Even when the evening had long since turned into a turning point in the history of Swiss football, Yann Sommer did not lose his typical caution.

Instead of storming cheerfully and being buried under a mountain of celebrating teammates, the goalkeeper of the Swiss national team played it safe.

He raised a hand defensively, his lips seemed to form a "Wait!"

As if he couldn't imagine, with the best will in the world, that he had actually saved Kylian Mbappé's final penalty.

Later, after there had been cheers for the liberation, a reporter suggested turning the story into a Hollywood film that summer night in Bucharest. “I'll call Robert DeNiro afterwards to see if he wants to play the role,” suggested the goalkeeper. He could well imagine the film about the heroic deeds of a generation of footballers who were shaped by families who fled the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and a goalkeeper from wealthy Switzerland.

That DeNiro would be the right actor for the goalkeeper, however, should be reconsidered. But maybe Sommer had this idea because the Hollywood star - just like him - didn't grow very big. It is always discussed that Sommer, at 1.83 meters, is actually too small for a goalkeeper at the highest level. His occasional weakness in fending off penalties is also repeatedly associated with it. All these debates will now become quieter, as will the many unpleasant controversies that have been waged around the so-called “Nati” over the past few weeks. “This team deserves more than has been written about them,” said captain Granit Xhaka, who kept pushing his colleagues even when everything seemed lost.

While the world champions French were getting more and more reluctant to annoy these annoying Swiss and after Paul Pogbas 3: 1 they started to save energy, the outsider had defined a clear approach.

"We said to ourselves: No matter how the game goes, no matter what happens, no matter what kind of phases we experience: We'll go to the end," said Sommer.

That's exactly what they did.

At the big tournaments in 2014, 2016 and 2018 they were eliminated in the round of 16.

“Today we looked at each other and looked at their faces and said: Today we're going to pack this thing.

No matter how it goes, ”said Sommer, who flew home briefly during the European Championship to see his daughter's birth.

He was a few hours late, and with the final penalty shot on the night of Bucharest, he was in the right place at the right time.

Legendary Swiss goalkeeping school

The Swiss were more passionate about it, and in an intense knockout game that is often more important than the brilliance of some world stars.

Patrick Foletti, one of the best goalkeeping coaches in the world, who looks after him, certainly has a share in Sommer's performance.

He is considered the father of the legendary Swiss goalkeeping school, from which, in addition to Sommer, Roman Bürki, Marwin Hitz, Gregor Kobel (all BVB), Yvon Mvogo (Eindhoven) and Jonas Omlin (SC Montpellier) emerged.

"Sometimes we talk without words, it's about the way we look at each other, it's about intuition, as a goalie coach I'm also a mental coach," Foletti once said in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about his relationship with Sommer.

In any case, the Borussia Mönchengladbach goalkeeper has developed from a penalty failure to a specialist in defusing penalties carried out by great international stars. In autumn, in the Nations League, he fended off two penalties from the Spaniard Sergio Ramos. Now there is no reunion with Ramos in the quarter-finals, but with the European champion from 2012.