The days of war with football as a director

Football is good and holy, a social phenomenon, the opium of the people, something more important – according to legend Bill Shankly – than life and death, but bad lies, in front of such real lies, as everyday life has been in Ukraine for a year and a half, naturally takes a back seat.

Definitely useful, strengthening, and being a way out and a refuge, highlighting with this benefit the importance it has in the souls of people.

Typical example of Dnipro. Obviously the sporting situation, with Panathinaikos claiming against them to qualify for 3^the The qualifying round of the Champions League, the round that occupies the lion’s share of the news within the borders, but hierarchically, the reality of the opponents of the “Greens”, their fans, their compatriots, far exceeds any sport, anything football.

Russian invasion dawn 24^Ha In February 2022, he found the then Dnipro team had just returned – after just one day – from its winter training camp in Turkey and the foreign footballers on the roster, along with coach Igor Jovićević staying for two days in the basement of the team’s training facilities to protect themselves from missiles and Russian fighter jets.

They could hear – very soon – the local airport being bombed, flattened, without being able to see the destruction, without being able to communicate with the outside world very well, as communications were down. The locals stayed with their family members and people, but all were looking for a way to leave their war-torn country safely.

Most of them, after the first, managed to leave the Dnipro, being extremely dangerous and completely unimaginable in terms of realizing what is happening and what they are facing in 2022. And to this day they have not returned.

The honorary head of the team, Yuri Berezha, was immediately drafted into the Ukrainian army, commanded a company called Dnipro.

He remains to this day at the front, watching his team’s games as often as he can, with his soldiers – mostly from the wider region and Dnipro fans, like the brother of the former team’s goalkeeper, Valeriy Yurchuk, or the most popular journalist covering Dnipro’s daily life, Viktor Oguzin (hit twice and now recuperating often in a local hospital). .

Refugee centers, Uzhhorod and Kozice

With the match against the “Greens”, Dnipro begins its second consecutive away season. Last year, they played in Uzhhorod, 1,170 kilometers west of her home, without fans in the stands – for security reasons – for more than a year.

Only in international competitions, which now cross the Ukrainian border and use Kozyce as a base, do players from the Ukrainian runner-up have people backing them up.

Kosice is less than 100 km from Uzhgorod and thousands of Ukrainians have fled there because of the war. The families of most of the Dnipro footballers now live there, as the playing base is mainly shared between the two cities, namely Uzhhorod and Kosice.

With everyday life relentlessly tough. Even this short distance of one hour often takes six and seven times longer, mainly because of the safety protocol and very difficult checks that are carried out along this route.

However, it was precisely because of Kosice’s replacement that Dnipro became one of the first (if not the first) Ukrainian team that, in the middle of the war, not only managed to retain – at least some – foreign footballers in its squad, but also managed to acquire others, such as Argentine midfielder Blanco and Brazilian goalkeeper Waliev.

Minor for sure, but for the group, to make this trip (either by road or train) at least twice a week, involves unimaginable costs. Understandably, it’s not just financial, but it modifies everything a “typical” soccer team might plan for, say. Recovery, training sessions, anything at all is guaranteed under normal circumstances.

But again, everyday life, the tragedy brought by the war, goes beyond football, but on the other hand, it also helped it. Wherever they are in Kozice, the players and all Dnipro officials hold daily meetings with their refugee compatriots in specially designed venues, in shopping malls, exhibition halls, and even in camps and homes, organized or individual, on a daily basis.

After all, they are all refugees. Everyone helps each other. any way he can. For even if they are no longer in the heart of fire, it touches them. Each of them has its own people, friends and relatives who have stayed in their homes and no one knows – at the mercy of bombing and missile attacks – whether they will continue to hold out the next moment.

Dnipro scorer Artem Duvbek did not see his parents for eight months after the war broke out. He watched them on the outskirts of Kiev, in last year’s match against Kovalevka (9/11/2022), and then hit his hat-trick (out of three in total) in last year’s tournament.

That game, uninterruptedly over. Strictly followed protocol dictates that if a siren sounds, everyone in the field goes to a safe shelter. Another one of the essentials, and perhaps the most important of all, that the stadiums where football is played in Ukraine are required: an underground shelter.

The number of last year’s matches (this year’s tournament starts next weekend, however, Dnipro’s opening match with Vorskla was postponed to better prepare for matches with Panathinaikos) in Dnipro where this procedure was used, with a minimum of half an hour and a maximum of 1.5 hours of interruption, double figures.

Seemingly over all over Ukraine. But everything, even after months (like the game in Dnipro with Oleksandria for example), dragged on and on.

And so football goes on. And so life goes on amidst the devastation of war.