Ground 223: Action Park, Shankhouse FC

December 17th 1887 was a pivotal day in the history of three of England's biggest clubs.  At St James' Park, home gound of Newcastle West End, Shankhouse Black Watch's amateur footballers went down 9-0 to holders Aston Villa in the fourth round of the FA Cup.  The losing team were amply compensated, the £100 gate receipts - a new record for football in Northumberland - double what Villa had offered to switch the tie to Birmingham, but there was a more enduring financial legacy for their temporary hosts, West End's secretary Tom Watson later resigning his position partly due to criticism of his handling of the 7,000 crowd.  Watson had secured the lease on St James' Park and helped make West End the city's pre-eminent team; his departure contributed towards a decline which saw the club subsumed by Newcastle East End five years later.  East End's return to prominence began with Watson's arrival in 1888, though the ambitious Tynesider - "the first truly great manager in English football history" - soon moved on to Wearside, building a Sunderland team which won three out of four Football League championships between 1892 - the year his former clubs came together as Newcastle United - and 1895.  Lured to second division Liverpool by a salary of £300 per year, Watson masterminded the club's first two league titles and remained in the post until his death from pneumonia in 1915, making him Anfield's longest serving manager.

While Watson - at one point the highest paid secretary in England - seized on football's increasing professionalism, Shankhouse's time as one of the dominant forces in north-east football was drawing to a close.  Northumberland's first clubs, Tyne and Newcastle Rangers, started as leisure pursuits for the middle classes, their playing staff drawn from university students and schoolmasters, but the founding of Shankhouse by members of the local Primitive Methodist Chapel bible class in 1883 - after a team of pit workers from the village took on soldiers from the Black Watch camped at Cramlington - marked football's transition into a pastime for the region's industrial working classes.  Within a year there were seventeen teams in Shankhouse - population 1,000 - alone, although only two, Black Watch and Red Caps, lasted more than a single season.  Not everyone was happy with the changing demographics - an early visit to Newcastle left the city council complaining about "the foul language used by supporters of the Shankhouse club", while Tyneside newspapers later sniffily reported the dismissal of two Black Watch players for "roughness" and "kicking opponents in a most malicious manner."

Northumberland Challenge Cup winners in 1887, thrashing Newcastle West End 5-1 in front of 5,000 spectators at Chillingham Road,  Shankhouse's miners played on land rented from a local farmer but were talented enough to win six of the first eleven Northumberland Senior Cups, including three in a row starting in 1893, when they were also champions of the Northern Football Alliance and played Notts County in the first round of the FA Cup. Prominent Black Watch players included goalkeeper Jack Milburn,  Robert Willis and Willie Thompson, scorer of Newcastle United's first Football League hat-trick. Another future Magpie,  Bob Benson, was renowned as "a terror to opposing forwards" during spells with Southampton, Sheffield United, Woolwich Arsenal and England.  Shankhouse moved to a custom built ground at Arcot Park in 1896 but declining attendances and the money needed to pay players eventually took their toll. In 1905 a public meeting raised enough cash to stop the club from folding, but the following year the team finished bottom of twelve in the Alliance and were only able to stave off extinction by merging with Shankhouse Albion and dropping into the Blyth and District League.

It took 122 years for Shankhouse to win a second Alliance title, Gary Kirkup's side beating Ryton and Team Northumbria - both now in the Northern League - to top spot in 2005.  After fifteen years in the job, Kirkup stepped down this summer, replaced by his long-serving assistant Johnny Wilson.  Jarrow Roofing, founded around the same time as Shankhouse re-entered the Alliance in the late-1980s, also changed bosses in the close season, Paul Bennett joining from Hebburn Town to take charge of the team alongside the indomitable Richie McLoughlin. Roofing's new additions - including several of Bennett's old Hebburn Town squad - make them promotion favourites -  "a first division team in second division colours" reckon the nonleaguezone hoi-polloi.

