Andriy Yarmolenko sank to his knees, arms out, less in celebration it seemed than in exhaustion. His teammates surrounded him, their reaction less of joy than of something more profound. When the Ukrainian got to his feet, his mouth was tight as he tried to fight back the tears. In the end he could not, and as he walked back to his own half to restart the game, he wept openly. Even Aston Villa’s players applauded. Football can be a horrible game, its ownership model perhaps broken beyond repair, but there are still times when it can provide moments of enormous poignancy and perhaps more.
“Goal for West Ham and Ukraine,” boomed the stadium announcer, “Andriy Yarmolenko.” Was that overdoing it? Perhaps. But the bombast matched the mood. This was a goal that set West Ham on the way to their second win in seven games and that kept them dreaming of Champions League qualification. But it felt a lot more important than that.
What, by the end of the season, will probably appear a mid-table clash is nothing but an irrelevance in the wider context, but perhaps somewhere, in some bunker in Mariupol, a shattered apartment block in Kyiv, or in Yarmolenko’s home city of Chernihiv in the north of Ukraine, somebody will hear that Yarmolenko scored and be transported, at least momentarily, from the horror. Perhaps they will hear of the roar that greeted Yarmolenko’s arrival as a 52nd-minute substitute for Michail Antonio, or of the scenes that followed his goal, and know that their plight is remembered, that the sympathy of a large part of the world is with them. It is only a symbol, but it is something.
West Ham have seemed weary recently as they went out of the FA Cup to Southampton and lost the first leg of their Europa League tie against Sevilla. Antonio, in particular, has looked short of his usual zip. This was his 27th league start of the season, but he had not scored in the league since New Year’s Day. West Ham have a longstanding habit of wasting money on centre-forwards but the failure to bring in support for him in January may be what ends up costing them Champions League football next season. There was one dart from the Jamaica striker after 33 minutes that brought a corner, but his involvement was spasmodic even before he went down with what appeared to be a groin problem.
This was a game littered with injuries. Villa’s Lucas Digne hobbled off after 10 minutes and Aaron Cresswell followed Antonio. With Jarrod Bowen also out, West Ham are running short of attacking options. Yarmolenko may have a major role to play in the coming weeks. He took his goal well, seizing on Saïd Benrahma’s pass before deftly clipping his shot past Emi Martínez with the outside of his foot with 20 minutes remaining. Benrahma laid on the second for Pablo Fornals to cap a neat counter 12 minutes later.
What was odd was how Villa, despite having won their previous three games, seemed happy to let the game drift. There were moments of low-key time-wasting and a lot of sideways passes. For a long time this was a flat affair, although it did liven up around the hour mark as Danny Ings had a shot pushed against the post and then Craig Dawson headed over the bar from close range after Martínez had made a remarkable block from a Kurt Zouma header.
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West Ham reached the quarter-finals of both the FA Cup and the League Cup this season and are in the last 16 of the Europa League. If fatigue is beginning to take its toll, it’s perhaps no great surprise. Just because West Ham won, nobody should think that issue has gone away. This was a tired performance, and the suspicion was that if Villa had gone at West Ham earlier, as they belatedly did having fallen behind, they might have caused them problems. As it was, Jacob Ramsey’s 90th-minute goal was enough only to cause West Ham an anxious six minutes of injury time.
The three points may prove important come the end of the season, but really what mattered was far less the result or any specifics than the warmth that was shown to Yarmolenko. As the rockets fall on Ukraine it is next to nothing, a gesture of almost incalculable meagreness, but it is what football can do. If that provides succour to anybody, then it is worth something.
