Football Fix

"Why I hate Dynamo Kiev," explained my student, "is that during the Soviet Union they took every good player in Ukraine. "If you score for Odessa, first you go to the army, and then you go to Kiev." "How about Donetsk?" I asked. "Don't they have all the money now?"

He leaned closer. "There are two groups in Ukraine, one is for Kiev and one if for Shakhtar. All the referees are for Kiev. They lost today and it was the first time their player has been sent-off in three seasons. Three seasons. That referee will be unemployed." "So who's in Shakhtar's group?" I asked, thinking I'd need to check the internet to see if he was right. "At the moment there's Shakhtar, Kharkiv, Odessa, Luhansk and Karpaty Lviv, but Lviv sometimes change. We fight very hard when we play one of the other group but when we play each other everything is arranged. For example, tomorrow we play with Shakhtar. I can tell you the score now. It will be two-zero."

"And this is good?" I asked. "It's Ukraine," he shrugged.

UPDATE: Chornomorets didn't score, but Shakhtar got three. Which, according to this site, is also the number of red cards received by Dynamo Kiev players this season.

Forthcoming Attractions

Work's taking me to Nottingham for a month this summer. As I've already visited both of the big grounds in the city, this site should come in very handy indeed.

The Ukrainian season ends in May, before which I'm hoping to fit in one more trip to Chernomorets, an Arsenal or Obolon Kiev home game, and the potentially crucial last-day match between Bastion Illichivsk and Mykolaiv, currently second and third in Group A of the Druha League (Ukraine's League One).

Ground 117: Spartak Stadion, Odessa.

Chornomorets Odessa should be one of the giants of Ukrainian football. A one club city, Odessa was the place where Ukrainians first saw the game being played. In 1878, the Odessa British Athletic Club was the first football club anywhere in the Russian Empire. The first international game to feature a Ukrainian team took place here in 1914 and Dynamo Odessa were founded a quarter of a century later. Renamed Chornomorets (Black Seamen), they qualified for the UEFA Cup in 1975, finishing third (thereby ending my run of firsts) in the USSR Top League behind only Dinamo Kiev and Spartak Moscow. Independence brought two Ukrainian Cups and a pair of runner-up finishes (again behind Kiev) to Odessa, but also relegation. In the past three seasons they've finished sixth, seventh and tenth.

This year they're even worse. Fourth from bottom of a sixteen-team league, before kick-off they'd scored just eighteen goals in twenty-three games and were only three points off relegation. Their opponents, Vorskla Poltava, were occupying the Blackburn Rovers position: played twenty three, points twenty four, goal difference zero.

Outside the ground the newspaper vendors were doing a roaring trade thanks to the new law requiring drinkers to wrap their bottles of beer in paper. What was left came in handy as a cover for the seats. Chornomorets came out in Inter Milan stripes but any similarities ended in the warm-up. I spent the first twenty minutes trying to get through a handful of sunflower seeds I'd mistakenly accepted from my neighbour - then wished I'd asked for more. The game had goalless written all over it: Poltava were so happy with a point they rarely bothered to cross halfway and Odessa so toothless up front they couldn't even muster a shot on target after half-time. Their best player was the right back, a former Brazilian Under-17 international who'd failed to make the grade with Marseille, but that wasn't saying very much. By the end of the game the centre-forward had dropped so deep he was playing in defence, hitting a simple square ball straight out for a throw. The crowd thinned immediately from four thousand down to two. "This is the worst game I've seen," said the bloke sitting next to me. And he supports Hartlepool United.

DATE: April 10th
ADMISSION: Free with a mate's season ticket.

Poltava's away support. Go on, count 'em.

If only...

The high point of the afternoon from the Odessa Ultras.

Ground 116: Stadion Dnister im. Viktora Dukova

It was all a bit of a comedown from the last time I saw a football match in Ukraine. From the Champions League, a 100,000 crowd and Kiev's Olympic Stadium to three or four hundred watching Dniester Ovidiopol (played twenty, position thirteenth, points twenty-three) versus Kharkiv (position rock-bottom, played nineteen, points four, wins zero, goal difference minus thirty-eight) in Ukraine's Persha Liga (their equivalent of the Championship in status, or the Conference in the standard of play).

I'd managed to talk four other people into joining me, plus one who bolted when he couldn't get a seat on the bus. Ovidiopol (or Oviedo as our other non-Russian speaker insisted on calling it) is a forty-minute ride west of Odessa, on the eastern shore of the Dniester Liman. Its Wikipedia entry runs to four lines. Its most prominent sights are a view of the water, two Soviet-era statues and a pub done out like an Ancient Greek temple where the beer costs 80p and the waitresses dress like belly-dancers.