It  looks a fair enough assessment after 37 seconds, the visitors' first attack ending with Paul Gardiner tapping in.  Shankhouse reply with a one-on-one that the excellent Dan Regan tips away and a free kick that heads over the perimeter fence and into the scrubland separating the pitch from the East Coast mainline.  All Roofing get out of two penalty appeals are bruised shins and a drop ball.  "The most stonewall pen you'll ever see, that," says one of the crowd.  Ten minutes into the second half, Shankhouse get the leveller their effort deserves, prompting a flurry in which Roofing clang the post and the crossbar before Andy Appleby strolls the ball across the line with the home defence waiting for offside.  "Can't be off, lads," the linesman tuts.  "He was level."  Stephen Young smacks a third,  Shankhouse score a consolation and Appleby rolls home a fourth - his ninth in six pre-season games.  "Tired legs," Wilson says, "but you've done well."

Admission:  Free
Date: August 6th 2013

Football Art: Ted Bates

"The most legendary and influential figure in Southampton's history," the Daily Echo said of Ted Bates.  "The very soul of Southampton Football Club," thought his obituarist in The Guardian.  "An emblem of loyalty and devotion," wrote the Daily Mail. Arriving on the south coast as a promising inside-forward, Bates was a fixture at Southampton for the next sixty-six years, making over 200 first-team appearances, steering the Saints from the middle of the third-tier to the top seven of the First Division, European football and an FA Cup semi-final, and later serving as assistant manager, club director and president.

Signed from Norwich City on his nineteenth birthday,  Bates' war-interrupted playing career peaked when he forged a prolific partnership with Charlie Wayman, the duo scoring 70 goals as the Saints narrowly missed out on promotion from Division Two in successive seasons at the end of the 1940s. Retiring as a player in 1953, Bates was working as reserve team manager when, with the club struggling in Division Three South,  the board of directors forced George Roughton out in September 1955 and handed control of the first eleven to the man who would eventually become known as 'Mr Southampton'.

Third Division champions in 1959-60, it took Bates another six seasons to finally attain the First Division status he'd been denied as a player, his free-scoring Saints side averaging over two goals a game as they clinched the runners-up spot behind Manchester City.  "Getting promotion to the First Division was obviously the high point for me,"  Bates remembered in a local newspaper interview.  "And once we got there, it wasn't the end of it. It was a struggle to stay up at first. We really had to dig in and keep improving the side. You can never stand still in this game."

Bates built Southampton just as Shankly made the modern Liverpool or Busby Manchester United, unearthing future England internationals Terry Paine, Mick Channon and Martin Chivers as the Saints reached the 1963 FA Cup semi-final, twice finished seventh in the First Division,  and played two seasons in Europe, beating Rosenborg and Vitória de Guimarães in the Fairs Cup of 1969-70 before losing on away goals to Newcastle United, then bowing out at the first round stage of the 1971-72 UEFA Cup  3-2 on aggregate to Athletic Bilbao.

After nearly two decades as manager, Bates stepped down in 1973, remaining on the staff as chief executive and assistant to Lawrie McMenemy as Southampton defeated Manchester United 1-0 in the 1976 FA Cup Final. "It didn't come any better than winning the FA Cup at Wembley, " he said. "It was our first trip to Wembley, the first time we'd won the cup...I don't think anyone involved with the club will forget it."

Joining the board in 1978, Bates was made an MBE and awarded the freedom of the city in 2001, two years before his death at the age of 85.  Four years later a £112,000 bronze statue, funded by the Ted Bates Trust, was unveiled outside St Mary's Stadium, only to be taken down within a week.  Widely derided for resembling Portsmouth owner Milan Mandaric shrunk to Jimmy Krankie proportions, the sculpture was called "an absolute abomination", "His head is too big, his arms too big, his legs too small," just one of the many criticisms.  "It was an embarrassing episode, mistakes happened, it wasn't very good and something had to be done," Southampton chairman Leon Crouch admitted as he revealed a £120,000 replacement. "Ted was - and in many ways still is - Southampton Football Club and we owe it to him to build a fitting statue."  The new work - by Sean Hedges-Quinn, who also sculpted Sir Bobby Robson and Bob Stokoe - stands outside the main entrance to the ground, showing Bates dressed formally in a suit and tie, waving towards the River Itchen. "Ted Bates MBE Mr Southampton," reads the inscription on the plinth.  "This statue has been erected by fans, friends and colleagues in recognition of Ted's 66 years of loyal service to our great club."  A fitting tribute to the man who did as much as anyone to build Southampton FC.

