Ukraine come to Wembley on Wednesday armed with one of the sharpest centre-forwards in European football. In his native country, and in the place where he plays his club football, his impact has made him a celebrity — so much so that paparazzi reacted with glee on seeing him with his young blonde wife, Julia, on a recent break on the Cote D’Azur. German tabloids eagerly bought the photos of “King Andriy”, as they call him in the city where he lives.

His career has turned around for the good this season, after a frustrating period employed in the Premier League. Ukraine are grateful for Andriy Voronin’s new lease of life. They need his good form because their other Andriy, the one who for more than a decade has fired most of their missiles, seems lost, baffled, a ghost of what he used to be.

If it appears confusing that the famous Andriy, Shevchenko, comes into a match for his country as less than the best forward available, there is no danger of mistaking the two. Voronin flicks a long ponytail from the back of his head and approaches his game with the elegance, as a colleague once described it in these pages, of a plumber. Shevchenko pouts, and used to hunt goals with a feline grace.

Shevchenko left England at about the same time last August as Voronin. Where Shevchenko’s departure was quite a saga, Voronin’s was barely noticed. Voronin had just spent a season at Liverpool, where a Premier League contribution of five goals in 19 matches did little to discourage the enthusiasm of Anfield’s decision-makers when Hertha Berlin contacted them about taking the striker on loan. His reputation in Germany, where his form for Bayer Leverkusen had led to Liverpool’s original interest in the summer of 2007, remained high.

The negotiations to get Shevchenko out of London had been far longer drawn out. The failure of his two seasons at Chelsea barely needs retelling, except to record that he scored some useful goals in the Carling Cup, made two or three significant contributions in the Champions League and scored nine times in two years of Premier League football. Roman Abramovich, as open as he ever is about his soft spots, had one for his fellow Russian-speaker, and paid close to £30m to Milan for Shevchenko. The circumstances of his return to Italy were more secretive. Chelsea did not disclose how little Milan paid them to bring Sheva back to Serie A.

There, he has done next to nothing. Here are the figures that serenade the legendary Andriy into London on Wednesday. His Serie A goals in his second spell at Milan, all 10 months of it? None. Nor has lack of fitness been a particular issue for the 32-year-old, other than a few aches and strains promptly treated at a club that specialises, as David Beckham and Paolo Maldini would attest, in prolonging the physical fitness of veterans.

Shevchenko is usually named in matchday squads by Milan head coach Carlo Ancelotti, but lately he only comes off the bench late if the game is going very well already. Discussions about how long it might be before the former Shevchenko, speedy and precise, reappears ceased to be a feature of Ancelotti’s relaxed press briefings several months ago. It is as if a bereavement occurred around November, and everybody except the severe-looking athlete pouting in his tracksuit on the Milan substitutes’ bench is quietly moving on. Ancelotti would even appreciate Shevchenko showing some of his Chelsea Carling Cup form, let alone the zip that made him European Footballer of the Year in 2004, the scorer of 127 goals in 208 Serie A matches in a era when Italian defences were the hardest to perforate.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, King Andriy II propels his club to the summit of the Bundesliga. In their past seven matches, Voronin has scored eight times. Hertha view the success gladly but are more and more wary that the price likely to be demanded of them by Liverpool for the permanent transfer they seek will rise as the striker’s influence soars.

Hertha are not a club accustomed to these heights, and even though German’s top division remains absorbingly tight in the title race run-in, Voronin is his team’s lucky charm right now. Or rather he is sporting it. A colleague suggested the Voronin ponytail be sheared and put behind glass at the club’s museum after the Ukrainian sealed a 1-0 win over Bayer Leverkusen this month. Voronin, meanwhile, was analysing a different part of his anatomy. The decisive goal, his 11th of a campaign that started slowly, was deflected in off his chest. “A more slender footballer would not have scored it,” he said, hinting at an unsuspected streak of self-deprecation. “I have to thank my big chest. Just as well I train it so well.”

He is a well-built man, and that defines his game. His directness was appealing enough to Liverpool when Rafael Benitez found that Voronin could be recruited without a transfer fee from Leverkusen in the summer of 2007, but it never captivated Anfield. Not long into his Liverpool career, Voronin attracted sneers from a section of the crowd who scarcely celebrated his rare home goals in front of the Kop. The adulation he hears and reads in Berlin is of a different timbre. The Berliner Zeitung ran a comment piece suggesting he had become a cult: “What will fathers now say to their sons when the youngsters are drawn into rock’n’roll and want to have Voronin’s long hair? How can they forbid their boys to wear ponytails?”

Happily for barbers in Ukraine, more boys grow up wanting to play football just like Andriy, and that still refers to Andriy Shevchenko. In his wretched past three years, one form of the game has regularly revived something of the best of Sheva: international football, in a Ukraine side that has been accustomed since the middle of the 1990s to structuring their football around their fabled striker.

Since Shevchenko captained his country to their first World Cup, and to the quarter-finals, in Germany, his club form may have vanished. For Ukraine, he has seven goals in his past 11 competitive internationals. In front of an English crowd, he has ample motive to show he can still perform. So does the other Andriy, the one with the rock’n’roll mane.