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 events, dissatisfaction with the organisation has reached such levels that the observer has to wonder if a full-blown civil war in Ukrainian football is inevitable – if it hasn’t already started.

Of course, we’ve been here before. Whether it’s revenues, refereering appointments, fixture scheduling or the price of a ticket to see the national team lose to Greece, the complaint from the club owners, the fans and sometimes even the players remains the same – the priorities of the FFU are not those of Ukrainian football as a whole. On the other hand, the accusations continue, they do bear a marked resemblance to the interests of Dynamo Kyiv.

Sometimes the FFU is innocent. Sometimes the owners themselves are equally capable of creating an utter mess. Although the fact that FFU president Hryhoriy Surkis is the brother of Dynamo president Ihor Surkis – and preceded his younger sibling at the Dynamo helm – would appear to constitute a clear conflict of interest, conclusive evidence of any resultant wrong-doing is nevertheless thin on the ground.

However, on August 17th the FFU presided over a sequence of events so remarkable that all the old insinuations and allegations have once again taken on a very heavy cumulative weight.

This was the day in which the FFU’s disciplinary committee ruled that a league match between Metalist Kharkiv and Karpaty Lviv on April 19th, 2008 had been fixed. The committee awarded both clubs technical defeats in the game, which Metalist had won 4-0, and fined each the equivalent of USD 25,000. Ten Karpaty players were fined USD 10,000, whilst a further eight were stung for USD 5,000 apiece.

That was just for starters. Metalist deputy general director Yevhen Krasnykov and the former Karpaty player Serghei Laşcencov received lifetime bans, whilst the Lviv side’s honorary director Petro Dyminsky and general director Ihor Dedyshyn were barred from football for one and five years respectively. And last but perhaps most significant of all, both Metalist and Kaparty were deducted nine points from their league totals for the current season.

The basis for this remarkable outbreak of gavel-banging was a video recording which surfaced earlier this year appearing to show Laşcencov (now playing in Azerbaijan and the current captain of the Moldovan national team) admitting that the game was fixed. According to several media reports, Laşcencov had acted as an intermediary in the transfer of USD 110,000 to the other Karpaty players from Krasnykov in exchange for a Metalist win.

The response from both clubs was, predictably enough, one of outrage. Metalist president Oleksander Yaroslavsky, backed by Shakhtar supremo Rinat Akhmetov, dismissed the ruling as ’illegal’, whilst the Lviv city council passed a motion calling on the FFU to reconsider. The clubs immediately filed appeals with both UEFA and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, at which point the penalties were suspended pending a verdict.

What happened next, however, seems to have taken even the FFU completely by surprise. National coach Myron Markevych, who had combined his role with managing Metalist and had in fact been in charge for the Karpaty game in 2008 but was not implicated in the case, handed in his resignation. By way of explanation, he claimed that he had ”no moral right to work for an organisation that is deliberately destroying football in Kharkiv”, and that ”the FFU has completely discredited itself”.

If their somewhat flustered response to his resignation is anything to go by, the potential impact on relations with Markevych – and three current Metalist internationals, Marko Dević, Denys Oliynyk and Serhiy Valyayev, who declared that they will no longer play for the national side – had apparently been overlooked by the FFU. Initially rejecting the resignation on the grounds that it was submitted by fax, Surkis & Co. then claimed that the terms of Markevych’s contract did not permit departure on moral grounds.

Unfortunately neither party stopped there. Markevych called the situation ”a farce ordered by certain people”, whilst Hryhoriy Surkis claimed that ”I don’t think that Markevych himself made this decision. There is somebody behind him who is using him”. That somebody was clearly implied to be Yaroslavsky, who although admitting to speaking to Markevych about his decision, denied making it for him.

It is from comments such as these that many have concluded that the whole business forms part of an ongoing battle for control of Ukrainian football between the FFU and the club owners. The long-standing allegation that the primary aim of the FFU has always been to secure the domestic standing of Dynamo by weakening the latter’s principal rivals has probably never enjoyed wider currency than at present.