Ground 222: Wingate Welfare Park, Wingate FC

"Now a village with a team," begins Wingate FC's Twitter profile.  A 19^th century mining community whose pit closed as long ago as 1962, Wingate's 3,000 residents have been without a Saturday afternoon football side since 1995, when a club which had twice won the Monkwearmouth Cup dropped out of the Wearside League altogether after almost a decade spent in the lower reaches of Division Two.

It was an inglorious end to nearly a century of football. Wingate Albion, champions of the Wearside League in 1908-09,  had also been the first club of goalkeeper Ronnie Sewell, who went on to an FA Cup victory with Burnley and an England cap while at neighbours Blackburn Rovers, where he made over 200 league appearances.  Alf Young, another who started out at Albion, played almost  300 times for Hartlepool, Lincoln City and Gillingham, while Robert Thompson left for Preston North End and later became the first Leeds United player to score a hat-trick in the Football League.  Two other clubs, Wingate Colliery Welfare and Wingate FC, almost repeated Albion's title success, finishing runners-up in the Wearside League three decades apart.  In 1978, Norman Corner, who'd returned to the Durham coalfield after playing professionally for Hull, Lincoln and Bradford City, managed Wingate to second place in the league and a Monkwearmouth Cup victory.   It wasn't quite a last hurrah - there was a second Monkwearmouth win six years later and both Workington and Shotton Comrades were seen off on the way to the third qualifying round of the 1985-86 FA Cup - but local football, like much else in East Durham, was beginning a near-terminal decline.

Enter Steve Cook.  "Chairman, manager, coach, mug," is his self-deprecating description of the role he plays at a club he founded almost single-handedly. Cook, a UEFA-qualified coach formerly of Hartlepool United and with plenty of Northern League experience at Brandon United, Seaham Red Star and Esh Winning, launched Project Wingate on Twitter at the end of February. In March, the yellow-and-blue home colours were chosen by the club's Twitter followers, with one of the winning voters selected as honorary president. By June Wingate had applied for and been accepted into the Durham Alliance, one step below the Wearside and eight promotions away from League Two, where they join the likes of Brandon British Legion, Darlington Rugby Club, Dunston Holmside Amateurs and Spennymoor Town Reserves.  Twenty-five players attended training in the first week of July. "During the course of our first season we will create and train new coaches selected from the playing squad," Cook says on the club's website.  It's a self-sustaining model, all fees covered in exchange for training the next generation of Wingate players at open entry sessions.

There are just over a dozen spectators at Wingate's first home friendly, including four seated on top of the dugouts and another two on the changing block roof.  Wingate Welfare Park, laid out in 1930 as a miners' recreation ground, is fitted with floodlights and four steps of terracing, though the lack of pitchside railings, seats or paved standing around the touchline means there is a lot of work to be done before the club can begin to think of promotion.  Substitutes sit on collapsible camping seats or kick balls against the perimeter fence as Cook and his opposite number, Billingham Town Intermediates' coach John Swanson, shout out instructions to their teams.

The home team fall behind after just twelve minutes, an underhit backpass finding a Billingham trialist, who controls and fires high past the onrushing goalkeeper.  Despite the bone-dry pitch, both sides keep the ball down, passes bobbling from boot to boot.  Wingate's Philly Hickman flicks a header against the base of the post with half an hour played, then calmly levels from the penalty spot from his team's next attack.  "Think about the shape, blues.  Settle it down," yells Swanson. Ian Cookland sidefoots a second for Billingham, but two goals in a minute from Haydn Price and Hickman put Wingate ahead for the first time in the match.  "We've fallen asleep here," Swanson laments.

