Ground 227: Neo GSZ Stadium, Larnaca

I came to Cyprus because of Temuri Ketsbaia, the Georgian forever lodged in my memory for his engraged, wild-eyed hoofing of a St James' Park advertising board and an extra-time leveller in Zagreb which put Newcastle United into the Champions League group stages and left us few dozen independent travellers with a journey back to the centre reminiscent of The Warriors' return trip from Van Cortlandt Park. 

Ketsbaia's five years in Britain - three on Tyneside and one apiece in Wolverhampton and Dundee - were bookended by lengthier periods in Athens and Cyprus, where he scored 72 goals in 175 games in two spells at Anorthosis Famagusta, the island's oldest club.  As coach he famously led his side to two titles and a Cypriot Cup, outwitted Trabzonspor and Olympiacos in Champions League qualifiers, and came within a whisker of the knockout rounds in 2008-09, defeating Panathanaikos, twice holding Werder Bremen and taking a point and a single goal loss from two games against Jose Mourinho's Inter Milan.  Four months later he was gone and the "brightest chapter in the 98-year history of Anorthosis" was at an end.

"Ketsbaia is a great coach but a very rude man," Marinos says as he checks me into his hotel.  "But football in Larnaca is not the same since he left."  "What's your team?" I ask. "I like football," he smiles, "which is why I support APOEL."  It's an answer which goes some way to explaining the malaise currently afflicting the town's five top-flight clubs.  While up to 1% of the country's entire population watch the Nicosia side's home fixtures, attendances at  AEK Larnaca have latterly slumped below 1,000,  cash-strapped, already relegated ALKI  have minus 35 points after 23 matches and  could disappear altogether before the end of the campaign, and disgruntled Anorthosis fans recently stormed into stadium offices attempting to oust the board of a club that is more than €12 million in debt and on to their third coach of the season.

The televised AEK  - Anorthosis derby was the highlight of the six league games played in and around Larnaca over the weekend, though with both sides - third and second in the 2012-13 First Division - mired in midtable first impressions weren't particularly encouraging.  The two-sided stadium, a 45-minute walk north of the beachfront near a hospital, industrial zone and the Aradippou road, was all but deserted when I arrived with only two working two ticket booths and more riot police than supporters on show.  Empty rows of dirty blue and white bucket seats curved around the straights of a running track, the only shade  provided by a corrugated roof above the VIP section and a canvas tunnel reaching over a concrete ditch towards the disused long-jump pit.  The opposing ultras arrived just before kick off, AEK's small contingent sport matching black hoodies and leave their drum unattended while trading shouts across the pitch, the blue-shirted Anorthosis fans breaking off from tying banners to engage in some energetic arm waving.

The Famagusta end gets a clap-and-stomp number started, the home fans silent until the 12th minute when Kyriakos Pavlou - one of only five Cypriot players on the pitch -  scrambles the opening goal past former Ligue 1 title winner Mathieu Valverde.  "AEK ole, AEK ole, AEK ole, ole, ole!"  Sedate toing and froing makes up the remainder of the half, the toothless visitors shading possession but never seriously threatening Miguel Escalona's goal.

In the second half the funereal pace of the Anorthosis fans' chanting is matched by the passage of the ball around their midfield.  The first time the blue shirts manage to pass their way to goal Moshe Ohayon can only hit Valverde's legs, the second - Roberto Colautti scooping over with the Frenchman stranded - immediately precedes Vitaliy Ivanko's solo bundle through the Famagusta defence, Colautti taking his head from his hands just long enough to see the ball nestling in the opposite net.  A late, deflected consolation from Andreas Avraam is greeted with jeers, more arm waving and sullen indifference, Anorthosis's fifth defeat in six games leaving the pre-season title favourites 16 points off top spot and only six ahead of a place in the post-season relegation round - catastrophic for a club which not so very long ago were drawing with Tottenham Hotspur and Inter Milan. 

As the 1,500 crowd drift back to their cars, I set off for the centre (passing a fish and chip shop with a Liver bird prominently displayed above the door) to see Omonia Nicosia struggle to a 1-1 draw in Limassol, with only three Cypriots on the pitch and an attendance of 995.  "Neglecting youth is having devastating consequences in every area of Cypriot football," is the headline in The Cyprus Mail. "I'm not a doctor," Ketsbaia said two years ago, but the game on the island - entertaining as it remains for visitors - seems to be in increasing need of some help.

