It was a scene that, on its own, was almost as powerful as the performance. It showed how this had gone beyond sport, that it was a football moment like few others.
Artem Dovbyk had just put the ball past Craig Gordon to put Ukraine one game from the World Cup, in a moment that would usually have brought images of euphoria. This was something else, though.
Dovbyk was momentarily left to celebrate on his own, because most of his teammates just sank to the ground. A striking quietness engulfed Hampden Park, that was unlike anything you ever really experience in a stadium, and reflected the extremes this had gone to.
The Ukrainian players left all their emotion on the pitch, to quote their manager Oleksandr Petrakov, so could do little more than lie there. They were utterly exhausted but it was that kind of exhilarated exhaustion that only comes from going to the very limits.
They aren’t done yet, of course. “We go to Wales,” Petrakov said, in the one moment he smiled during a stirring post-match press conference.
That in itself reminded how many layers there were to an evening that really went beyond a game.
The Ukrainian team and their manager were keen to insist that the job is not done, that it’s just “a little step to our great aim”, but they were also so fully conscious of what this really meant.
It was, in the words of one Ukrainian journalist speaking to Petrakov from his home country on Zoom, “some normality”.
It was light. It was joy.
It was why Ukrainians from as far away as New York and Sydney had insisted on making the journey to Glasgow, their own small piece of service.
This, as Petrakov said, “was for the Ukrainians, for the people watching them back home in shelters, for the armed forces in the trenches, for the people in the hospitals”.
This was to bring a country together.
There were constant reminders of the actual realities of that through the night, how these were not just words.
It was close enough to kick-off that reports came from Ukraine that air-raid sirens were going off around the country, forcing people to watch this in shelters.
There was then a significant change of tone in Petrakov’s press conference, as he refused to let people escape the truth of what this all meant; that it was a stirring story for the most grave reasons.
Ukraine fans in the stands during the FIFA World Cup 2022 Qualifier play-off semi-final match at Hampden Park
“I hope this conflict never touches you, but you just have to think of the women and children dying every day, the women being raped and gang-raped by these orcs, as we call them.”
It was difficult for people in the room to know what to say to that. That was the point. It also reminded of a relevant point about the game itself.
On watching it, and seeing a player like Oleksandr Zinchenko absolutely run the game in a way he isn’t quite afforded in the Premier League, there can be an mean-spirited inclination to think of these players as just multi-millionaires insulated from the true horrors of this just doing their small part. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Zinchenko himself is evidently so psychologically consumed by the conflict that he is constantly updating his social media with jarring images to remind people of this. All of the players have family who have suffered.
Oleksandr Zinchenko holds up the Ukraine flag on the pitch
Ukraine celebrate at Hampden Park