Conclusions have been drawn by just about everybody in the Ukrainian game, and there is little need to add to them here. On the other hand, it feels necessary to pose a number of questions both to the FFU and the ever-growing ranks of their adversaries.

i.) Is the evidence credible? A review of the game reveals some questionable defending by Karpaty, but if that’s a punishable offence then the whole Ukrainian league may as well be shut down right now. Doubts, too, have been raised about the authenticity of the Laşcencov recording, with the player himself insisting that the tape had been dubbed. The fact that it was rejected as insufficient evidence for a police investigation in Kharkiv should also be noted. On the other hand, it may be of significance that Laşcencov has form in this regard – in late 2009 he was transfer-listed by Olimpik-Shuvalan PFC Baku after being accused of throwing a match against Gabala FC. In the end, however, final judgement in this question will be reserved for UEFA and the CAS.

ii.) Do the FFU even need to weaken the competition in Dynamo’s favour? Dynamo may have had an uneven start to the current season, but at no point has their duopoly with Shakhtar Donetsk ever been seriously threatened. Metalist have finished in third spot four times in the past five years, but the average difference in points between them and Dynamo at the end of those seasons has been over 14 points. Moreover, given the sale of Brazilian striker Jajá Coelho – the side’s top scorer for the last two years – to Trabzonspor in August, the current Metalist side are probably less of a threat to Dynamo than this time last year.

iii.) Would this actually be an effective method of artificially strengthening Dynamo’s position? Consider that the Ukrainian League has risen from 12th place in UEFA’s rankings in 2007 to seventh place at present, thereby ensuring two Champions League positions. This improvement is due in no small part to the efforts of Dynamo’s domestic competitors. Although Dynamo reached the UEFA Cup semi-finals in 2009, Shakhtar went on to win the competition, whilst Metalist made it to the quarter-finals. The latter’s position in the UEFA club rankings for 2010 is up five places from 2009, and Shakhtar’s 17th spot is unchanged. Dynamo, however, are down three places since last year.

In other words, the progress of Dynamo’s rivals in Europe is actually supporting the continued qualification of the Kyiv side for the Champions League, given that they finished second in four out of the last six years. To weaken other Ukrainian clubs would be to risk losing Ukraine’s second spot, meaning that Dynamo would need to win the league every year in order to maintain their presence at Europe’s top table.

iv.) Why now? There have been far more obvious times for a pro-Dynamo mafia to resort to manipulation. The most obvious recent example is the first half of the 2007-2008 season, when Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk won 13 of their first 17 games and went into the winter break firmly ensconsed – at Dynamo’s expense – in the Champions League spots.

v.) What role do UEFA play? Ukraine has been under the cosh from Michel Platini virtually ever since the country, along with Poland, was awarded Euro 2012. Delays in preparations have led to strained relations with the FFU, with the UEFA president effectively setting a two-month ultimatum in April for tangible progress. At the same time, UEFA have also been particularly active in launching a series of anti-corruption initiatives across Europe. Could the Metalist-Karpaty affair be an attempt by the FFU to repair their damaged credit with UEFA? Incidentally, since the FFU handed down the penalties, Platini has confirmed that the finals will be split equally between the two host nations, and that ”We [UEFA] feel that Ukraine is fully capable of doing the work”.

vi.) The final question is one which very few seem to have considered – what if the FFU are actually right? Even the most embittered opponents of the Axis of Surkis would agree that a.) Ukrainian football has problems with corruption; and b.) something needs to be done about it. The trouble is that even if an attempt is made to address a.) and b.), assumption c.) kicks in – the FFU are always up to no good. This third assumption consistently trumps everything else.

Whether these questions will be answered is itself open to debate. Judging by the temperature which the situation has now reached – Yaroslavsky recently said that ”Everything Dynamo have won has been without the Surkises. From them Dynamo have won only scandals”, whilst Akhmetov weighed in with ”The Surkis brothers say ”we shall never cheat”. We look at them and we don’t believe them at all” – there is a feeling in the air that the time has arrived for actions, rather than words.