Admission: 15 euro
Date: Sunday 23rd February 2014

Ground 226: Stadio Grigori Afxentiou, Larnaca

If quantity's your thing then Cyprus is a football watcher's paradise stacked with nearly 60 club sides and four divisions in the area administered by the CFA alone.  Add in the 48 teams and four tiers of the KTFF (Cyprus Turkish Football Federation), regular European and international fixtures,  politicised ultra groups,  a plethora of refugee clubs and an improving domestic league - in the south at least - which provided a Champions League quarter-finalist as recently as 2012 and you have one of the continent's most diverse footballing landscapes.

The Larnaca region is no exception, providing five of the top flight's fourteen sides (two more are based in neigbouring Famagusta District), a quarter of the sixteen teams in the Second Division and another three of the third tier.   ASIL Lysi, formed in 1932 in a Famagusta village which fell to Turkish troops 42 years later, now play their home fixtures at a Larnaca stadium named after the Lysi-born guerilla fighter who was second-in-command to General Grivas during much of the struggle for independence from Britain.  The bobbled pitch and floodlights are at one end of the Salt Lake hiking trail, a four-kilometre walk from the seafront next to the remains of an 18th century acqueduct and the highway to Limassol.  Only one side is open to spectators, four tiered rows of blistered, chipped and uncovered wooden benches split into two sections by the entrance to the ground, a skeletal roof partly shading twenty or so white bucket seats that still smell of paint.  A static caravan sells ice cream and soft drinks, the entrance is paid into a box on a trestle table and the dug outs have garden chairs at the end to fit in all the substitutes.  A fence topped with barbed wire separates the crowd from the pitch, dust-brown flecked with green, its touchlines leisurely whitened while the players limber up.  The home fans drape yellow and black banners over empty seats, a solitary Greek flag twisting in the wind.  The travelling AE Zakakiou support arrives from Limassol in a convoy of cars, one setting up beside me with a handheld video camera as the teams take to the field.

After a placid opening ten minutes, Lysi almost have the ball in the net when an ankle-high cross is cleared against the goalkeeper's chest and is eventually claimed at the third attempt.  Commendably, both sides try to keep the ball on the ground, despite the surface doing its unlevel best to ensure it's more often played off the shinpad.  The home keeper saves from distance and sees another shot rebound off his crossbar, the Lysi bench loudly dispute a throw-in and their fans rise to celebrate a goal but get two miscontrols and the referee blowing for a foul instead.   The burly Zakakiou number 55 accelerates into space, cuts inside a pair of challenges and fires straight against the fence, Lysi retorting with a free header that clears the bar, smacks into some property hoardings  and brings the first half to a close.

The second begins with the yellow and blacks on the back foot,  a Zakakiou forward sliding to turn in a cross but seeing the ball bounce through his legs and trundle away.  The play settles into a mid-afternoon torpor soundtracked by yells of frustration and the monotonous beeping of a child's smartphone game, which is finally disrupted when he rolls off the stand.  With only minutes remaining a green shirt is felled in the box, number 55 converting the penalty by way of the keeper's hand.  The away team celebrate a win that maintains their slim chances of promotion to the higher of the Second Division's two groups, Lysi's players - now with a seven-point gap to claw back to avoid being relegated to the Third Division - make the universal gestures of defeat, haranguing the linesman, bowing their heads or just pointing into space. 

Admission: 10 euro
Date:  February 22nd  2014

On Seeing the 100% Perfect Goal

Everyone has their favourite type of goal, right?  For some it's a dipping pass met first time on the volley and angled past the unprepared goalkeeper.  For others only a solo effort will do, a lone player picking gaps through a defence before casually placing the ball in the net.  There are those who go for a curling free kick, others for diving headers, last-gasp winners,  long-range thunderbolts or this gloriously languorous chip.  Me? One beautiful April evening, exactly one hundred and seventeen minutes into the 1995-96 Premier League football season, I shared a crowded terrace with the back end of a supermarket and saw the 100% perfect goal.

