Moment of the day for Euro 2024: the incredible lightness of Yaremchuk’s brilliant first touch for Ukraine

Mykola Shaparenko has led this second half. After trailing 0-1 (and significantly in second place) against Slovakia at half-time, Ukraine had played full-on heavy metal football in the second half. Shaparenko had already scored a great equalizer in the 54th minute and all the good things from Ukraine continued to flow through him. That’s when he sees big Roman Yaremchuk create a dilapidated inside left channel from Slovakia in the 80th minute.

Euro 2024 was a tournament where big men came back into fashion and there are few bigger than Yaremchuk. Yaremchuk is about 6 feet tall and quite wide. He is a battering ram of a striker and he has been deployed by coach Sergiy Rebrov to make the difference. Coming into the match, 28-year-old Yaremchuk is Ukraine’s joint fourth highest scorer in the competition. all-time (15 goals), tied with… Rebrov The coach now hopes that he will soon be demoted to fifth place on the list.

Shaparenko’s vision is delightful, but it’s what comes next that makes it all so magical. As the ball falls over his right shoulder, Yaremchuk maps out the trajectory flawlessly. A few steps and he extends his right leg. He’s close to splitting at this point. He stands on the toes of his left foot, and he has stretched every sinew of his considerable body to reach the stride with the right. He bounces off his boot, and then… the ball stays dead. As if he has given the order to stop. All the momentum from Shaparenko’s through ball has been converted into a soft bounce that is not an inch away from where Yaremchuk wants it. 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 – like Palestine in this year’s Asian Cup – is playing for slightly more than just national pride in Germany. This is a collection of players representing a country devastated by war who had to be stronger than ever before to perform at the level they are today.

Few more than Yaremchuk. The man who once apparently ate thirteen meals a day (according to wife Christina) couldn’t do much of that for weeks after the Russian invasion in early 2022. He couldn’t sleep either, and it all ended with the loss of six meals. kg body weight… and all semblance of form on the field.

A Benfica player at the time, he was just starting his career as a goalscorer after a 2021 that saw him score goals for Ghent and Ukraine at the European Championship. The coming years would be his best years.

Four days after the outbreak of war, Yaremchuk would come on as a substitute in a league match, and the vast Estadio de Luz in Lisbon would applaud him like anyone. You can see him jogging, taking it in and then stopping, his bottom lip quivering as he fights to keep his emotions in check… it was an incredibly moving sight and an image that spoke deeply to the trauma he was experiencing.

���� This moment… Speechless! �� pic.twitter.com/EpgNydnZer

– SL Benfica (@slbenfica_en) February 27, 2022

Caused by worries, his season came to an end and he was eventually transferred to Club Brugge. Benfica president Rui Costa was quoted as saying at the time: “Yaremchuk deserves a word of appreciation, for all the work he has 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 always in a great mood during training, but with difficulty, real effort, to be able to do what he knows how to do. He was (very influenced) by these factors.

Things didn’t really work out for Belgium the following season either and he is now loaned out to Valencia. After struggling for goals for two years, he finally found a touch of goalscoring form in Spain. After failing to score in 18 LaLiga games in 2023, he scored three times this calendar year, in a 10-game spell (and 17 minutes of an 11th when he was injured) between January and March. He was also important for Ukraine during that period. He scored and assisted from the bench in a 2-1 come-from-behind win against Bosnia in a crucial European qualifying play-off.

That trust would be important for what comes next.

If the first touch was pure football genius, the second touch is someone remembering exactly how a goal is scored. With Martin Dubravka not getting too far off his line and Milan Skriniar far enough away, Yaremchuk knows agility is the answer. Instead of reaching for it – excited by the perfection of that first touch – he just lifts his right leg again and taps the bouncing ball with the bottom of his boot. And it rolls into the goal in painful slow motion. So slow that Skriniar almost gets there with a desperate lunge, but with just enough pace that he crossed the line before he could. Perfection.

2-1 Ukraine and that’s how it would stay. “There was a different spirit – I am happy for the players – they showed the spirit of Ukraine and deserved this victory. It was important to win for our country, our fighters and our supporters,” Rebrov said after the match.

Meanwhile, the Düsseldorf Arena crackled as the tens of thousands of Ukrainian fans who filled the arena celebrated wildly: Rebrov’s words in visual form. Many of the fans there now call the city home after becoming refugees from this brutal war, and this was their team who stepped up to offer them all a little hope and a little joy in these darkest of times. And it all came about through the incredible lightness of Roman Yaremchuk’s brilliant first touch.

Before that, Yaremchuk takes our Moment of the Day from Day 8 of Euro 2024.