Ukraine Vs. Sweden: Andriy Shevchenko The Hero As Hosts Win

Andriy Shevchenko might have a statue built of him after scoring a brace to lead host Ukraine past Sweden in their Euro 2012 opener. He might even have the country named after him, but he is not the best thing to come from the match.

Enter adorable little Ukrainian child, who probably set a new record for happiness when Shevchenko scored. It was the best thing in the entire world, times 10. The scales for happiness and bestness are now broken.

Andriy Shevchenko was already a national hero and the greatest Ukrainian footballer since Ukraine split off from the Soviet Union, but he’s truly cemented himself as a legend with his performance on Monday. In Ukraine’s first ever match in the European Championships, the 35-year-old striker scored twice to fire his team to a 2-1 comeback victory.

The first half of the match featured no goals, but a couple of narrow misses from the game’s big name strikers, Shevchenko and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Shevchenko had a great effort blocked near the end of the half, while Ibrahimovic hit the post with a header when he should have been able to score just a minute later.

Ukraine and Sweden have produced a highly entertaining 45 minutes of football in Kiev, but it hasn’t resulted in any goals yet. Some blocked shots, some good goalkeeping and some bad luck for attacking players have all combined to keep the score 0-0 at halftime.

Sweden have the more accomplished technical players in midfield, but they haven’t been able to translate that to possession. Ukraine look like they’ve been seriously boosted by their home fans, and they’ve surprisingly had much more of the ball than their opponents. They created a couple of very good opportunities late in the half, with Andreas Isaksson coming up with a big save on Andriy Voronin and Andreas Granqvist making a huge block on an Andriy Shevchenko shot.

Ukraine (4-4-2): Andriy Pyatov; Oleh Gusev, Yevhen Khacheridi, Tara Mykhalyk, Yevhen Selin; Anatoliy Tymoshchuk; Andriy Yarmolenko, Serhiy Nazarenko, Yevhen Konoplyanka; Andriy Shevchenko, Andriy Voronin

We’ll have live coverage in our Ukraine vs. Sweden, Euro 2012 StoryStream. For more on Euro 2012 and the entire world of football, follow @SBNationSoccer on twitter.

Finally the other hosts get to start their tournament. Ukraine will play their first match of Euro 2012 on Monday against Sweden in front of what will surely be a lively crowd of 70,000 of their closest friends.

Lines: Ukraine, pick ‘em (-125). Sweden, pick ‘em (+105).

Ukraine is a large country with a lot of decent talent and a decent domestic league, but they’re very much in a transition period with their senior national team, and it seems safe to assume that they would not have qualified for this tournament if they weren’t hosting. They looked poor in two warm-up friendlies against Austria and Turkey, teams that failed to qualify for the tournament.

Ukraine have a whole bunch of problems, most of which are centered around their players being either old or just generally average at football, but their biggest problem is probably at right back. In consecutive friendlies, two different right backs were absolutely torn to pieces by David Alaba and Caner Erkin, who are both actually attacking fullbacks that were pushed up to the left wing for Austria and Turkey, respectively. This is, needless to say, really awful news for Ukraine. Those two right backs, Oleh Husiev and Bohdan Butko, could find themselves both benched in favor of Shakhtar Donetsk’s athletic utility man Oleksandr Kucher.