It started with a goalkeeper. Bolton's Keith Branagan, who'd already let in three the previous Saturday and would concede a season average of almost two goals a game, punted a kick downfield, where Warren Barton, England's most expensive defender, outjumped the journeyman Dutch striker Fabian De Freitas, sending his header back over halfway.  Peter Beardsley cushioned the dropping ball to the feet of David Ginola, languidly advancing down the left wing.  As the opposing full-back, Scott Green, scurried back into position,  Ginola touched the ball forward with his right boot, shaping to cut inside and then arcing a left-footed cross from the just inches inside the touchline before the ambling Saša Ćurčić, more adept at chasing women than wingers, could make it back to help.

The dipping ball was perfectly placed, Les Ferdinand barely breaking stride as he rose between  Gudni Bergsson and Alan Stubbs, glancing a header down and away from Branagan's dive into the bottom corner of the net.   "That's a great cross, you know.  Ferdinand's in there....oh yes! It only took a touch, but it was a classy touch from Les Ferdinand," the commentator says appreciatively.   Beardsley, Robert Lee and Keith Gillespie embrace the beaming goalscorer. From start to end, it was a goal of almost effortless elan. 

Burnden Park had opened in 1895, hosted Nat Lofthouse and an FA Cup Final replay and had its hatted-and-suited crowds immortalised in LS Lowry's distinctive matchstick style. Two years later it was demolished and replaced by an Asda.  Gone too were Keegan's Entertainers, dismantled by the joyless Kenny Dalglish, whose New Model Army football saw Ginola's artistry replaced by Des Hamilton's arse and Ferdinand sold to Tottenham Hotspur after the purchase of a slight, nerve-stricken Dane.   "I can't play for that man," Ginola told a group of Newcastle fans in an unguarded moment at Nice Airport. In 1999, he won both the PFA and FWA Player of the Year awards.  Dalglish had already been sacked; Des Hamilton went on loan to Sheffield United and Huddersfield Town. 

Ferdinand left Tyneside after scoring fifty goals in just eighty-four games (you can see them all here). "The time I spent (at Newcastle) was the best period in my career," he later said.  It was a sentiment shared by most Newcastle supporters.  When the Magpies next travelled to face Bolton, the pitch was at an out-of-town arena by a motorway in Horwich, the only pub within walking distance refused to serve football fans, and Nathan Blake scored the only goal on a dispiritingly cold December night.

A sad story, don't you think? 

A British History of South Korean Football

At the end of 1999, when I left behind a dull post-university job and my Newcastle United season ticket and moved to Daejeon, South Korea, to teach English as a Foreign Language, foreign supporters of K-League clubs were still thin enough on the ground to merit inclusion in the matchday programme. On the pitch, the imports came from other Asian countries,  Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe: Daejeon had only the Senagalese defender Papa Oumar Coly until midway through the 2001 season, when an out-of-condition striker arrived from the Saudi club Al-Ittihad.  "You know At-kin-son?" a student asked, giving equal precedence to each of the three syllables.  "Aston Villa and Ipswich."   A striker once capable of doing this had just signed for a cash-strapped provincial South Korean football team.  It was all a bit like Kevin Keegan joining Newcastle United - except King Kev wasn't  stuck in communal accommodation, reduced to hiring 'Charlie's Angels' from his local video store in a vain bid to pass the time,or loaned out to Jeonbuk Motors after labouring his way through three largely forgettable games.  Aside from our shared knowledge of the city's less exciting suburbs and the fact that neither of us was in any fit shape to last a full 90 minutes, Dalian and I were both minor - in my case incredibly minor and consisting of once being mistaken for a player while out shopping in a Daejeon home shirt  - parts in a Korean-British footballing exchange that had lasted at least a hundred years...

Koreans had been kicking balls around for more than a thousand years before a team representing the southern part of the peninsula arrived in London for the 1948 Summer Olympic Games.  On August 2^nd, in front of 6,500 fans at Dulwich Hamlet, a fledgling Republic of Korea team beat Mexico 5-3, advancing to a second-game rout at Selhurst Park in which eventual gold medallists Sweden scored twelve without reply in a one-sided quarter-final victory. Sixty-four years on, a crowd approximately ten times bigger than the one at Crystal Palace saw South Korea eliminate the host nation on penalty kicks in the 2012 Games.  Although Brazil cantered to a 3-0 victory in a semi-final played at Old Trafford, the Koreans deservedly took bronze by defeating Japan, Arsenal’s Park Chu-yeong hitting the first of his side's two goals.  “Korean football, which surprised the world…by reaching the semi-final of the 2002 World Cup, has opened a new chapter in its history by winning its first-ever Olympic medal,” reported the English edition of the Chosun Ilbo.

