There might never have been a more politically important fixture than Ukraine’s World Cup qualifying play-off against Wales on Sunday and, by extension, there may not have been a more painful defeat.
As Ukraine’s war with Russia dragged into a fourth month, some in the country hoped that an appearance at the finals in Qatar in November would act as a catalyst. As international attention inevitably drifts, it would be a chance to place the invasion and its consequences back at the forefront of the world’s news cycles.
Wales’ victory brought an end to the heroic subplot being played out by Ukraine’s footballers as their countrymen fight for the survival of their state at home. An own goal by Andriy Yarmolenko, if not the team’s talisman then undoubtedly its spiritual leader, was a cruel way for the dream to die.
“Our people and our soldiers were desperate for Ukraine to be at the World Cup,” says Roman Bebekh, a Kyiv-based football reporter in peacetime, now spending his days telling stories from the frontline in Donbas.
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“The Wales game was the biggest in the history of our country. We needed to be at the World Cup for more than football reasons. It was about politics. We needed to stay in the news.”
Oleksandr Petrakov’s team defied expectation in coming this close to Qatar. Most of the squad had not played competitively since before Russia’s invasion began on February 24th.
A handful of charity friendlies played by Dynamo Kyiv and Shakhtar Donetsk, the Global Tour for Peace aimed at raising humanitarian funds, was the closest most of these players had come to real football in months. That they beat Scotland and, for the most part, had the better of Wales in Cardiff was testament to the grossly distorted stakes for which they were playing.
“The interest in Ukraine is beginning to drop,” says Bebekh. “It’s not possible for news everywhere in the world to be constantly talking about our problems. The World Cup would have given us that opportunity for focus. It was a very tough defeat to take.
“We need that opportunity to speak. All that the players and the coach talked about before the game was the war, not football. We needed to stay in the world’s attention.”
Against Ireland in Dublin in the Nations League tonight, the spirit to fight for the country will likely remain, yet the stakes now are lowered. There will be no World Cup for the war-torn country to anticipate, but there remains the matter of ensuring the survival of domestic football in Ukraine.
An agreement was reached in late May between the 16 clubs of the Ukrainian Premier League that a new season will begin here by mid-August. The pitfalls of pulling off that feat, whilst the shells and rockets continue to fall and the country remains in the grip of martial law, are predictably numerous.
Anton Ivanov is general manager of top-flight side Metalist 1925 from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest and a key target of the Russian attack.
“Shakhtar and Dynamo and some others wanted to play it in either Turkey or Poland,” says Ivanov, who attended the meeting on behalf of Metalist. “That would have made sense because there are three million Ukrainian refugees there. That would have been good from a marketing point of view. But it is going to be here in Ukraine.
“Some clubs wanted to have foreign players for their European campaigns too, which will not be possible if it is played abroad. We also still need to decide which cities are safe to play in. It will maybe be in Lviv or in Uzhgorod [both in west Ukraine] but there will be no supporters.”
There is some scepticism in the country about whether the new championship will garner much interest in the context of the war. There is also a palpable sense in which the defeat to Wales represents a glorious opportunity missed, and a regret which will only deepen as time passes and Ukraine fights to keep its struggle in the world’s attention.
“As time goes on, people get used to it,” says Roman Lopatin, who before the war worked for top-flight side Olimpik Donetsk but who is now out of a job.
“They remember there is a war on, but it’s so far away. Our footballers could have brought attention back to it. The result is not important on the pitch.
“The only thing here right now is the war. A lot of displaced people like me have no work, we have nothing to do. Football can be a little bit of sun, some [thing] positive.”
