Nick Smith
Metalist, Lies & Videotape
It’s those men again. Despite catcalls in Kharkiv, derision in Donetsk and vilification in Lviv, the longest-running comedy show in Ukraine shows no indication of planning for a graceful retirement. The question today is how much longer the Football Federation of Ukraine (FFU) will remain the only show in town. As a result of recent…
Yin, Yang & Football
When ex-Manchester United striker Dong Fangzhuo left Legia Warsaw on August 1, a brief yet beautiful piece of football symmetry disappeared with him. The first Chinese player in Poland may have featured in only six games in just over five months – and failed to find the net in any of them – but in…
Northern Exposure: The People’s Team Abroad
Football teams wishing to be taken seriously at a World Cup should probably avoid losing all of their group games, especially if they concede twelve goals and score just one in doing so. Registering a striker as a goalkeeper in a futile bid to bend the tournament’s squad regulations is also frowned upon, as is…
Slovenia World Cup 2010 Preview
After seeing off Egypt in the latest installment of the world’s most violent international football rivalry to qualify for the World Cup, Algeria should be feeling pretty pleased with themselves. The USA, meanwhile, are participating in their fifth straight World Cup, and nobody does utterly groundless footballing optimism quite like England. So why, of all…
Switzerland World Cup 2010 Preview
It starts with a sudden lowering of the voice. Two quick glances to either side, a furtive slug of the glass, and the mysteries are revealed. Never mind the hand of Thierry Henry and the referee who was told to see nothing. The real European World Cup conspiracy, the one which – like all the…
Greece World Cup 2010 Preview
Summer 2004 saw 250,000 people turn Athens upside down in celebrating Greece’s shock victory in Euro 2004. Fast forward six years and the streets of the capital are full once again, although under very different circumstances. With the nation in uproar against the financial mismanagement of the most incompetent government since, well, the previous one,…
Denmark World Cup 2010 Preview
With star striker Nicklas Bendtner already thrown out of London nightspot Boujis last year with his trousers around his knees, the worry for Denmark ahead of their fourth World Cup finals campaign is that the coming month will leave them further exposed. Morten Olsen, now in his tenth year as national coach, can rely on…
Rotor’s Return: Goals, Ghosts and Stalingrad
Russia has never been short of a ghost or two. The restless souls of Ivan the Terrible and Lenin’s would-be assassin Fanni Kaplan roam the walls and towers of Moscow, whilst the folk of Saint Petersburg rub shoulders with Princess Tarakanova, Tsar Paul I and an invisible old lady in Troitskaya Square. Out in the…
Europe – The Final Countdown (2012)
Five referees. Wage caps. The 6+5 rule. Michel Platini may be on a mission to over-complicate just about everything in European football, but on some subjects nobody can accuse him of neglecting the essentials. Take his visit to Kyiv in early July 2008. The UEFA president emerged visibly frustrated from a series of meetings to…
The Shakhtar Syndrome
One year ago, an unusually reckless observer suggested that Shakhtar Donetsk, pride of Ukraine’s coal-mining Donbass region, were digging themselves into a hole at a rate which would have had Alexey Stakhanov going weak at the knees. One UEFA Cup triumph, one new stadium which ranks as one of Europe’s finest, and a raft of…
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