Sports

Four good days – Ukraine’s World Cup mission is over, but the fight back home continues


CARDIFF, Wales – The Ukrainian dream of a World Cup spot came to an end on a cold Sunday night in the relentless rain. Head coach Oleksandr Petrakov stared at the pouring rain and didn’t know what to do. A red flare landed on the field, and the air smelled like gunpowder. Smoke billowed into the gray sky. The stadium shook because of the noise. Petrakov turned to walk off the pitch, then he stepped back and stood alone watching the Wales team celebrate. He looks lost. His team came very close. It missed a lot of opportunities in the 0-1 loss, and it’s hard to recall the hopes and promises that have burned brightly over the past four days. No one talked in the dressing room.

“Deadly quiet,” he would say later.

Petrakov said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went to the front lines and personally asked the soldiers there to write a message of support on a flag and the team brought that flag to Wales. Team members know who is supporting them and why, and it hurts. His players carry the pain on their faces, carry this loss deep in a wound that never heals, and he says the defeat is his, not theirs. A nation needs a victory, needs a good thing as a reward for a future filled with good things. He tried to find the right words. He apologized during the press conference with his compatriots for not scoring. He winced and stopped, gulped and paused, smiling thinly and staring blankly at the wall. It’s hard to see. He felt the possibility of the next six months slip through his fingers. Everyone did. A Ukrainian journalist used his post-meeting question to beg international reporters listening not to forget what was happening in their homeland.

Petrakov looked out at the assembled group.

“You know what’s happening in Ukraine,” he said. “We have war raging all over the country. Children and women die every day. Our infrastructure is being ravaged daily by Russian barbarians. The Russians want to hurt us. . Ukrainians are resisting. Ukrainians are defending.”


IN THE MORNING During Sunday’s game at Cardiff City Stadium, two Russian missiles hit Kyiv, and again black smoke rose into the air. Petrakov woke up in Wales to the news of his hometown, the first strike there in a month. He is from Kyiv. As a young boy, he spent hours fishing on the riverbank that ran through the center of town. His idea of ​​a perfect day is to walk through the city and stop at all the old cathedrals and churches. He’ll find a couch and just sit and think.

When Russian troops began attacking Kyiv on 24 February, he refused to leave. His children begged. He tells them that he was born in Kyiv and that he will die in Kyiv before he lets anyone steal his home. In the early days of the war, he took to the streets trying to enlist in the army. The recruiter told him they didn’t need 64-year-old soldiers and that the way he could serve their country was to do what he’d trained his whole life to do. They told him he didn’t know anything about fighting but he knew about football.

“Take us to Qatar,” he said military men told him.

Petrakov walked the streets and visited soldiers in trenches and bunkers. He talked to them about football and quit smoking. When the Russian reached the outskirts of the city, he could hear an explosion. His wife begged him not to leave the apartment. Once, he was walking to the market to get bread and heard a rocket whistle overhead. He felt the ground shake as it hit. Five people died, he told me. Including a family. A mother and a father. One boy and one girl.

“You’re walking and you don’t know where it’s going to hit,” he said. “A lottery ticket. You don’t know. Another fell about two kilometers from me. A rocket. All the windows shook. The house shook. I was in the apartment, and my wife passed. night in the bunker. She couldn’t stand it, and I don’t know, maybe because I’m 64 I’m not afraid. You won’t escape your fate.”

After Ukraine’s 3-1 win over Scotland on Wednesday, the coach clenched his fists and roared into the night. The look on his face made people lie that they were just playing a game. Three months of fear and rage – resistance and defense – poured out of him; and then he looks and feels like he’s spent squanderingly, as if he’d been given something after the victory but also relieved of a burden.

It is difficult to explain the situation in Ukraine. Mass graves are still being discovered. A walk in the woods north of Kyiv is possible, and if you don’t step on a dirt mine, look for an empty pit where civilians murdered by Russian troops were quickly buried by their compatriots only to be reburied then with dignity . The bloody clothes were still lying at the bottom of those holes. Locals surrounded the burned Russian tanks, to see where the enemy had died. Air raid sirens sound so often that there’s now an app for that.

