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The original was posted on /r/soccer by /u/Sparky-moon on 2026-02-16 09:36:02+00:00.

“Since I started to play football, when I was six, I worked hard and did everything to stop goals. Now, after one moment, a lot of people know me because I scored a goal.”

“It’s still crazy for me,” says Trubin. “Still, sometimes, I can’t believe it happened. Today I finished training and a fan stopped me for a photo — they said, ‘Good goal’. That’s never happened before. It’s crazy. That moment will always be with me.”

It’s worth reiterating that it’s not an exaggeration to make it seem more dramatic: Trubin really didn’t know Benfica needed another goal until seconds before he scored.

Trubin laughs about that sight now. “We were winning, so I didn’t need to hurry up. I didn’t understand at all why the fans started to scream, why some of my team-mates were pointing at me — ‘one, one, one’ — I didn’t understand. But when we got the free kick, Mister (Mourinho) pointed to me to go up, then I asked someone, ‘We need one more goal?’”

“When you play, you don’t think. You just do. This moment, it happened so fast. Maybe because the cross was so perfect, maybe because it (a goal) had to happen, for me it was natural, something that easily came.

“In this moment, you need to risk. You need to put everything all in. If I need to score, I need to go right in there, to make our fans happy, to make Benfica better. I just ran, and then the movement of my head, it was like I was a striker. It was crazy.”

When the ball went in, everyone in the stadium — including, I am sorry to report, your otherwise neutral correspondent from The Athletic, high up in the stands — lost their minds. The players started running in different directions. Substitutes and coaches burst onto the pitch. Mourinho hared up the touchline and hugged a ballboy. Trubin wheeled away, into the centre of the pitch, escaping his team-mates for just long enough to do a knee slide.

“I still have some wounds on my knee,” he says. “Then all my team-mates jumped on me.”

He pauses when asked to describe that moment, to sum up the emotions he felt.

“It’s something… I dunno. First of all, I started to run. I need to check my GPS. Normally I’m not an emotional person, but in this moment I let all my emotions out. My goalkeeping coach told me ‘be focused’, because we didn’t know if the game was over. Maybe there would be one more attack.”