Wingate clatter the crossbar twice before the visitors equalise, Cookland rounding Russ Blenkinsop, falling over and then dispatching the ball with the front of his boot.  Both sides are now using rolling substitutes.  A few more supporters wander in with pushchairs and some children start a kickabout on the second pitch.  If Cook has his way, they'll be the next generation of Wingate's community football club.

With Peterlee Town the latest victims of the East Durham triangle, you can only wish him well.

Date:27th July 2013
Admission: Free

Ground 221: Chernomorets Stadium, Odessa

The last time I was in Odessa, in early 2010, the city's football club were playing in front of a few thousand fans at a two-sided, open-air stadium with an asphalt running track and a view of the Comedy Theatre.  We could have done with some laughs. At the end of the season, after failing to win any of their last eleven games, Chernomorets were relegated for the third time in fourteeen years.  "It's the indifference that gets me," grumbled a supporter as we filed out towards the train station. "They'll be lucky to get cockroaches here next season."

What they got instead was Roman Grigorchuk.  A three-time title winner in Latvia with FK Ventspils, Grigorchuk arrived at the quarter point of the season with the club floundering in midtable, managed promotion in his first year, survival in his second and briefly threatened the top four last winter, eventually making do with sixth and a Europa League place after a 3-0 shellacking by Shakhtar in the Ukrainian Cup Final.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, almost a year to the day since Grigorchuk replaced Igor Nakonechny as head coach, the redeveloped Chernomorets Stadium finally opened in November 2011 after three years of delays, squabbling and escalating costs.  The new stadium was built on the site of the club's original home, the Soviet Central Stadium of the Black Sea Shipping Company, a classic roofless-bowl-with-running-track design constructed on land the city authorities had just flattened for a boating lake before realising they'd run out of cash.

Baboushkas line the approaches to the ground flogging bits of dried fish and sunflower seeds out of carrier bags and plastic water bottles with the tops cut off.  Fans sit on the base of the Taras Shevchenko statue to smoke cigarettes, or wander along broken-up paths to slug back beer and piss against tree trunks. The outside of the stadium looks like a cross between a shopping mall and a Habsburg railway station, queues building on the staircases while stewards punch holes in tickets.  Inside, the Chernomorets anthem meanders along like a losing semi-finalist in the Eurovision Song Contest.  My seat's behind the goal the home side are attacking, directly opposite the few hundred Odessa ultras, with the nineteen Arsenal Kyiv fans up and to my left glowering behind their flags.

 After a winter run of nine wins and a draw, Chernomorets have faded since the season resumed  in March, winning just one of their last eleven league games.  Their problems in attack - their top scorers, the Albanian international Elis Bakaj and Lucian Burdujan, a Romanian U21 cap and cup winner with Rapid Bucharest, have just five goals each all season - are evident early in the half.  Leo Matos, FIFA U17 World Cup winner in 2003 before his talent burned briefly at Marseille and Flamengo, crosses, Bakaj plants his feet, screws his eyes closed and....BANG! Folds up like an ironing board, the ball ricocheting downwards off his head and harmlessly bouncing off a hoarding.  When the home side do threaten its down to the fleet-footed Matos on the right of midfield. Mainly they don't, the well-organised visitors keeping Vladimir Gomenyuk up top for nuisance value, Allardycing the midfield and allowing all the opportunities Matos wants to overhit crosses from the flank.  Just before the break, Arsenal almost manage to force the ball over the line three times in the messy goalmouth scramble that follows an uncleared corner kick.  The referee's whistle brings a faint smattering of applause and a couple of boos with most of the crowd already running for a beer.

Arsenal come out all guns blazing...over the crossbar.  With the home fans losing interest, a steward swoops on a sunburnt teenager in a trilby hat who refuses to stub out his cigarette, the argument brought to a sudden end when a Gomenyuk shot bounces over their heads.  By now, things are dire enough on the pitch to prompt the first Mexican Wave.  In response, a plastic bottle is thrown against the frame of the goal.  "Odessa, Odessa," rolls down from the stands as Sito Riera - whose more talented brother Albert played for Liverpool, Manchester City and Spain - comes on for Anatoliy Didenko, a kind of Emile Heskey mixed with Peter Crouch.