Petrakov’s daughter remains in the city. So is his wife. They talk to him regularly and the only way he can help them is by coaching. His team is his only weapon, the only way he can help his country, and for the past 4 days he believes that team will beat Wales and carry the flag. Ukraine with the song went to Qatar to attend the World Cup. That he would complete the mission given to him by the soldiers who had kindly told him that he was too old to take up a rifle and be stationed.

The war is just over 100 days old. For more than three months, there was reason for hope. The Ukrainian army came into contact with the Russians, using its stockpile of foreign weapons to win the battle of Kyiv and push the Russians across the border in many places. But the situation in the east has changed, with Russian troops shelling helpless positions, fighting taking place in the trenches – the whole thing is brutal and ancient, more like Antietam than Baghdad. The Russians control about 20% of the country, and this war could drag on. It’s been happening since 2014, Ukrainians want to remind foreigners that this whole thing is new.

For those reasons, and many others, the past four days have been good. It takes a lot of people to win a war, to create the right combination of defiance and determination – and Oleksandr Petrakov is one of them. He has given a nation four good days, its own kind of miracle in such terrible times, and he wants to give it more.


BEFORE SUNDAY’S GAME, the stadium buzzed with energy as the Ukrainian bus raced outside. Petrakov walked alone down the old white tiled hallway. He walked into the field and crossed his arms, shouting and pointing. This is a man who has spent his life preparing for a single moment. The rain began to fall, but he was not wearing a jacket. He just cleans his glasses regularly and stands right on the sidelines.

The game started, and the Welsh crowd rocked the building, the noise echoing around the concrete stands. The home fans sang songs and cheered. It hasn’t been since 1958 that Wales have made it to the World Cup, and before any other opponent it would be a favorite. All those failures, and the longing to wash them away, live in all the praise and cheers. The rain fell harder. Finally, one of the coach’s assistants stepped out of the mess and draped a jacket over his shoulders.

At the 34th minute, Gareth Bale line up a free kick. He pushed it low on the right, and the star Ukraine Andriy Yarmolenko dove to clear it with his head.

Yarmolenko plays for West Ham United, and the day before the fight started, he sent his wife and children back to Kyiv for a doctor’s appointment. “Can you imagine what I was like when it started the next morning?” he told British journalists in March after their safe return. “I just want to run and bang my head against the wall. It’s stupid to send my family to Kyiv and I’m sitting in London.”

Yarmolenko has contact with Bale’s shot and tries to get it wide, but his header inadvertently misses the left post of the goal.

The tension escalated with each passing minute.

Ukraine misses opportunity after opportunity. Petrakov had to be separated from one of the Wales players because of a stalling problem. He roared in the rain with his team. Everyone was drenched. The match turned fierce, and the crowd was boisterous, with both sides singing, cheering and complaining about the officials. The Ukrainian part chanted the name of their country in four syllables over and over. Both teams want this win. Those in the stands felt their longing, who seemed to understand that they were watching one of the most intense days of football they had ever seen.

The Welsh players were cramped, and Petrakov yelled at the pitcher, pointing at his watch, begging for a long stretch of stoppage time. When 88:13 disappeared, the player replaced the Ukrainian Serhiy Sydorchuk possession of the ball and let loose a shot. It flew high over the goal, and Sydorchuk fell to his knees in pain. He seems to know. The Welsh fans began to exhale and sing an old English football song with the lyrics: “Please don’t make me go hooome!”

The game is over, and the initially motionless Petrakov, stunned, loses. The stadium buzzes with noise, smoke and energy. Welsh fans jumped onto the pitch and tried to escape the security staff.

In the end, Petrakov knew what to do.

He started towards the far right corner of the field, to the bend where the Ukrainian fans sang and waved flags during 90 minutes of rain. Bale stepped forward and gave Petrakov a long hug, and then the coach delighted the fans who had cheered him on. There wasn’t too much difference between them in that moment, all were citizens of a country at war, a country that was fighting to survive.

He gave them four good days.

Then in the silence of defeat, Petrakov reflected on how he wanted his team, this group of brothers, to exist in the memory of his countrymen.

“I really want the Ukrainian people to remember our football team,” he said. “I’d like to say sorry we didn’t score, but this is sport. This is how it happens, and I don’t…”

Below the stadium, the press conference room was silent.

“I’m speechless,” said Petrakov. “I do not know what to say.”



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