Khvicha Kvaratskhelia knows he'll be doing a lot of it in this game, but this early? There's barely a minute and twenty seconds on the clock when Portugal's right centre-back Antonio Silva decides to go on a run into the Georgia half. Kvaratskhelia, ostensibly the second of two forwards in his team's conservative 3-5-2, knows he has to track back and does so with energy. Which is when Silva - a 20-year-old Benfica talent making his Euro debut - passed it square. Right to Georges Mikautadze. And Kvaratskhelia takes off.
Nobody expected Georgia to do much at Euro 2024. And surely, they wouldn't now. Going into the last day, the lowest ranked team in this edition (74th) had the unenviable task of beating one of its highest (Portugal are 6th) to stand a chance of making it through to the knockouts. David may slay Goliath in the stories, but in life it rarely pans out that way. Especially when Goliath wears #7 for Portugal.
Cristiano Ronaldo -- and everyone else -- had come out expecting him to score, to win, to break records (the oldest scorer in Euro history, for one). He was, as he always is, the main event. The headline.
Except now, in the second minute of the game, the ball was about to reach the feet of the other fellow wearing #7...
Now running the way he's always wanted to - towards the opposition goal - Kvaratskhelia is uncatchable. Silva tries, but he might as well have stopped and booked a flight home for all the good it did. Mikautadze knows this and as he runs into the Portuguese half with Danilo and Goncalo Inacio backpedalling, he almost immediately plays a simple ball out wide to the left. Kvaratskhelia approaches the ball, and the decibel count rises steeply.
There's something about the way Khvicha Kvaratskhelia runs that speaks to your soul. It's almost involuntary, really. Every time you see him set off, the hairs on the back of your neck just know something's up.
Maybe it's the style: that slightly hunched back and the long, loping strides making it look like he's an apparition floating at high-speed inches above the blades of grass. It catches you off-guard because floating shouldn't happen with any sense of rapidity, but somehow Kvaratskhelia pulls it off. Or maybe it's the way he looks: the neat hair and carefully arranged beard a contrast to his general demeanour, one of a mischievous little imp. Or perhaps it's the socks, pushed low at the ankles, the old-school way of announcing that the wearer is, in fact, quite the baller.
The Georgians have always known this fact, known about the pure baller-ness of this man and the rise in volume in the Schalke Arena every time he touches the ball are proof of that.
But the world was introduced to it at Naples, where he is so popular they call him Kvaradona. After a stellar 2022-23 where he was integral to Napoli's long-awaited Serie A win, he had continued playing at a high level despite the club's outrageous drop off this season. His confidence, coming into the Euros, should have taken a hit, but the individual numbers he was putting up suggested that he still believed in his pure ability.
Did he?
Running onto Mikautadze's pass, Kvaratskhelia takes a touch. From full pelt he slows down a bit, looks up once to see Diogo Costa come charging off his line. He then puts his head down and calmly smashes the ball past Costa and into the bottom corner. A finish of a man who has absolute faith in himself.
Georgia 1 - 0 Portugal, 1:31 on the clock. Cue bedlam.
Georgia wouldn't have been here if Euro qualification still worked the way it always had. Having finished fourth in their qualification group, they had made it to the tournament proper via a route offered by the Nations League. It had taken a penalty shootout win against former champions Greece to seal the deal.
There really ought to have been just happy with the act of participation... but that's never been the Georgian way. Georgia would then not only hang onto the lead, they'd double it.
Kvaratskhelia would write in the Players' Tribune ahead of their opener... "We go against Turkey. And Czech Republic. And Portugal. Will it be hard? Of course. Will it be tough? Yes. Will I ask Cristiano for his jersey after the game? Maybe. Probably. OK, yes. Why not? He is my idol. I will tell him that. But that does not mean we can't win."
Georgia got their win; Kvaratskhelia got his Ronaldo jersey.
Ronaldo gave Kvaratskhelia his shirt after his MOTM performance vs. Portugal ���� pic.twitter.com/k4blrPAlF0
- ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) June 26, 2024
Kvaratskhelia was amazing - a mazy dribble where he ran at, and past, and through five different Portuguese players in the middle of the field only to be stopped by a frustrated hack of a foul, the encapsulation of how much he was running the game.
But it wasn't a one-man show by any means. Mikautadze led the line with aplomb and is now the tournament's top scorer. Behind them, Giorgi Kochorashvili was everywhere while the old head of Guram Kashia kept everyone in line. The bedrock of it all was keeper Giorgi Mamardashvili, arguably the player of the tournament so far.
In 2013, Ronaldo had gone to Georgia to inaugurate Dinamo Tbilisi's new academy. There's a photo going around which shows him with at least five of the players who took to the field against (and beat) him on Wednesday, eleven years on. One of them is Kvaratskhelia.
Coach Willy Sagnol has coached them into a compact, and somehow still wildly adventurous unit, and the oxymoron has made for unmissable viewing. It's also led them to the greatest football win in their history, the biggest upset in European Championship history. In their very first appearance at this stage, they've made the pre-quarters.
"Football is football. Nobody knows," Kvaratskhelia would write in that Tribune article. "Nobody thought we would even qualify. Now they don't believe again. They say Georgia has no chance. Everyone, they say that. But do you know what I say? I say....They didn't ask any Georgians."
Ask them now.
"Football is football."
For proving the essential truth of that statement with a finish of the highest calibre, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia takes our Moment of the Day from day 13 of Euro 2024.