Much of the blame for the situation must rest with the FFU. In an atmosphere of all-encompassing paranoia in which federations and oligarchs relentlessly jockey for power, even the appearance of a conflict of interest is enough for that conflict of interest to exist.

On the other hand, and as this column has previously stressed, incompetence is always as plausible as conspiracy where the FFU is concerned. There is a danger that in their zeal its enemies are ascribing more power to the organisation than it probably possesses. Either way, the question of just how far that power really goes, and how much longer it will last in the face of such opposition, looks set to be resolved once and for all.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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 doing so he formed one half of an equation so perfect that his failure to make any impression in a league currently ranked 26th in Europe seems rather irrelevant.

Dong, 25, arrived at Legia in late January and traveled to the club’s training camps in Spain and Cyprus. After scoring three times in seven friendly games, he signed an 18-month contract on February 23rd with an option for two further years.

Legia management enthused about a player for whom Sir Alex Ferguson was once prepared to pay Dalian Shide £3.5 million (although only £500,000 actually changed hands), with sporting director Miroslaw Trzeciak describing Dong as ”a quality striker who will play a big part in our chase for the league title”. One visitor to the Legia website was even more inspired, writing that the news was like ”cookies falling from the sky”.

In hindsight, however, there were already signs that Dong’s stay in Poland would prove as frustrating as his time in Manchester. Behind the scenes, coach Jan Urban apparently took some convincing that the player was right for Legia. Similarly, whilst the fans were on the whole cautiously positive about the move, mutterings were still heard that Legia were in more urgent need of a defensive midfielder than another striker.

The fact that Dong then failed to appear in what was supposed to be his debut against Cracovia on February 26th did little to reassure the skeptics. Wearing the number 14 shirt, he finally made his first appearance for Legia on March 13th as a 69th-minute substitute against Polonia Bytom before starting the next match against Śląsk Wrocław. And apart from two further games apiece in the reserves and the Polish Cup, that was that for Dong at Legia.

But it doesn’t matter. Here’s the beautiful part – just as the previously-hyped Chinese footballer was attempting to rebuild his career in Poland, the once-hotly tipped Polish player was doing the same thing in China. As luck would have it, with rather more success, too.

Dong Fangzhuo can only hope that his road to redemption takes fewer twists and turns than that of Emmanuel Olisadebe. One of the very few Polish citizens born in the Nigerian city of Warri, the 18 year-old Olisadebe signed for Polonia Warsaw in 1997, and supplied the firepower which three years later propelled the club to a first league title in 56 years.

The key figure, not just in the triumph of 2000, but in what would be a remarkable integration of the young Nigerian to a fundamentally alien culture, was Polonia coach Jerzy Engel. Having seen something in Olisadebe which both Wisła Kraków and Ruch Chorzów had missed during the striker’s earlier, unsuccessful trials with Polonia’s league rivals, Engel had not only made him the attacking focal point of his team, but also conceived the outline of a larger, considerably more ambitious plan.

Recently named national coach and chastened by Poland’s failure to reach the 2000 European Championship finals, Engel decided to make Olisabede – scorer of twelve goals in Polonia’s title-winning season – the first African-born player to represent Poland. As it turned out, convincing the football-mad President Alexander Kwaśniewski to waive the regulations about residency and language proficiency and fast-track Olisadebe’s Polish citizenship proved easier than persuading the player himself.

Olisadebe has always had a complex relationship with his adopted homeland. Gratitude for the country in which he launched his career and met his future wife (in Pizza Hut on Ulica Marszałkowska, no less), along with a deep bond with Engel (whose son would serve as Olisadebe’s best man at his wedding in Warsaw’s old town in 2001), was mixed with a struggle to truly belong in a country of 98% ethnic Poles, a minority of whom subjected him to racist abuse both on and off the pitch.

