It was one of the images of Tuesday’s matchday in the UEFA Nations League. A symbolic and moving image that sought to remember what the Ukrainian people have been suffering for 1,000 days now. A goal that served Oleksandr Zinchenko to appeal to the world and remember that the war is not yet over in his country.
Ukraine national team t-shirt with the number ‘1,000’ commemorating the thousand days of the start of the war with RussiaUAF
The sequence of a moving image
The players loaded the match with symbols from the first moment they took the field. The Trubin, Konoplya, Zabarnyi, Matviienko, Mykolenko, Kaliuzhnyi, Gatsulyak, Zinchenko, Sudakov, Mudryk and Yaremchuk, took to the pitch with a Ukrainian flag on their backs that began to send a message to those present at the Air Albania Stadium in Tirana .
The match had just started, they had only been 5 minutes into the match against Albania when the Ukrainian midfielder Oleksandr Zinchenko had an opportunity to open the scoring that he was not going to waste. A rebound after a shot by Roman Yaremchuk allowed him, with an accurate shot to the long post and the first hit, to put his team ahead.
A goal after which he immediately got up from the ground, ran towards his side where all his teammates followed him and in search of something he was looking for. It was at that moment when they threw a T-shirt at him that he unfolded and on it you could read a number: “1,000.” An elastic band that the Ukrainian Football Federation itself already showed hanging in its locker room on its social networks and that the Arsenal footballer was now showing.
Oleksandr Zinchenko runs with his teammates in search of the shirt with the ‘1,000’ on the backEFE
“1,000 days of battle and sacrifice”
The Federation itself made the message clear: “1,000 days of battle and sacrifice”, although Zinchenko made sure that it went even further by showing it to the Albanian public and the Ukrainians present watching the match. A symbolic day of a war that has already lasted almost three years and that the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself issued a statement that said: “Ukraine will never submit to the occupiers and the Russian military will be punished for violating international law.”
A government message that was in line with what the players themselves wanted to express on behalf of the Ukrainian people. A match that the Ukrainian team managed to win against Albania (1-2) to be second with 8 points in Group 1 of Division B of the UEFA Nations League, only behind the Czech Republic.
