of-the-mill knuckle-dragging chauvinistic bigotry. No, what hit me was one rather unhelpful way in which some folk defended him.

There were supporters -– Welsh and English – who decided to stress how “beautiful” and “poetic” Mr Davies’ language was.

Was it though? Really? Would anybody ever say anything like that about an anglophone doing a pre-match presser?

This was an articulate and, I suspect, rather intelligent athlete talking about sport. It was not a literary recital. Most of the people applying an aesthetic value to Welsh were, like me, unable to follow what Mr Davies was saying. So what is going on?

There is a long history of English-speakers declaring Britain’s minority languages and dialects, especially Celtic ones, to be beautiful or poetic or ancient or historic, even timeless and unchanged. This, for me, is really problematic. I think this patronises, mysticises and exoticises speakers; it “others” them.

This narrative makes modern language varieties sound like relics, like something that should be in a museum or art gallery, rather than a way you tell your kids their tea is on the table, or journalists how you feel about your next football match.

Many of us walk around with all sorts of biases, good and bad, about languages. We might think that French is “romantic” or “chi-chi”; or German “precise” or “brutal”, or that Scots is “rough” or “humorous”.

This patter is steaming-cowpat grade. Such value judgements reveal our learned prejudices about the people who speak different languages. And little or nothing more.

Linguists have known this for decades. Scientists have, for example, played recordings of various Europeans to Asians who had never heard our languages before. The test subjects were asked which languages sounded nicest. They could not say.

All languages are capable of great beauty, and ugliness, of laser-like precision and woolly, comforting vagueness, of being both crude and sophisticated, of sounding both funny and deadly serious. It depends on who is talking and what they are saying, not on what language they are speaking.

So what is behind the mostly well-intentioned chat that Welsh sound nice? It’s still prejudice, I am afraid, based on a narrow view of the language’s value and role.

Nobody has gushed about the beauty of English after Gareth Southgate’s players did their press conferences. This is because, in the UK at least, the language you are reading right now is ubiquitous, standard, default.

English can be lovely too (though maybe not in this column or on your gas bill) but we never think to describe the entire language in that way.

I often hear folk say things like “Gaelic has its place”. Which is a polite way of declaring that the language is not welcome everywhere.

One of the “places” Celtic speakers are allowed to have is in folk culture. Anglophones are used to the idea of, say, Welsh being performed at the National Eisteddfod, or Gaelic at the Mod.

And, of course, the languages will sound gorgeous at such events. And the English-speaking majority ends up prizing their aesthetic or historic value.

There are people who are theoretically content with preserving, say Gaelic, as a sort of cultural artefact but who complain when they see the language on a train station sign in Edinburgh. It is as if they get mad when the natives stray off their reservation.

For Scots, its tolerated “place” is, frankly, of lower social prestige. Sure, the leid is sometimes celebrated in formal culture – especially on Burns Night. But it is more often seen as an acceptable vehicle for self-deprecating comedy. There are people who are happy to laugh along with Scotland The What? or Rikki Fulton but who burst blood vessels if they hear broad Scots spoken in Holyrood.

Funnily enough, a few light Scottishisms have always been tolerated in the world of football broadcasting.

Working-class Scotland stars, for example, gave many a World Cup interview that an international audience would have found hard to follow. Back, that is, in the days when we got to finals.

Ben Davies was attacked by those who thought his language was out of “place” at the World Cup.

Cymru lost. I do not know how Mr Davies and Welsh-speaking players and fans reacted. I doubt it was pretty. But I’ll say this of the Spurs player: his game may be beautiful but his language does not need to be.