Night the embodiment of modern Ukraine delivered

THIS has been an extremely difficult tournament to cover. Anybody who’s attempted to move from one venue to another is already feeling the effects of a night spent huddled on an airport floor, or squashed into a packed train for an overnight journey. Little wonder there are swathes of empty seats at stadiums for the first time at a European Championship since 1996.

The South Africa World Cup was similarly characterised by logistical difficulties and half-empty venues for certain games. The message for administrators is clear: if you are going to break new frontiers, this is the cost — at least if you set ticket process way beyond the means of locals.

It’s easy to be grouchy. But then you get something like Ukraine’s victory over Sweden on Monday and a sudden outpouring of joyous national pride and you suddenly feel very churlish. It was the same at the Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon in January. Of course in any rational world it was crazy to invest millions into stadiums that will rarely if ever be full again; of course in any rational world other governments would have as little to do with the Equatoguinean despot Obiang Nguema as possible; of course in any rational world you wouldn’t co-host in a tournament in which you have to fly on unlicensed airlines or drive for nine hours through mountainous jungle to get from venue to venue.

Of course the tournament was a logistical nonsense: but it was redeemed by the outpourings of joy when Equatorial Guinea scored a last-minute winner against Senegal, when Gabon scored their last-minute winner in the epic against Morocco and, ultimately, when Zambia completed their emotional victory over Ivory Coast.

Emotion can be the great panacea for it is, ultimately, what lies at the heart of sport. Great sporting drama, moments of sublime sentimentality, don’t suddenly make crassly political choices by administrators right, but they do make them easier to forget.

Ukraine had never before played a match at the final stages of a European Championship. At home, in the remodelled Olympiskyi, it was always going to be emotional, particularly if they won. What made it even more affecting was the manner of victory, coming from behind with two goals in quick succession — and especially when those goals came from Andriy Shevchenko.

There were doubts even as to whether he would play, doubts as to whether, at 35, he should play. At half-time, those doubts were even stronger; he’d looked off the pace, had dragged one chance badly wide. But class is permanent; he may not have the pace of old, but he still has the movement, still has the technical ability with his headers. Two near-post runs and two precisely placed nods later and Oleh Blokhin’s decision to start him was emphatically justified. Little wonder he went bounding gleefully down the touchline, belly wobbling alarmingly, after the second.

You’d never have got Valeriy Lobanovskyi doing that — and this was in part a night to remember the Colonel, although he died 10 years ago. He created both Blokhin and Shevchenko as footballers; in different generations they were his perfect forwards, “universal footballers” as he called them. There are few more moving photographs in football than that of Shevchenko in 2003, having scored the decisive penalty in the AC Milan’s Champions League final victory over Juventus, taking the trophy to the statue of Lobanovskyi, perched on bench, chin cupped characteristically on hand, that stands outside the Dynamo stadium.

Lobanovskyi formed Shevchenko as a footballer and is part of the reason for Shevchenko’s importance. Playing for Lobanovskyi’s last great Dynamo side, Shevchenko scored a hat-trick at Camp Nou against Barcelona, scored three over two legs in a demolition of Real Madrid, helped them to the semi-final of the 1999 Champions League, in which they led 3-1 against Bayern Munich. He is a link to that glorious past and his father was an ensign in a tank regiment in the Red Army, yet and Shevchenko is also emblematic of the new Ukraine — bright, confident, married to a US model, successful in western Europe but with enough sense of home to return to Kyiv to conclude his career.

Shevchenko even comes from the heartland of Ukraine, from the tiny village of Dvirkivshchyna, about 60 miles east of Kyiv off the road to Kharkiv, amid the rolling hills and gentle rivers that are characteristic of the vast central plain.

Shevchenko admitted he delayed his retirement to play in the Euros on home soil. It could have been a terrible anti-climax, an old man creaking around as fathers pointed and explained to their sons, “That used to be Andriy Shevchenko.” But in the sea of exultant yellow on Monday, his decision to stay on was gloriously vindicated.