In the end, however, Olisadebe decided for Poland – admitting that ”I don’t know what gave me the strength to go through with this” – and once in the national shirt there was little sign of any indecisiveness. He scored on his debut against Romania in Bucharest in August 2000 and never looked back, finding the net seven times in his first nine games. With the fiasco of Euro 2000 a distant memory, Poland became the first European nation to qualify for the World Cup in 2002, ending 26 years in the international wilderness.

Emmanuel Olisabebe was a hot commodity. Voted the 29th-best player in the world by FIFA in 2001, he finalised a move to Greek giants Panathinaikos for $1.7 million – over ten times the amount Polonia had paid to Nigerian club Jasper United in 1997 – and cashed in further on his newly-found superstar status by featuring in an eye-catching series of advertisements for vacuum cleaners.

The next two years would be the peak of his career. Olisabebe played in every game at the World Cup, scoring Poland’s fastest-ever goal in the tournament after three minutes against the United States. With Panathinaikos, meanwhile, he won the domestic double and played in the Champions League.

However, the success came at a price. Olisadebe was increasingly troubled by knee injury, and rumours circulated back in Poland that he was being forced to play on painkilling injections by Panathinaikos management who were unwilling to pay for surgery. Absent from the side all too often, Olisadebe lost his place and drifted down the pecking order before leaving Greece at the start of 2006.

Thus began Olisadebe’s Dong Fangzhuo period. Despite knees as fragile as the club’s grasp of basic accounting principles, he signed for Harry Redknapp’s Portsmouth. Two games and no goals later, he returned to Greece for a short spell with Skoda Xanthi – where, appropriately enough, he never really got started – before pitching up in Cyprus with top-flight new boys APOP Kinyras Peyias.

And then it happened. A move to Henan Construction in Zhengzhou in 2008, superficially an admission that Olisadebe’s career – much like the player himself – was on its last legs, instead turned out to be inspired. Runner-up in the China Super League scoring charts in his first season with 12 goals in 26 games, he was nominated as the league’s second most valuable player and, in a curious echo of a previous life, was awarded citizenship of Zhengzhou.

Emmanuel Olisadebe is still in China, where despite yet another knee injury which saw him miss out on this season’s Asian Champions League, he was once again named as the second-best player in the league. Recent interviews have seen him express a wish to play for two more seasons with Henan before going into coaching. It’s probably fair to suggest that he could pass on a thing or two.

Olisadebe’s Zhengzhou lies just over 500 miles from Dalian, where a young Dong Fangzhuo – now starting all over again at newly-promoted Portuguese side Portimonense – once honed the skills which saw him hailed as the first Chinese football superstar.

Amongst the myriad attractions of the city is one of China’s oldest Confucian temples. Harmony and balance play a key role in the Confucian vision, and the brief overlap of the Pole in China and the Chinese in Poland, each attempting to achieve the same thing, appears as a captivating and hidden piece of symmetry worthy of the surroundings. Sometimes football is really beautiful.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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 hiring a group of Chinese actors to impersonate genuine supporters. As for claiming that the country’s leader imparts tactical advice to the bench during games via an invisible mobile phone, well, that sort of thing can get anybody a reputation.

North Korea had quite a World Cup last month, and almost entirely for the wrong reasons. Despite the huge potential propaganda value of sporting achievement to the reclusive Communist state, just about the only successful aspect of their brief appearance was the nostalgia it evoked for the days when entirely unknown teams could still show up on the global stage.

Such events are almost impossible today. It says something about just how saturated and obsessive coverage of the sport has become that only the most isolated state in the world is still capable of springing a surprise.

From a footballing perspective, however, exactly how isolated is North Korea? On the face of it, every bit as isolated as anyone would expect. The national team has never had a foreign coach, no overseas players have ever appeared for a domestic club, and North Korean sides do not participate in Asian Football Confederation club competitions.

