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.
Certainly the players themselves 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.”
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.
For all the distractions and the piecemeal preparation there really is an extremely talented squad waiting to be unleashed here, a squad that may well unite and thrive in the pressure cauldron of tournament football.
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