On Sunday, Russia escalated its aerial bombardment of Kyiv, launching a major wave of missile and drone attacks. On Monday, 10 people were injured when an art academy and exhibition hall were demolished in an airstrike. On Tuesday, Mykhailo Mudryk’s late winner secured for Ukraine a place at Euro 2024, sealing a 2-1 victory against Iceland in the Uefa Path B playoff.
One of these things, evidently, is not like the others. And yet nor does Ukraine’s qualification for their first major tournament since the beginning of their war with Russia feel like a mere triviality or footnote. On a night of high drama, high emotion and ultimately high celebration, these players – and the thousands of fans who had followed them here – recognised that something more was at stake.
Full-time brought not just elation but a kind of delayed grief. There were exhausted hugs and there were tears of relief, tears of joy and tears of loss.
Qualifying for a football tournament will not bring back their dead or rebuild their cities or unmake the grim memories or shoot down the Russian missiles. Exiled here in their Polish home from home, 500 miles from the Ukrainian border, they know that these stands will never be their stands, these streets will never be their streets, this turf will never be their turf.
Still they came, because in times like these even to shout the name of Ukraine is to partake in a kind of resistance.
“Making the Euros will help the world to not forget about Ukraine,” the midfielder Volodymyr Brazhko had said in advance of this match. And of course there is a basic cruelty in the fact that something this important – the visibility, the identity, the very survival of a nation state – can be swung by something as capricious as a game of football.
But perhaps the world has been forgetting about Ukraine a little, and if the coming months can provide this nation with a voice and a platform, then it is an opportunity they will seize with both hands. After all geopolitics, like football, is a game in which you take the result however you can get it. No country has taken in more Ukrainian refugees than the Euro 2024 hosts, and Germany this summer will now be a pageant of Ukrainian pride and Ukrainian defiance.
And so while international football is not war, nor is it war’s opposite. This much has become apparent from the very start of the Russian invasion, since when we have long become accustomed to Ukrainian press conferences being dotted with casual references to bombs and slaughter, good and evil. As the teams stepped out into a nearly full stadium, as stands draped with anti-Russian banners reverberated to patriotic song, the outline of Ukraine printed on the giant flag laid across the centre circle included Crimea within its borders.
At which point, Ukraine’s glorious march to victory encountered a small, doughty, volcanic obstacle. Iceland had pulled off a monumental shock by thrashing the highly fancied Israel on Saturday, and here again they seemed to relish their spoiling role. Lashed down in their classic 4‑4‑2, with their wingers dropping in to create a back five depending on which side was being attacked, Ukraine spent most of the first half puzzling over how to break them down, by which time they had gone behind.
It had been coming. Albert Gudmundsson’s left-footed strike from outside the area followed a neat lattice of passes with barely any Ukrainian pressure on the ball. Roman Yaremchuk had the ball in the net for an equaliser, only for the VAR to rule it out for offside. But amid Ukraine’s frustration lay a template: move the ball quicker, sweeping diagonal balls with blitzing runs. Viktor Tsygankov’s equaliser, curled into the bottom corner after a sumptuous long pass from Georgiy Sudakov, was a justified reward for a spell of sustained quality at the start of the second half.
Even as they began to dominate possession and territory, Ukraine continued to blow hot and cold. They were indebted to Andriy Lunin of Real Madrid for keeping them in the game with two fine saves. And finally, with six minutes left, they got what they came for. Again Sudakov was the creator, slipping into the right channel and turning the ball inside for Mudryk, whose low finish from 20 yards set off flares in the stands, jubilation in the press box and an agonising siege in the final minutes.
Eventually, the celebrations could begin. The Ukrainian substitutes bounded on to the pitch. Mudryk – who had a quiet game for the most part – looked skywards and gave a silent prayer of thanks. And so it will have been in the living rooms and shelters of Ukraine: a people not saved, and not safe, but grateful at least for this small morsel of happiness.
