‘Ian Rush gave me a pair of Nike boots and I treasured them for years. I tried playing with them once, until my big toes poked through the toe area!’ How a Liverpool legend helped inspire Andriy Shevchenko

Andriy Shevchenko.

Back in the 1980s, before the era of globalisation, the world was a lot smaller. The prospect of being able to watch live coverage of any but the biggest football matches being played thousands of miles away was the stuff of fantasy.

The links between Soviet-era Ukraine and Wales were therefore not too obvious, but football has a knack of bringing people together, as one promising young player who had grown up in the shadow of the Chernobyl disaster was left inspired by one of Wales’ greatest-ever strikers.