Depending on which version of the tale you believe, the modern game of association football was first played on the Korean peninsula in either 1882 or 1896.  What nobody disputes is that it was brought there by the British. In June 1882 the HMS Flying Fish docked at Incheon while Vice Admiral Willis, commanding officer of the China station, met representatives of King Gojong to conclude a Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the two nations.  The crew, under orders not to leave the ship, found the deck too narrow to play football on and so moved their game to a neighbouring pier, where a small crowd of children hesitantly gathered to watch.  When the Flying Fish sailed for China, two leather football footballs were left behind.  Their legacy, if true, proved more enduring than Willis’s treaty, which was re-negotiated, on much more favourable terms to the European power, the following year.

 The country's first officially documented kickabout was contested by Korean students at Seoul’s Royal English School in November 1896. “The boys go at it with…vim and earnestness,” reported a correspondent for the English-language newspaper The Independent, “chasing after the leather sphere…as if their lives depended on the game.”  Six months later, sailors from HMS Narcissis lost by a single goal to an RES team featuring a mix of Koreans and their British teachers. The match was “well fought”, The Independent noted, praising one of the home players for an exhibition of skill which “would not have disgraced an English public schoolboy”.  A rematch, held on December 16^th 1897,  saw the hosts win 6-2 in front of a “considerable” crowd.  “The most prominent feature of the game,” thought The Independent, “was the plucky way in which the Koreans tackled their stronger and heavier opponents.”  

Tokyo's annexation of Korea in 1910, tacitly supported by the British as part of the earlier Anglo-Japanese Alliance,  signalled the ending of diplomatic ties until the eve of the Korean War in 1949.  It took another two decades before footballing links were similarly restored,  Middlesex Wanderers, founded to "promote good fellowship among football clubs and other sporting organisations throughout the world", and featuring amateur players from clubs such as St Albans and Oxford City, defeating the South Korean national side 2-1 at Seoul's Hochang Stadium.  It was the first of five visits by the touring club, culminating in a 6-1 defeat by the country's U23 team during the 1977 President's Cup.   Among the goalscorers in that last game was Cha Bum-kun,  Korean football's first export to European football when he moved to the Bundesliga the following year. His son, Cha Du-ri. would later forge a career of his own, going on to lift the Scottish Cup and Premier League during a two-season spell at Glasgow Celtic.

The arrival of the younger Cha and his title-winning compatriot Ki Sung-yeung at Parkhead was another link in a sporting exchange which began with Dundee United's journey to Seoul for a 1971 pre-season tour.  "It was regarded as missionary work (but)...they found the standard of football higher than had been anticipated", is the Scottish side's laconic assessment of a three-game tour which saw two single-goal victories and a 3-3 draw with the national team, who subsequently lost twice to Coventry City at Seoul's Dongdaemun Stadium the following year.  In 1976, League Cup holders Manchester City played in Busan and Daegu, winning both games by three goals to nil, while a Byun Byung-joo strike proved no more than a consolation in a 2-1 defeat to Arsenal at the 1990 Caltex Cup in Singapore.  Kilmarnock's 1995 visit was significantly more fruitful, the understrength Scottish side and their six travelling supporters going down 5-1 in what was their third Korea Cup game in just five days. 

The Ayshire side did only marginally worse than the experimental Scotland team Berti Vogts' sent out at Busan just two weeks before the 2002 World Cup finals.  On a sultry May evening, an "infinitely superior" South Korean eleven put four goals past Neil Sullivan in the Scottish goal.  Five days later, at Seogwipo's World Cup Stadium, future Manchester United and QPR player Park Ji-sung equalised Michael Owen's opener in what The Guardian derided as "a one-dimensional performance... of launch 'n' leap football" from Sven-Goran Erikkson's side.

