12 years ago, Ukraine had just experienced a bitter disappointment in front of their own fans.
Wayne Rooney scored the only goal in the match between England and Ukraine, which ended Group D of the European Championship. Ukraine finished third in the group, one point ahead of France, which advanced to the next round.
The tournament was played in Ukraine, and the England match at the Donbass Arena. Ten years later, the stadium’s glass was shattered by the Russian war of aggression. Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, has been one of the longest-running theaters of the war.
Despite this, the Ukrainian national team is participating in the fourth consecutive European Championship. The first two ended in the group stage, but the last time Ukraine already advanced to the top eight.
This time, the entrance ticket alone was up for grabs in minutes. Ukraine lost only two matches out of eight in the qualifiers and even drew against England. It was close to a direct race place, but Italy, who ended up with equal points, edged ahead through the results of mutual matches.
The games continued into the further qualification, where defeat meant the crumbling of race dreams.
The situation was already familiar from the previous year. In the qualifiers for the 2022 World Cup, Ukraine played in Finland’s group and finished one point ahead of Huuhkajie in second place. France got a direct place in the competition, but Ukraine still got a chance through further qualification.
When Scotland went down in the first part, the World Cup was one win away. Ukraine traveled to Wales to visit Cardiff, where the charge was further boosted by a gift sent to the team from the frontline.
– The team sent letters to the soldiers and received a flag from the war, which they promised to hang on the locker room wall, the head coach at the time Oleksandr Petrakov said at a press conference.
Wales scored the only goal of the match played in the pouring rain when Gareth Bale the free kick bounced through the Ukrainian player into the goal.
The Russian attack has lasted for more than two years, but football has also been played in Ukraine for almost the same period.
A day less than half a year after the start of the attack, Shakhtar Donetsk faced Metalist 1925 in Kyiv in the official opening of the new major league season, which the public could only see via television.
The previous season had been halfway through when the war started, and did not continue after the winter break. Now, however, we wanted to play.
The stands were kept empty. For security reasons, the starting times and venues of the matches were also kept secret for a longer period of time. Each stadium was no more than 500 meters from a bomb shelter, as air raid alerts interrupted games. Sometimes I had to play only during the day due to power outages or missile strikes.
In November, in one match, a possible goal was checked from the video while the bomb alarm sounded. The match was stopped for an hour. It was the second stoppage in the same match, which ended up taking just under five hours to play.
– Strange. We are soccer players, so we only think about soccer, not about attack. We were losing the game, so all we talked about (in the bomb shelter) was how to change the result. We thought we had to win the match, so no one thought about the danger, national team player Taras Stepanenko recalled a one and a half hour bomb shelter trip ESPN’s in the interview.
Fifa changed its rules so that foreign players who played in Ukraine could terminate their contracts and leave the country. The decision led to a series played with domestic forces, but also tested the finances of the clubs as the players left without transfer compensation.
Many teams played permanently away from home, because the real home places are so close to the front line of the war.
Some were unable to continue because the destruction of the war had made the activity impossible.
The number one club of Ukraine, Shakhtar, has not played in its home stadium for ten years, as the hostilities in the Donbass region started already in 2014.
It moved a thousand kilometers away to Lviv.
The stadium built in Donetsk for 400 million dollars still stands empty.
– Considering the situation, the stadium is in good condition. However, it has an underground parking area, so we believe it avoided major damage because the Russians keep their weapons there, the club told ESPN in November 2022.
Long journey to home games
Shahtar has continued to dominate the series, winning the last two championships. In the midst of the crisis, however, even football has been played in Ukraine, as the championship was decided by two points.
The big surprise of the season that ended was FC Kryvbas, a club that played in 2017, whose players only became professionals in 2018. President to Volodymyr Zelensky The favorite team finished third, behind the giants Shakhtar and Dynamo Kyiv, and will play in the Europa League qualifiers next season.
The architect of Kryvbas’ success is the head coach Yuri Vernydub. Moldovan Sheriff beat Real Madrid under him in 2021.
When the war started, Vernydub left his post, returned to Ukraine and went to the front. In the same summer, he was named head coach of Kryvbas, when the plan for a symbolically important football season became clear.
– Everyone knows the situation, so not all foreign players want to come here to play. Even some Ukrainians do not want to join our team because our home place is not far from the front line of the war, so some are afraid. It’s humane, Vernydub said New Voice magazine about the challenges of player acquisitions in January.