It was the pub that kept us out of the ground until dead on kick-off. "Gdye stadion?" we asked an old bloke, busy weeding his vegetables. "Eh?" he replied, before eventually pointing us across a disused railway track and the kind of rusting factory you usually find in a Steinbeck novel. We entered the ground through an open metal gate. There was a wall on one side that had been designated as the toilet, fresh wet stains running down the cracks in the concrete. Piped marching band music accompanied the teams as they made their way onto the pitch. "Do you reckon it's free?" someone asked, as we tried to take up as little space on the filthy plastic seats as gravity would allow.

The pattern of the game was obvious from the start. Kharkiv's young team had come for the draw and were defending heroically, while Ovidiopol's captain, a stubby little fat man with a mullet and precisely twenty-eight percent of Gheorghe Hagi's talent, tried to orchestrate a way through to goal. Dniester had the edge in width, pace and ability, but were hamstrung by a number nine who was too young to be allowed into the penalty area without parental supervision, a number seven who thought the goal was twenty metres to the right of where it really was, and a ball-playing centre half who was Rio Ferdinand in his head and Anton Ferdinand in actual talent and performance. The crowd began to get restless as half-time approached without a goal. "Referee, you're a fu.." began one shout, before an overweight man in a suit and "rich person's scarf" strolled along the running track and told the drunks at the back to "Shut up." He didn't look like the kind of bloke you argued with. They didn't.

At half-time we followed a crowd of people back out of the gate to the local corner shop, which had a beer pump on the counter and pints for 33p, getting back just in time to see a Kharkiv defender sent off for a foul on the edge of the area, which meant we could stand right behind the net, plastic glasses in hand, as Hagi bent the resulting free kick straight into the top corner. Kharkiv had their best chance a few minutes' later, their centre-forward almost hitting the corner flag with a free header from the middle of the goal. Their travelling supporter folded his arms across his chest and didn't speak for the rest of the game. A second goal followed while the home crowd were momentarily distracted by an old man handing out free calendars. "Den-is-tra, Den-is-tra," roared a few blokes who'd brought their own vodka along. Everyone else was too busy looking at pictures of a school volleyball team.

DATE: April 3rd 2010
ADMISSION: Free!

The Stadion Viktora Dukova. Not quite the Nou Camp...

The next generation of Dniester superstars hone their skills at half-time.

The boys try their best to look grateful.

Family outing.

Failing to track down the elusive Kharkiv firm, the Ovidiopol Ultras pose for a group pic instead.

While for everyone else the rush for home begins.

Next up: Bastion Illichivsk in the Druha Liga, about as low as professional club football gets in this part of the world.

Chornomorets Stadium, Odessa

Or about all that's currently left of it. Originally built in the 1930s, the ground is on the edge of Taras Shevchenko Park, a tree-lined scrub land popular with drunks, families and stray dogs. After sluggish building work cost the city the chance of hosting Euro 2012, the redevelopment of the 35,000-capacity stadium won't now be completed for at least another year. Until then the local team are playing at the two-sided Spartak Stadium, a few hundred metres seawards of the city's main railway station - where their last game got a crowd of under three thousand.

Odessa's Spartak Stadium "was opened in 1928 as a dedication to the 10th anniversary of the Komsomol and was considered the most modern stadium in the city at the time seating 10,000 spectators," says its entry on Wikipedia. Now down to 6,000 and home to the city's rugby team, it's not on the list for 2012.

Ground 115: Zimbru Stadium, Chişinău

On a good day you can get from Odessa to Chişinău, the capital city of Moldova, in around four hours. On the day we chose to travel it took us over six. The road was rutted, pot-holed and covered with falling snow. 'Quality and Comfort' said a sticker on the side of the bus, but my seat was stuck in a permanent half-recline and the air was so cold that nobody took their hat or gloves off. The driver had a black leather cap pulled down low over his sunglasses, a cigarette in one hand and a mobile phone permanently wedged in the other. "When I was in India," began a loud North American voice from the very back of the bus. At the border there was nothing except brown, ice-coated puddles, an emaciated dog and a concrete toilet block, where we paid the equivalent of 18p to urinate down a skittle-shaped hole in the ground. Four men in combat fatigues and fur hats watched over the queue from the inside of a jeep.