Discounting friendlies and games involving members of the Royal Navy, Owen's 26th minute goal was the second scored by an English forward in South Korea.  The aforementioned Dalian Atkinson - recipient of Match of the Day's Goal of the Season award in 1992-93 - having scrambled in a single effort while sporting the redcurrant colours of Daejeon. "I've still got it and the more I play the better I will get," Atkinson had said on his arrival in the country, but he was overweight, depressed and hopelessly out-of-form.  After eight appearances for two clubs, he announced his retirement from football at the age of 33.

Ian Porterfield enjoyed an equally inauspicous arrival, the Scotsman turning to some familiar faces as he sought to rebuild an ailing Busan team which had won just six games and finished next to bottom of the 2002 K-League season.  Assisted first by former Aberdeen stalwart Drew Jarvie and later by ex-Swindon Town boss Tom Jones, Porterfield snapped up Jamie Cureton and Andy Cooke, the two Englishmen forming a short-lived striking partnership that ended when Cureton returned home after four goals in twenty-one games. "I wasn't happy in Korea," he explained. "Within the first month I realised I was not getting what I wanted out of football, with the language barrier to overcome and the fact the build up to games was so low-key. The crowds were small and there wasn't the same buzz you get over here".  Cooke stayed on, contributing thirteen goals and almost as many yellow cards as Busan finished ninth in 2003.   Porterfield added Chris Marsden, an FA Cup finalist with Southampton the previous year, in time for the 2004 season, but after two games and one goal the midfielder departed for Sheffield Wednesday.  That left only Cooke, whose six strikes helped the south coast team to a seventh-place finish and the Korean Cup. "With our budget that was like winning the Scottish Premier with Dunfermline Athletic," Porterfield said after his team beat Bucheon in a Christmas Day final.  Homesickness meant Cooke soon returned to Britain.  “The money was more than you could ever imagine getting here in England, but I just thought enough was enough and I wanted to get my family home. There are only so many shops and restaurants you can go around and in the evening, the highlight of our day, every day, was going for something to eat."   A fourth English striker, the nomadic ex-Newcastle United junior Richard Offiong, later wound up at Chunnam Dragons only to find the prospect of Saturday afternoons in Doncaster more enticing after just one game.  When Porterfield himself left in 2006 to take up an offer with the Armenian national side, British football's brush with East Asia's oldest professional league had come to an end.

Nonetheless, other contacts remain.  In 2005, Premier League champions Chelsea, sponsored by the Seoul-based conglomerate Samsung, became England's first top-flight visitors since Manchester City, beating Suwon Samsung Bluewings 1-0 on a pre-season tour.   Spurs, Bolton Wanderers, Reading and Sunderland all travelled to the peninsula to take part in the Unification Church-organised Peace Cup, forming or solidifying links that has seen the likes of Lee Young-pyo, Seoul Ki-Hyeon,  Lee Chung-yong and Ji Dong-won plying their trade in the Premier League.  Outside the top-flight the transfer process hasn't been entirely one-sided: Bucheon, beaten finalists when Ian Porterfield's Busan lifted the Korean FA Cup had temporarily vanished from the footballing map when their owners, SK Energy, decided to relocate the team to Seogwipo's underused stadium on a volcanic island three hundred miles south of their former home.  Inspired in part by the example of AFC Wimbledon, Bucheon's abandoned fans started their own club.  In 2009, over a century after the British first played in Korea, FC United of Manchester went down 3-0 in front of a crowd of 23,000 at Bucheon Sports Complex.  The wheel had come full circle. 

Football in the Vanished World: Bukovyna Chernivtsi

"English games are played, as out on the vast exercising ground we saw football in full swing, several games going on". 

"I also played a bit of football, near our house there was a football field; it was the town's football field, called Maccabi. We had a really good football team. Sports...were very popular among the Jewish organizations".

For almost two centuries the eastern gateway to the Habsburg Empire, Bukovina was ceded to Romania between the two world wars and is now one of the sleepiest parts of south-western Ukraine.  Two hundred kilometres south of Lviv, and a four-hour bus ride from Suceava across the EU border, Chernivtsi, the quirky, down-at-heel provincial capital,  was formerly known  as Little Vienna and Jerusalem on the Prut; the second city of Austrian Galicia, Czernowitz / Cernăuți was a cosmopolitan mélange of ethnicities, home to Romanian, German, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Polish speakers,  the birthplace of the poet Paul Celan, and one of the first places in modern day Ukraine to embrace the sport of football.