With eight minutes left  Bakaj runs unchallenged across the edge of the area. "Shoot!" yell the crowd. Gently, he passes the ball sideways into completely empty space.

That's the kind of game it was.

Date: May 26th 2013
Admission:  Free with a season ticket from a student. 

Ground 220: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Stadium

Think Istanbul and you think 2,700 years of Greeks, Byzantines and Ottomans, minarets, murder on the Orient Express, the Grand Bazaar and the Golden Horn.  And football.  With five top-flight clubs, three stadiums of 50,000 plus capacities and some of the most fanatical supporters in Europe, Turkey's biggest city is one of the continent's great weekend awaydays.

While Besiktas is the country's oldest club and Galatasaray and Fenerbahce the most consistently lauded, it's the government-backed top-flight arrivestes Kasımpaşa Spor Kulübü whose fixture catches my eye.  Fourth and fifth in the Super Lig behind Istanbul's big three, between them Kasımpaşa and Bursaspor - national champions as recently as 2009-10 - have Premier League legends like, erm, Tuncay Sanli, Andreas Isaakson, Scott Carson, Anton Ferdinand and Maurice Edu in their ranks.  That, an afternoon kick off, and the fact that I didn't have to deal with Ticketmaster's Turkish subsidiary - what could possibly go wrong? 

Just five minutes on foot from İstiklal Avenue, the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Stadium is separated from the Pera Palace Hotel by one main road, a line of police and the steep bank overlooking the squat, tightly-packed quarter where the Turkish prime minister was born and raised. Erodgan played in Kasımpaşa's youth teams before transferring to politics, calls himself a "Kasımpaşa man" and regularly intervenes to help his old club in ways you can't imagine David Cameron ever quite pulling off for Aston Villa.  Now managed by former Rangers and Ajax forward Shota Arveladze, who took the job after Roy Keane turned down an earlier approach (you can only imagine what carnage his combustible personality might have wrecked on a footballing culture as volatile as Istanbul's), the newly promoted club are on the brink of their most successful season ever, having played only five seasons in Turkey's top league before 2007.  A bigger than expected crowd and my woefully misguided decision to remain on the top-deck of a Bosphorus tour boat for ninety minutes without a hat or suncream means that by the time I get to the ground there's smoke wafting everywhere, fans thronging the narrow streets and the ticket office shutters are being pulled down.  I barely have time to utter a "Bollocks!" when a voice mutters "You want ticket?" "Sorry, no English," he says, signalling the price with two fingers as he slides a complimentary ticket out of an inner pocket.  Twenty Turkish lira and some faffing around with a barcode later, I'm through the turnstiles in time to hear the opening bars of the national anthem, both sets of fans holding flags and scarves aloft as they bellow out the words.  

The cacophonous din is kept up throughout the whole of the first half, the two sides playing tippy-tappy in midfield while the fans behind the far goal keep up a competing barrage of noise.  With Carson not in the squad and Ferdinand left on the bench, Tuncay, Isaakson - whose final game in England saw him concede eight goals at Middlesbrough - and Kasımpaşa's German captain Fabian Ernst are the most recognisable faces in the middle. Bursa start pacier and more inventive than the home team, but struggle to find a way through, round or over Yalcin Ayhan and Baris Basdas.  It takes twenty-six minutes for the home side to mount a serious attack, a cross from the right eluding everyone but Bosnian Senijad Ibričić, who heads back across the goalkeeper and into the corner of the net.  Tuncay misses a one-on-one moments later, beating his fists on the grass in frustration, and Bursa's threat gradually begins to fade.  The second goal comes in what turns out to be the game's final minute, Kalu Uche stumbling onto a clearance after the ball takes three deflections.  The Nigerian international shows more movement in celebrating than he's previously managed all game while a home fan vaults a hoarding only to be repeatedly smacked about the head by the Bursaspor keeper, understandably irate at losing a goal to a forward so horrifically ineffective his club tried to sign Carlton Cole. As the police rush to one end of the pitch, the Kasımpaşa fans at the opposite end make a half-hearted charge towards the away supporters.  Flag poles begin flying, the home players start tearing their shirts off and somewhere in the melee the referee blows for full-time.  "Fabian Ernst's brother?" a home fan asks, swaying drunkenly and pointing to my bald, sunburnt head.  "Why?" I ask, gesturing towards the scuffle on the pitch. "Discipline!" he smiles, smashing a fist into the palm of one hand. 