It is not possible to play European games in Ukraine, so this season Shakhtar Donetsk played their home matches against Barcelona, Porto and Antwerp in Germany in the group stage of the Champions League. Six Shakhtar players are also in the Ukrainian competition team.
Ukrainian airspace is closed to civilian traffic, so Shakhtar’s trip to the “home match” took about 11 hours. First, three hours to the Polish border, where crossing the border with all the checks took another three hours.
We waited at Rzeszow airport for a couple of hours before the one and a half hour flight to Lübeck, Germany. Finally, I still had to drive about an hour to get to Hamburg. Then game day and the next day back again.
In the Europa League qualifiers, Dnipro-1 played in the Czech Republic and Zorja Luhansk in Poland. Dynamo Kyiv qualified for the Conference League in Romania. The story was the same for everyone.
In general, it was possible to leave the country only with the president’s special permission, thanks to the importance of the matches that are followed on the phone screens at the front. Sport is a valuable instrument of power, propaganda, cohesion and diplomacy, which Ukraine has not forgotten during the state of war.
He was a boxer himself in the front line Oleksandr Usyk caused in May For Tyson Fury the first defeat of his career and became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. The gold medalist of the London Olympics was already in the position of a national hero.
– The Ukrainians are hitting hard! And in the end, all our opponents will fall, Ukrainian President Zelenskyi declared on social media.
It is certain that the national football team’s progress is now just as closely monitored. Until now, the result has remained in the pipe, as Ukraine suffered a brisk defeat to Romania in their opening match.
To the Games through full drama
The harsh fate experienced in Cardiff seemed to be repeated in the further qualification of these games as well. Ukraine had its back against the wall, but showed its character – twice.
Bosnia and Herzegovina was the first to fall, and then Iceland faced Poland. Ukraine fell behind, but equalized after the break. Just six minutes before full time Myh’ailo Mudryk scored the winning goal that sent Ukraine to the final tournament.
– This is a really important victory for all of us, both for our country and the players. I’m really happy because these two matches were really exciting and difficult. We already said before the games that all victories are for our supporters, our country, our people and our soldiers, head coach Sergey Rebrov said at a press conference.
Poland has taken in around 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees, and the support was visible and audible in the Wroclaw stadium stands. The match played in a “neutral” arena ended with a national celebration, which will now continue in Germany.
A place in the tournament would have been a tough achievement even from the start, which was only complicated further by the trials of more than two years. The majority of the national team’s players still play in their home country.
Defender Oleksandr Tymtsyk and the goalkeeper Dmytro Riznyk lost their brothers in battle. Full back Oleksandr Karavaev has been afraid in public for his parents in Hersonis.
The qualifying hero Mudryk was also with Shakhtar in the first season played during the war. Last year, he moved to the English Premier League and Chelsea paid the Ukrainian club a compensation of 70 million euros. Shahtar donated almost a quarter of the transfer amount to the victims of the war.
Arsenal also played in the Premier League Oleksandr Zinchenkoof Bournemouth Illya Zabarnyi and Everton Vitaliy Mykolenko. Konkar striker Roman Yaremchuk was one of the players in the Spanish Premier League, where Andriy Lunin became Real Madrid’s number one goalkeeper. Ruslan Malinovskyi was in Genoa, Italy, a young veskar Anatoly Trubin in Portuguese Benfica.
Star-level players have shared their own thoughts while making millions far from home.
– Maybe I should be holding a gun. However, I knew that I would be more useful to Ukraine by trying to help as much as possible by sending goods and money, and by telling my audience on Instagram or elsewhere about what is happening in Ukraine, Zinchenko, who donated over a million euros to Ukraine Has said.
Together with a national team legend Andriy Shevchenko with Zinchenko also organized a charity match in London.
National team captain Andriy Yarmolenko again donated around 100,000 euros for the purchase of ambulances. As one of Ukraine’s most famous athletes, he had used his contacts to help the Ukrainian army evacuate teammate Yaremchuk’s in-laws from Yarmolenko’s hometown, which was under attack.
Stepanenko, on the other hand, has said that he wanted to go to the front, but that his relatives persuaded him to wear Ukraine’s colors on the field instead.
The prolongation of the war has made news about it commonplace, but the Ukrainians have hoped that the EC tournament will bring the country back to the forefront for at least a couple of weeks.
One German stadium was already filled with Ukrainian tickets in November, when Ukraine and Italy played the final game of the qualifying group in Leverkusen. Germany, which is hosting the games, has received more than one million refugees from Ukraine according to data from February, so the team will receive exceptional support for the most significant competitive performance in its history.