After everything, after the celebrations on the pitch and the celebrations in the stands and the Icelandic-style hand claps, a curious blankness seemed to descend on the Ukrainians. One by one, player after player shuffled towards the team bus in a kind of crumpled stupor, not yet able to process what any of this meant.
“I’m very tired, there are no emotions,” Georgiy Sudakov said with a sigh. “I left everything in the locker room,” said Oleksandr Zinchenko.
Perhaps this was the logical consequence of a win that meant everything and changed nothing. Ukraine’s players had emptied every last drop of themselves into the Wroclaw turf, summoned a spell of pure emotion and pure fervour, qualified their country for a fourth consecutive European Championship. But victory hits a little different when the stakes are largely theoretical. Defeat, too.
“It would be a shame to lose to someone else,” the Iceland coach, Åge Hareide, said. “But to lose to Ukraine … it’s OK.”
War shifts the parameters of sport in new and confusing directions. Everyone seems to agree that Ukraine qualifying for Euro 2024 has a special significance, but what exactly? Joy for a grieving people, a little succour amid unthinkable hardship? Or are there tangible goals that can be achieved by their presence in Germany this summer?
“In times, when the enemy tries to destroy us, we demonstrate every day that Ukrainians are and will be,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the country’s president, wrote on X on Tuesday night. Which is not to equate the destructive firepower of Putin’s army with, say, the searching through balls of Johann Berg Gudmundsson. But there is a message being put across here: Ukraine never gives up; so don’t give up on us. It may or may not be germane that Serhiy Rebrov’s side have conjured four of their past six wins from losing positions.
Certainly the players seem to recognise and revel in the fact that they are not simply athletes but lobbyists, that this is not simply a sporting tournament but a form of advertising space. “It will be so important,” Zinchenko said. “All the world is going to watch this competition. It’s an unreal opportunity to show how good we are as a team and how good it is to be Ukrainian.”
Nor is it accidental how often they refer to the Ukrainian military, some of whom were pictured on social media watching the game on tiny screens in metal huts or projected on to hanging bedsheets.
“This win is for our people, for the soldiers who are protecting our freedom,” Rebrov said. “Look at what has happened in Ukraine in the last days, the last weeks,” Sudakov said. “The drones, the missiles, the bombs that arrive at different cities. It’s incredible. That’s why we need support.”
Success, translating to visibility, translating to advocacy, translating to public pressure, translating to an increase in western arms supplies. Is this really how it works? Perhaps this is the only way it can work: a kind of footballing diplomacy, soaking up every last second of global attention they can muster, hammering home their message. “We need to shout about it every day,” Zinchenko said. “This is the only way we can win.”
And so the longer Ukraine stay in the tournament, the further they get, the more time they get to shout. At which point we get dragged off on a wild but not entirely irrelevant tangent: what can we realistically expect them to do at the European finals tournament? They go into Group E with Belgium, Romania and Slovakia: perhaps the most hospitable group of the lot, with Romania and Slovakia well below Ukraine in the Fifa world rankings. A place in the knockout stages should be the very minimum expectation. A quarter-final, matching their performance three years ago, is not out of the question.
For all the distractions and the piecemeal preparation there is an extremely talented squad waiting to be unleashed, a squad that may well unite and thrive in the pressure cauldron of tournament football. Sudakov, who created both goals on Tuesday, is a playmaker of rare vision. Mykhailo Mudryk is a winger on the cusp of detonation, whose winning goal could be a kind of catalyst.
In Andriy Lunin of Real Madrid and Anatoliy Trubin of Benfica they can boast not one but two world-class goalkeepers. The strikers Artem Dovbyk and Roman Yaremchuk were cleverly rotated by Rebrov during the international break, keeping them fresh and hungry. Such is the depth that even Zinchenko could be safely dropped to the bench against Iceland.
But in order to realise their rich potential, Ukraine will need to strike a certain balance. For all their quality they have often blown hot and cold during qualification, juddering between extreme competence and extreme incompetence.
They are technically good enough to compete for long periods and emotionally driven enough to hit peaks few teams can live with. If Rebrov can successfully harness the two, he will have something extremely special on his hands.