I bet Roy Keane would have absolutely loved him.

Admission:  20 Tl (£7)

Date: Sunday March 31st. 

Before...

During... 

And after.

İnönü Stadium, Istanbul

A ten-minute walk from Taksim Square on the European side of the Bosphorus, the İnönü Stadium is home to the black and whites of Beşiktaş, Turkey's oldest football club. War-interrupted building work started in May 1939 and took eight years to complete, the pitch officially christened with a November 1947 friendly against AIK Stockholm. The only football stadium to overlook two continents, Pele once claimed it had the most beautiful view of any ground in the world. "I have never seen anything like it. The stadium was a pressure cooker and the people were possessed,”  Lisandro Lopez, Lyon's Argentinean forward, said after he played there for Porto.

Turkey's first modern stadium was extensively renovated in 2004, when the running track was removed and the capactity increased to 32,000.  Even so, with two of the İnönü's former tenants, Galatasaray and  Fenerbahçe, now attracting crowds of over fifty thousand at newly developed arenas, Beşiktaş have long been looking to  upgrade their own facilties. At the end of the current season, the club will groundshare while a 42,000 capacity stadium, modelled in part on Hamburg's Imtech Arena, is constructed on the site of the İnönü. As part of the €120 million project, the pitch will be lowered another nine metres, while the Eski Açık tribune, a protected national monument, will be covered in glass and preserved.

The ground, which was built on the stables of Dolmabahçe Palace, is easily reached on foot from Taksim or by a short uphill climb from the ferry landing and tram stop at Kabataş.  Alternatively, you can see its floodlights behind the minarets of Dolmabahçe from the deck of a tour boat:

Or the downhill, cross-continental view over the Bosphorus to Asia:

Ground 219: Sheriff Sports Complex, Tiraspol

Nine dollars and two and a half hours is all it takes for the train ride to Transnistria, a self-proclaimed sliver of a state between the western border of Ukraine and the rest of what once made up the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Only officially recognised by its three fellow breakaway republics of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria effectively won its independence in July 1992 when the Russian 14th Army's artillery backed by high-level political pressure from Moscow forced the Moldovans to sign a ceasefire agreement. More than two decades later, Lenin statues, Russian soldiers and Soviet paraphenalia still abound in Tiraspol, capital city of a country reputed to have the biggest stockpile of illegal weapons anywhere in Europe and which attracts fewer Western visitors than even North Korea. "Two things are responsible for the creation of Transnistria: the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the script of Apocalypse Now," explains the Russian writer Vladimir Kaminer.

 It's a reputation which explains why I'm travelling in a carriage with only two other passengers as the Odessa to Chisinau service trundles out of Ukraine.  "Passport?" the conductor asks in gravelly Russian. "Looks Irish," he mumbles, turning it over in his hand before returning with an English-language immigration form. Ukrainian border guards stamp us out of the country while Transnistrian police officers and Alsatian sniffer dogs watch in the background.   After a twenty-minute wait the train starts moving.  Half an hour later I'm climbing down the metal steps at Tiraspol to find locked or deserted rooms and two taxi drivers who shrug their shoulders when I show them the address of my hotel.  I set off down Lenin Street, take a left at a decrepit stadium where FC Tiraspol's team coach is parked and finally get lost on an unlit backstreet near Victory Park. A woman with machine-gun Russian and two shopping bags shows me the rest of the way. "It's no problem. Sorry it took so long," she says, disappearing into the night.