Even the precise structure of the country’s league remains obscure, with the Technical Innovation Contest (TIC) apparently running from February to June, with the six best teams then competing in the Republic Championship in October. Remarkably, none of the winners of the TIC between 1960 and 1984 are known, and in 2004 Pyongyang City Sports Group became the first recorded winner of the Republic Championship – 32 years after the competition was inaugurated.

Look a little closer, however, and North Korean football shows itself to be more outward-looking than appearances would suggest. For starters, there is an established tradition of ethnic Koreans from Japan appearing for the national side, represented in the World Cup squad by defensive midfielder An Young-Hak of Omija Ardija and the now famously lachrymal striker Jong Tae-Se.

Jong is a particularly intriguing case, given that he was born in Nagoya to parents of South Korean citizenship and has never lived in the country for which he has chosen to claim such tearful allegiance.

Of most interest, though, are the native North Koreans who have been permitted to play outside the country’s tightly-controlled borders. At present there are no less than eight North Korean players attached to clubs in Europe, which may come as a surprise to the media outlets which consistently push the stereotype of an entirely inward-facing football culture.

The highest profile of these eight is clearly the aforementioned Jong Tae-Se, who signed for VfL Bochum in early July. The others are Pak Chol-Ryong at FC Concordia Basel in the Swiss Challenge League, Cha Jong-Hyok and Kim Kuk-Jin at FC Wil in the same division, Yong Lee-Ja at Serbia’s FK Napredak Kruševac, Ri Myong-Jun and Hong Kum-Song in Latvia with FC Daugava, and finally national team captain Hong Yong-Jo, who plays in the Russian Premier League for FC Rostov.

Two things immediately stand out. Firstly, North Korean players abroad appear to be following, at least to a certain extent, the tried and tested South Korean pattern of moving in pairs. This phenomenon has been particularly pronounced amongst South Koreans signing for sides in Eastern Europe, where the past year has seen Kim Nam-Il and Park Hye-Sung pitching up at Tom Tomsk, Lee Min-Kyu and Her Min-Young opting for Dynamo Moscow, and Hwang Hun-Hee and Kim Pyung-Rae briefly turning out for Metalurh Zaporizhya in Ukraine.

Going back a little further, Kim Dong-Hyun – on loan to Rubin Kazan from SC Braga in 2006 – was accompanied by a midfielder named Kang Sun-Kyu, who only emerged from the club’s reserves to play in a couple of Russian Cup matches. Meanwhile, merely having a Korean name seemed sufficient to get a contract at Zenit St. Petersburg in 2006, when the club famously signed no less than three South Koreans, Kim Dong-Jin, Lee Ho and Hyun Yun-Min, immediately after the World Cup.

That North Korea appears to be cautiously repeating this process is interesting, as it indicates that the authorities – who retain tight control over the movement of players, and indeed anybody, out of the country – apparently see no problem in using a policy associated with the other side of the 38th Parallel. Other models are certainly available in the region, given that Japanese and Chinese footballers usually move alone to Europe, and why North Korea should instead choose to follow the system used by their bitter enemies to the south remains unclear.

The second point of interest is the geographical distribution of the North Koreans playing in Europe. A brief historical detour should help to underline the potential significance of this.

North Korea officially practices a philosophy of Juche, or self-reliance. Although often interpreted as isolation, in practice it corresponds more to a delicate balancing act which attempts to limit the capability of external entities to exercise political, economic or military influence on the country. This is of necessity an active and evolutionary process, and as a result the focus of North Korean foreign relations has gone through at least three distinct phases.

The first followed the Korean War and sought to balance power between the Soviet Union and China, whilst simultaneously strengthening ties with Eastern Europe and other members of the Communist world. The second ran from the mid-1960s and prioritized post-colonial states and European countries considered to be potentially co-operative, whether through left-wing leanings or simple ideological indifference.

Finally, the current phase, which began following the collapse of the Soviet Union, centers on the USA and Japan and continues to veer wildly between diplomacy and hostile posturing.

Although it is still too early to form any firm conclusions, the initial signs seem to suggest that North Korea’s burgeoning engagement with the footballing world is following some of the patterns established by Cold War diplomacy.