The first organised team,  Turn-und Sportverein Czernowitz, was founded by German students in the autumn of 1903,  the black and whites outlasting several name changes and two  losing appearances in the semi-final of the Romanian Cup until they were finally broken up in 1940, when the entire German-speaking population, including the playing staff and officials of  Fußballsektion Jahn Czernowitz, was forcibly transported out of Bukovina in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact.  Many Bukovinan Germans settled in or around Stuttgart, their sporting legacy surviving with TSV Jahn Büsnau, who currently play in a district league at the twelth level of the German football league.

  
A Polish team, Polonia Cernăuţi, was established after the German club splintered in 1912, and went on to become the region's dominant force during its twenty-two years in the Kingdom of Romania.  Despite rarely owning a stadium of its own, Polonia spent three seasons in Divizia A, won the Bukovinan regional championships and held the Romanian national side to a 1-1 draw in front of 12,000 spectators in September 1922 before they too were dissolved in 1940. Fotbal Club Dragoş Vodă Cernăuţi, the favoured team of the city's Romanian speakers, won the Bukovina championship four times between 1925 and 1933 but managed only a single season in the national top-flight, during which they won four out of eighteen games.  They did, though, share briefly in the development of Cernăuţi's most famous footballing son, Alfred Eisenbeisser transferring from Jahn shortly before representing Romania at football at the 1930 World Cup .  Appearing against Peru and Uruguay,  Eisenbeisser contracted pneumonia on the return journey and was forced to stay behind when the ship docked at Genoa.  Rumours of his death spread through Bukovina; when he finally reached home, he found his mother busy preparing the funeral arrangements.  Eisenbeisser recovered sufficiently  to place thirteenth in the figure skating championships at the 1936 Winter Olympics, win another seven caps, and turn out over 140 times in the colours of Venus București.  Venus, like Dragos, were wound up in the late-1940s, having won eight national championships before Romania entered the war.

In 1919, when the region was annexed to the Kingdom of Romania,  Czernowitz's Jewish population  had reached almost 30,000 people - or a third of the entire town.  The city twice elected Jewish mayors, streets were named after Jewish authors, rabbis and prominent city councillors, the first ever Yiddish was hosted there in 1908, and the community's two club sides,  Maccabi and Hakoah Cernăuţi, enjoyed regular success in regional competitions. Maccabi, the oldest, had first taken to the field in 1909-1910, and would later supply a Romanian international of their own when Isidor Gansl, formerly of Fernencvaros and Hakoah Vienna, was capped against Turkey in 1923.  Hakoah played their first competitive game in 1920, and reached Divizia A and the Romanian Cup quarter-finals before they were subsumed by Maccabi eleven years later.  In 1932, a victory over Jahn resulted in a pitch invasion during which Maccabi players were attacked by supporters carrying revolvers shouting "Jews go to Palestine!"  By 1941, the team had been disbanded and many of its players transported to camps.  When the Soviets rolled back three years later, almost 50,000 Bukovina Jews had perished, either shot out of hand or loaded in to cattle trucks.  Jewish Czernowitz vanished in all but memory, its synagogue turned into a cinema six years after Celan published 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue):  Death is a gang boss...his eyes are blue. He shoots you with leaded bullets, his aim is true. 

Eight years after the traumatised city was incorporated into the newly-expaned Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Bukovya Chernivtsi emerged.  In 1958, a team including veteran inside-right Evgeny Archangelskiy, scorer of four goals during Dynamo Moscow's 1945 tour of England, made its first appearances in the Soviet League.  Three decades later, with the Soviet Union on the verge of dissolution, Chernivtsi finally made their mark on the national stage, finishing in fifth place in the 1991 First League, a division which included Rotor Volgograd, Kuban Krasnodar, Zenit St Petersburg and Tavria Simferopol, the surprise first champions of independent Ukraine.  Present in the top-flight of Ukrainian football for three seasons, the yellow and blacks were relegated along with Metalist Kharkiv in 1993-94 and have since spent eleven seasons in the second tier and the same number in the third.  Narrowly surviving extinction this summer, survival is an achievement in itself in a country where four of the original twenty top-flight clubs no longer exist in any form whatsoever. 