Chişinău's no Prague. The city was hit by an earthquake in 1940 and most of what was left standing was soon flattened by one or other of the German, Romanian or Soviet armies. We covered the sights in an afternoon: stone statues and glass casinos, rubble and squash courts where Moldova once held Scotland to a 1-1 draw, an Orthodox cathedral and a smallish arch built to celebrate a dead Tsar's victory over the Turks. We ended up watching the Premier League on a big screen in the Carlsberg Pub on Bucuresti, which had a nylon England flag hanging from the ceiling and a Tranmere Rovers fan at a table upstairs. Several beers later we decided it would be a good idea to attempt the forty-five minute walk back to the hotel. We only made it as far as the Hotel National before getting stopped by the police. "Passports," one said in Russian, sliding his leg out of the car door. As we handed them over disappointment slowly clouded his face. "Where are your girls?" he asked, changing tack. "What have you been drinking? Why aren't you drunk?" He closed the passports and put them in his pocket. "How about we go for a drink?" We laughed, nervously. "But you're driving, aren't you?" "Not tomorrow we're not," pointing at his partner, who'd got out of the car and was standing with his arms folded across his chest. "We're busy then." "Doing what?" "Erm, we're watching Zimbru against Otaci." He stared at each of us in turn, exchanged a look with his partner, and handed back the passports with only half a smile.

 

Manic scenes outside Zimbru Stadium.

 

It's no surprise they didn't fancy tagging along. You wouldn't have called FC Zimbru Chişinău's game against Nistru Otaci the match of the day in Moldova, let alone the rest of Europe. Zimbru won eight of the first nine Divizia Naţională titles after Moldovan independence, before Sheriff, the second largest company in the breakaway territory of Transnistria, started bankrolling FC Sheriff Tiraspol. Zimbru hadn't managed as much as second place ever since and were way down in sixth before kick-off against Otaci, a small-town team from the far north of the country who were unsurprisingly bottom of the league. "You do know the game's on at the small ground?" asked the elderly woman who sold us our 10 Lei (50p) tickets. There was snow all over the new national stadium, so the game had been moved to a training pitch around the back. With an hour to go until the game kicked off we retreated to a sports bar just across the road. When we left, everyone else stayed behind to watch Rubin Kazan play CSKA Moscow in the Russian Super Cup.

There were only a few hundred people in the temporary stands and most of those who spoke English soon found their way towards our seats. "You will laugh when you hear how much these players earn," said a man in a ski hat and football boots who'd just grabbed my shoulder and told me to call him Victor. "Can you imagine only $400 a month? No, you can't! And do you see the man eight along on the bench? He was the top striker in 2008 but he likes women and casinos too much." "Who's the best player now?" we asked, and two people behind us laughed out loud in reply.

 

 "It's in the small stadium today," said the woman selling tickets. The main Zimbru Stadium has seats for 10,600 people and is home to Zimbru, the Moldovan national team and the local branch of the Norwich City fan club.

 

As Otaci had travelled without a goalkeeper, a reserve defender had been made to play there instead. The top he'd been given was at least one size too big, his gloves were so small he took them off before half time and whenever he made a save the crowd burst out laughing while Zimbru's players stomped on the ground in disgust. "He was playing in the first team before," Victor told me, "but then they bought the two Africans. They're here for three games. It's a kind of corruption." Neither of the foreigners was half as good as Zimbru's number nine. "Who's he?" I asked Victor. "Nobody."

There wasn't much of an atmosphere beyond a few dozen fans chanting 'Zim-bru Ki-shi-nau, Zimbru Ki-shi-nau' on the other side of the pitch. By half-time even they'd got bored and started throwing snowballs at each other instead. Deciding against Victor's offer of lemon tea and half a slice of processed cheese, I spent the interval in the toilets attempting to ward off frostbite with the aid of a malfunctioning hand-dryer.

Two-one up at the break, Zimbru finally brought on their casino-loving striker midway through the second half. He jogged around for a few minutes, did nothing at all for the next twenty, and then scored with a tap-in right on full-time. Zimbru's third goal had come five minutes earlier, by which time half the crowd, including Victor, had already left. "Moldovan football," he laughed. "Once is enough."

Date: 6th March 2010
Admission: 10 lei (50p)

A slightly less impressive view of the place.

After the half-time rush for lemon tea and baguettes.

Waiting for the full-time whistle.

FC Chornomorets Odessa

My new local team. The Ukrainian season resumes on February 28th with Chornomorets (currently third bottom with ten defeats out of sixteen) at home to sixth-placed Tavriya Simferopol.

The Ukrainian League is ranked seventh in Europe, ahead of Portugal and Holland, but that's mainly because of Donetsk and Kiev and "Odessa is non-league crap at its very worst," emailed a friend who's actually seen them play this season. He didn't go back. First rule of Eastern European football: lower your expectations - and spend as long as you can in the pub before kick-off.