Consider the following. The first native North Korean player to play overseas was Kim Yong-Jun, who in 2006 signed for Yanbian FC in the Chinese second tier. That same year, the duo of Lee Kwan-Myong and the 18 year-old striker Choe Myong-Ho moved to Krylia Sovetov Samara in Russia, where the latter was soon dubbed ’the North Korean Ronaldo’ by sections of the press.

Although neither were particularly successful, with Choe managing a single league appearance and Lee never making it out of the reserves, the parallels between the destinations of these pioneers and the direction of early North Korean foreign relations are nevertheless striking.

The coincidences do not end there. Just as the North’s nascent diplomatic development once expanded from Russia and China to Eastern Europe, so in recent times the region has become a new target for the country’s burgeoning footballer export trade.

In addition to the players currently featuring in the former Soviet bloc, it should be noted that the two at FC Daugava previously played for the club’s predecessor FC Dinaburg before its expulsion from the Virsliga for match-fixing, and that the national captain Hong Yong-Jo turned out for FK Bežanija in Serbia prior to his move to Russia in 2008.

Which brings us to the next stage – co-operative Western European countries. Switzerland of all places is probably about as different from North Korea as it gets, yet behind the obvious divergences lies a long-standing political relationship.

The two states established diplomatic relations in December 1974, and since then the Swiss have educated all three of Kim Jong-Il’s sons, financed the Pyongyang Business School and consistently denied allegations that prior to recent money laundering reforms, much of the Dear Leader’s estimated $4 billion fortune was stashed in various vaults in Zürich.

With a relationship that cozy – although the Swiss government plans to stop development aid to North Korea by the end of 2011 in protest at the country’s nuclear ambitions – the choice of Switzerland as the first Western European country to host North Korean footballers becomes less mysterious. By the same token, expect a long wait before any players show up in France, which has long refused to deal with Kim Jong-Il until he addresses what Amnesty International has described as ’widespread’ human rights violations by his regime.

Whether the pattern will continue to hold in what are increasingly fluid geopolitical and sporting contexts remains to be seen. In any case, it is also clear that wherever they are in the world, North Korean players abroad live under the same rigid controls as they would at home. Chaperones from the country’s intelligence service permanently accompany them, paying particularly close attention to their interactions with the media and ensuring that all interviews conform to a particularly banal – and strictly apolitical – template.

Whilst occasionally resulting in unintended comedy – during his time in Samara, the North Korean Ronaldo once held forth to the press on the dangers of owning a refrigerator, from which an athlete could catch a cold and consequently miss training – the constant surveillance reflects all too clearly the dictatorial society from which these players originate.

Ultimately, it is the dictatorial nature of this society that makes it difficult to do anything other than speculate on the motives and patterns which animate North Korean football and its relationships with the wider world. At the same time, it is precisely this nature which suggests that such patterns are in fact to be found, given that when it comes to the outside world, dictators – especially those responsible for mass starvation and repression at home – tend to leave little to chance.

Whether North Korea really is attempting to conquer the footballing world by adopting a South Korean policy and squeezing it into the geopolitical framework of Cold War diplomacy is unclear. Fact is, nobody knows. But whatever the truth, Eastern European football – as ever – and increasingly the game in Western Europe too, are interesting places to be.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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 the teams in Group C, are Slovenia – population 2.06 million, registered footballers 30,000, all-time World Cup record played three, lost three – the most confident?

The answer is simple – teamwork. It sounds slightly facile, but Slovenia have doggedly spent the previous eight years creating a national footballing philosophy in which the whole is now able to achieve consistently more than the sum of its parts would suggest. Under the guidance first of Bojan Prašnikar – in his third spell as national coach after being the first to manage the newly-independent Slovenia in 1991 – and the country’s greatest-ever player Branko Oblak, and then current boss Matjaž Kek from 2007, the country slowly developed a system in which collective industry was everything, and individual genius was nothing.