Chernivtsi has recently spruced itself up, with its red-brick university added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2011 and both Central Square and the nearby Olga Kobylianska Street repaved and pedestrianised. The football stadium is just off Holovna, a ten-minute walk from the centre on the other side of Shevchenko Park.  The Bukovyna, the city's fanciest hotel, is directly opposite, the bus station another ten minutes up the road.  When I went there, the stadium was empty except for a small group of workmen repairing seats and three sprinters practising their starts.  On a dirt pitch next to the ground, a shirts against skins game had just got underway.  I watched from the top of the uncovered stand, dust and sunflower shells blowing across my feet.

Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16961#sthash.lZBtFxS3.dpuf

Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16961#sthash.lZBtFxS3.dpufnewly-expanded Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, it was another eight years until Bukovina Chernivtsi emerged

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/22/3147883/journey-through-time-in-ukraines.html#storylink=cp. Three unsuccessful seasons in the Ukrainian top flight  followed before the club was relegated alongside Metalist Kharkiv at the end of 1993-9

Ground 225: Central Stadium, Mykolaiv

If you're lucky, the bus ride along the single lane highway connecting the cities of Odessa and Mykolaiv takes a shade over two and a half hours.  Tell an Odessan that you're making the trip and they'll assume you're going to the zoo, the fourth oldest in the Russian Empire and still the most famous in Ukraine.  Say the same to someone from Mykolaiv and they'll answer with a look mingling equal parts incomprehension and pity. "Why?" one asked.  "Everything's so dirty."  "There's football," I countered.  "Is there?"  He paused for a second: "The stadium's so small."

"The juggernaut of the Soviet shipbuilding industry"; "Ukraine's hard drug capital (and) the official entry point of AIDS into the country"; "The best part of Mykolaiv is actually leaving."  While the guidebooks aren't exactly complimentary, my last visit to the city left more positive memories: its pedestrianised main street - a mini version of Odessa's Deribasovskaya without the cobbles or fancy prices - monuments to Lenin, shipyard workers and the Red Army, and a billboard for an international marriage agency which read 'A Slav Girl! We are born to make you happy!'  (When I posted the picture online, someone immediately replied with: "Do you think they've forgotten the 'e'?"). Back then I also joined a stray dog and a crack team of groundskeepers when I snuck in to Central Stadium, home to Mykolaiv's two football teams - third division Enerhiya and MFC (Municipal Football Club), at 93 years old the country's longest surviving club side.

Plucked from the West Division of the Soviet Second League - where they'd been up against the continental might of Dynamo Brest, Zaria Balti, Goyazan Kazakh, Torpedo Taganrog and Qarabağ Ağdam - in 1991, Mykolaiv's top team briefly went head to head with the giants of Kyiv, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk before sinking into obscurity at the end of the decade, five years after Bukovyna Chernivtsi had taken their own last bow from the Ukrainian Premier League.  The clubs' most notable recent achievement has been to survive at all - shorn of finance, they sit twelfth and thirteenth in the sixteen team Druha Liga, just a single point above relegation.

I jump off the bus at Radyanska, which has a McDonald's at one end, Lenin at the other and most of the city's best places to eat somewhere in between.  The football ground's another twenty minutes away at the very end of Lenina Prospekt, its entrance flanked by a pair of anchors and an outdoor market.  Mykolaiv scarves and badges are spread across the pavement but the only things changing hands are fliers for trips to Chernomorets Odessa or Shakhtar Donetsk.  A mural shows two Mykolaiv fans clad in Fred Perry and Adidas stamping on an opposition supporter's face, 'Stay True' written along the top.  Inside, the stands are sparsely populated.  "Mykolaiv," chorus a bunch of 50 or so flag-waving ultras at one end of the pitch.  "Mykolaiv," reply a dozen at the other.

The home centre-forward skies ten metres over from five metres out. Bukovyna have a free kick that the goalkeeper flaps back towards the wall.  One of the ultras goes topless, his face covered by a scarf and Guy Fawkes mask. There are lots of sliding tackles and my ears get a bit cold.  And then the referee blows for half-time.  You can almost hear the relief.