Tiraspol by daylight is only marginally more exciting. City of a thousand black Mercedes, its few sights are spread along October 25th Street: the spired, white-columned Palace of the Soviets has a bust of Lenin outside, the parliament building built in 1960s office block style has a statue of Lenin on its front steps, a T-34 tank, several war memorials, a few dozen metres of sand by a concrete bridge and an equestrian statue to Alexander Suvorov, 18th-century Muscovite general and founder of the city.  An old crone on a collapsible seat tends four goats in the grounds of an abandoned factory building and barrel-chested pensioners sell bags of onions and potatoes near the open-air market.  Outside the $200 million Sheriff Arena Complex are a pair of Sheriff Petrol Stations and signs still adorned with hammers and sickles and CCCP. "Sorry for question, aren't you from Deutschland?" queries the waiter, ungrammatically, at a nearby branch of Andy's Pizza. "Good luck," he smiles as I finish up my Chisinau Draught and head towards the ground.

Back in the communist-era, Zimbru Chisinau (Nistru Kishinev) and Tiligul Tiraspol were Moldova's big two football clubs. Zimbru, Soviet Cup quarter-finalists in 1963, spent eleven seasons in the Soviet Top League. Tiligul, First League runners-up in 1991, were denied promotion due to the break up of the Soviet Union, but won three Moldovan Cups as Zimbru picked up eight of the first nine national championships. Neither will figure in this year's title race: Tiligul folded in 2009 and Zimbru haven't won a trophy in almost six years.  Viktor Gushan is the reason why.

In 1997 Gushan, ex-KGB officer and founder of Transnistria's monolithic Sheriff Corporation, added a football club to a list of assets which include bakeries, supermarkets, a distillery, petrol and TV stations, a mobile phone network and Mercedes-Benz dealerships. Sheriff finished their first season fourteen points clear at the top of the second-tier Divizia A, won the Moldovan Cup in their second and a league and cup double in their fourth. Since then, Gushan's side have won eleven of twelve Moldovan championships, six domestic cups and have beaten the likes of Dynamo Kyiv, FC Twente, Dinamo Zagreb and Slavia Prague in European competition.

Actually, make that twelve of thirteen.  With a dozen rounds of the season remaining, Dacia Chisinau, title-winners in 2011, trail the defending champions by twelve points.  "Anything can happen," says Dacia manager Igor Dobrovolski, but the Chisinau side lost two players to third-placed FC Tiraspol during the winter break and were held 1-1 by city rivals Academica on their first weekend back.  Despite the temperature -  seven degrees above zero in Tiraspol - the meeting of Moldova's two best sides is played indoors, the 2,500 crowd including a raucous contingent of approximately thirty fans who've crossed an unrecognised border to see their team play. 

While the Dacia Ultras jump, twirl scarves and bang continually on a drum, the home support is surprisingly sedate apart from some high-pitched choruses of Sheriff and a discordant, mournful-sounding horn. The non-playing members of the home squad take up their places in the row behind mine, shaking their heads at each misplaced pass and sending their girlfriends for mineral water and packets of smoky bacon crisps at the end of a dull first half.  The only chance Sheriff are able to create falls to Marko Stanojevic, but the former Red Star Belgrade player hits Sektor 6 instead of the target after stumbling through a tackle on the edge of the box. Dacia's forwards huff and puff but get never remotely look like breaching a defence marshalled by skipper Miral Samardžić and Benjamin Balima, part of the Burkina Faso squad that lost out in the final of the African Nations Cup to Nigeria.  The second half is even less exciting - the only surprise that the official match report makes it into a second paragraph. With five minutes left, Stanojevic jinks round three players before miscontrolling and toeing the ball wide.  The crowd file out through the pitch-black stadium complex into unlit streets. Dogs bark, Belarussian-made trolley buses pass by on their way out of town. Somehow, it all seems very fitting.

Date: Saturday March 9th
Admission:  10 Transnistrian roubles (about 70p)