Mykola Shaparenko has been running this second half. Having gone in trailing 0-1 (and being considerably second-best) to Slovakia at half time, Ukraine had gone all-out heavy metal football in the second half. Shaparenko had already scored a lovely equaliser in the 54th minute and all good things Ukraine did keep flowing through him. Which is when, in the 80th minute, he spots big Roman Yaremchuk make a run-down Slovakia's inside left channel.
Euro 2024 has been a tournament of big men becoming fashionable again and there are few bigger than Yaremchuk out there. Around 6'3" and appropriately broad, Yaremchuk is a battering ram of a striker and he's been brought on by coach Sergiy Rebrov to make the difference. Coming into the match, 28-year-old Yaremchuk is Ukraine's joint-fourth highest scorer of all time (15 goals), tied with... Rebrov. The coach is now hoping he will soon be downgraded to fifth on the list.
Shaparenko's vision is delightful but it's what comes next that makes it all so magical. As the ball drops over his right shoulder, Yaremchuk charts out the trajectory flawlessly. A couple of steps and he stretches out his right leg. He's almost doing split at this point. He's on the toes of his left foot and he's stretched every sinew of his considerable frame to reach the pass with the right. It bounces off his boot, and then... the ball just stops dead. Like he's commanded it to halt. All the momentum of the Shaparenko through ball has been converted into a gentle bounce that's not a millimeter away from where Yaremchuk wants it to be. The touch had to be perfect to produce the Bergkamp-esque lightness it did, and it was.
In fact, the lightness of the touch was all the more remarkable considering the weight on his shoulders. Ukraine are -- much like Palestine at this year's Asian Cup were -- playing for that little bit more than mere national pride in Germany. Representing a country wrecked by war, this is a collection of players who have had to be stronger than ever before to perform at the level they are.
Few more so than Yaremchuk. The man who once apparently used to eat 13 meals a day (according to wife Christina) couldn't do much of that for weeks after Russia's invasion in early 2022. He couldn't sleep, either, and it all ended with him losing six kgs of bodyweight... and all semblance of form on the pitch.
A Benfica player at the time he'd just started to get into his stride as a goalscoring big after a 2021 in which he banged in goals for Gent and Ukraine at the Euros. The coming years were supposed to be his prime.
Four days after war broke out, Yaremchuk would be brought on as a sub in a league match, and Lisbon's great Estadio de Luz would stand as one to applaud him on. You can see him jogging on, soaking it in and then stopping, his bottom lip trembling as he fights to control his emotions... it was an incredibly moving sight and one that spoke deeply to the trauma he was going through.
���� This moment... Speachless! �� pic.twitter.com/EpgNydnZer
- SL Benfica (@slbenfica_en) February 27, 2022
Wreaked with worry, his season petered out and eventually he was moved on to Club Brugge. Benfica president Rui Costa would say at the time, "Yaremchuk deserves a word of appreciation, for all the work he's done at Benfica. People have no idea what he went through last season, with the war and his parents in the middle of it... He was in training always in a tremendous mood, but with difficulty, real difficulty, in being able to do what he knows how to do. He was [very affected] by these factors."
It didn't really work out at Belgium the next season either and he's now on loan at Valencia. Having struggled for goals for two years, he finally found a hint of goalscoring form in Spain. After not having scored in 18 LaLiga matches in 2023, he scored thrice this calendar year, in a stretch of 10 matches (and 17 minutes of a 11th when he got injured) between January and March. He'd been important for Ukraine in that period too, scoring and assisting off the bench in a come-from-behind 2-1 win against Bosnia in a crucial European Qualifier playoff.
That confidence would be important for what comes next.
If the first touch was pure footballing genius, the second is one taken by someone who remembers how exactly a goal is scored. With Martin Dubravka not coming too far off his line and Milan Skriniar far enough away, Yaremchuk knows that deftness is the answer. Instead of snatching at it -- thrilled by the perfection of that first touch -- he merely lifts his right leg again and taps the bouncing ball with the bottom of his boot. And it rolls into the goal in agonizing slow motion. So slow that Skriniar almost gets there with a desperate lunge, but with just enough pace that it crossed the line before he could. Perfection.
2-1 Ukraine and that's how it would stay. "There was a different spirit -- I am pleased for the players -- they showed the spirit of Ukraine and deserved this win. It was important to win for our country, our fighters, our supporters," said Rebrov after the match.
The Dusseldorf Arena, meanwhile, creaked as the tens of thousands of Ukrainian fans that filled it bounced in wild celebration: Rebrov's words in visual form. Many of the fans there now call the city home after becoming refugees of this brutal war, and this was their team stepping up to provide them all a bit of hope, a bit of joy in these darkest of times. And it all came about through the incredible lightness of Roman Yaremchuk's genius first touch.
For that, Yaremchuk takes our Moment of the Day from day 8 of Euro 2024.