The second period starts very much like the first. Mykolaiv's number nine hits his own player with one shot and gets closer to a steeplechase hurdle than goal with a second.  Moments later, Bukovyna break down the right and hammer a cross into the centre that Vasyl Palagnyuk prods home.  With just over an hour played, Chernivtsi score again, Polish midfielder Oleksandr Temeriwskyj firing a daisycutter under the goalkeeper's late dive.  "Are you from Finland?" a passing drunk asks.  "We used to have a real team.  Can you believe it?"

There are fifteen minutes left when Mykolaiv finally hit the target, Aleksandr Kablash, chesting down a pass and volleying past the keeper.  The home side threaten intermittently, the ultras sing to the very end, but most of the few thousand fans shuffle silently home.  It's an hour's walk to the bus station,  past a sword-wielding statue and a T34 tank, then another 100 metres from the entrance to the zoo.  "Odessa, Odessa," the bus driver shouts.  I text someone for the Newcastle score. "2-1," he replies, "Pardew's job safe for another week."

Admission: Free
Date:  October 5th 2013

Ground 224: Krystal Stadium, Kherson

"Ooh, heaven is a place on earth," pumps tinnily through the marshrutka's speaker system as the bus grinds, bumps, clunks and clatters its way through the outskirts of Odessa. "What are the chances of getting any sleep?" Richard, visiting from England, mutters, his backpack lodged between knees, nose and the perma-reclined seat in front.  "What do you reckon?" I laugh.  Two and a half hours later I wake up next to a T34 tank in Mykolaiv, having dozed my way through three quarters of the trip.  Richard looks genuinely pained.

"You're going where?" the staffroom had spluttered when I told them I was off to Kherson. "There's nothing there except mail-order brides and watermelons."  A student added "catfish kebabs."  Another just shrugged: "It's not Odessa." The first thing we spot as we enter the city is a MiG on a plinth.  The second's the Sovietski bus station, the third a car crash and the fourth a dead dog.  "The air's a bit chewy," says Richard as I try to navigate to the centre using a pen-drawn map and what I remember from a couple of minutes research on Google.  The fifth, after we drop our bags at the hotel and take a short cut through Lenin Park, are the hulking, rust-flecked floodlights at the Stadion Krytal.  "How much do you think it'll be?" Richard asks.  "10 hryvnia (75p)?!" stammers an old bloke at the turnstile. "Forget it!"

The ground's a concrete bowl with paving stone over the running track, a grassed-over long jump pit and shiny new plastic seats bolted over the terraces on one side.   Kherson kick off, booting a crossfield pass back off the mound of loose rock that runs along the entire length of the far touchline.  A chant of "Krystal Kherson" goes up from somewhere behind, a handful of people clapping along while the rest of the crowd just turn around and laugh.  After the inauspicious opening, Krystal actually play some decent one-touch football, their number nine doing a passable Robin van Persie impression against the four-man Shakhtar Sverdlovsk defence. When Vadym Kucherevskiy nods them ahead from a corner, we're treated to an ear-splitting rendition of 'Ole, ole, ole, ole, Kherson, Kherson' from the speaker stack behind the dugouts and some barking from the fans at the back.  The rest of the half plays out at a languid pace, Kherson doubling their lead from the penalty spot only moments before the break - "The scorer's Roman Lensky, thank you for the goal" says the stadium announcer - before the visitors have a player sent-off, to general bemusement, for a trip midway inside his own half. Happy 235th birthday, Kherson.

Shakhtar make two changes at the interval, come out five minutes early and take another quarter of an hour to reduce the deficit with everyone but Vadym Salatin distracted by a home substitution.  With just over ten minutes left Anton Sharko levels with an over-the-shoulder dink, and in the reshuffle that follows Kherson's centre forward ends up dumped at left back while a centre half is dragged off the pitch and given a public bollocking by the irate coach.  The game ends with a panicky Krystal eleven stringing eight across the back, evacuating midfield and misfiring passes out for goalkicks at the other end of the pitch.  Even all the way out here, where the Dnieper empties into the Black Sea on the edge of the Ukrainian steppe, it's just like watching Newcastle United.

At the final whistle we head back to Ushakova and the John Howard Pub, where Richard orders 'Jerked-off horse meat' and a massive screen shows Shakhtar Donetsk giving Poltava the runaround.  Metres away, Lenin faces the setting sun, pigeon on his head, back turned to a Renault sign, staring past a branch of Privat Bank.

Admission: 10 hr (75p)
Date: Saturday 21st September