That Slovenia failed to qualify for any international tournaments in this period was largely immaterial, because they were ensuring that 2002, the darkest hour in the national team’s short history, would never happen again.

One man did more than most to get Slovenia to the World Cup in Japan and South Korea – and that same man was largely responsible for sending them home again. With more goals (35), more appearances (80) and more attitude (an infinite supply) than any other player in Slovenian history, the legacy of Zlatko Zahovič has been severely tarnished by his spectacular falling-out with then-manager Srečko Katanec after their opening game against Spain.

Although tensions between the coach and his temperamental midfielder had reportedly been building for some time, Zahovič’s reaction to being substituted after an hour of the match in Gwanju still came as a shock. After the game, which Slovenia lost 3-1, he launched a vicious verbal assault on Katanec, claiming that:

“I can’t stay in a team where you will substitute me in a game like this.”

And that:

“I could buy you, your house and your family.”

Zahovič was sent home, from where, chastened by the national response to his actions, he issued an apology. Morale destroyed, Slovenia went on to lose their remaining matches against South Africa and Paraguay. The team had found out the hard way that the price of relying on individual brilliance could be too high. Although Zahovič would appear for the national side for another two years, the seeds had been sown for a complete re-evaluation of how they were to play.

Eight years later, the Slovenian team which will compete in South Africa are the complete expression of a new collective philosophy. Even today the imprint of Zahovič remains on the side, although in a completely different way to how he probably would have imagined.

The Slovenia of 2010 are deliberately a team without stars (although it is also fair to say that the country has yet to produce another player with Zahovič’s raw natural ability). Goalkeeper Samir Handanovič is the best of the bunch, and a good showing over the next month could see the 25-year old earn the move from Udinese to a bigger club which his talent deserves.

His older brother Jasmin, incidentally, is the side’s reserve goalkeeper. The experience of West Bromwich’s Robert Koren sees him assuming the captain’s armband, and he should be joined in the midfield by the well-travelled Andrej Komac and Auxerre livewire Valter Birsa. Particular attention should also be paid to Rene Krkhin, who at just 20 years of age has already made five first-team appearances for Internazionale.

Yet in the end, it is the team’s togetherness which is their greatest asset. Kek has explained that:

“In South Africa we will have 23 star players, and every player will apply his individual skills for the collective good. For me, that’s the essence of being a star.”

Whilst Koren adds:

“We are all good friends who respect each other’s abilities, and that will be our biggest strength.”

In a battle for second place in the group with the USA and Algeria, they believe that this can take them all the way.

Slovenia are at last free of the shadow of Zahovič, and it shows. The country’s football psyche is complex – for example, the game has at times been looked down upon as the sport of immigrants from the more southerly regions of the Balkans – and until the current side could match Zahovič in reaching the world stage he would always be there somewhere, lurking in the national subconscious.

Not any more. The confidence Slovenia feel going into the World Cup comes as much from what they have left behind as what lies ahead of them.

Also see: Slovenia 2010 World Cup Squad

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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 very best of its kind – is also the most obvious, is Switzerland’s presence at the finals in South Africa.

With the sound of crackling tin-foil seemingly echoing in every corner of the room, the initiation continues. Driven by a noxious cocktail of commercial and patriotic interests, Zürich–headquartered FIFA, under its Swiss president Sepp Blatter, were determined to make sure that Switzerland would have no problems in qualification. As a result, the side was deliberately placed with Greece, Israel, Latvia, Moldova and Luxembourg in a group so easy that the Swiss could even afford a home defeat to the latter team and still finish top.

This is hardly the first time, either. Forget whispering, slam down your glass and yell about how Switzerland got to Germany in 2006. A qualifying group of France, Israel, Republic of Ireland, Cyprus and the Faroe Islands? It’s enough to make a man need another drink.

All very convincing. Unfortunately it doesn’t explain how Switzerland have ended up in Group H with tournament favourites Spain and a Chile side which came second in South American qualifying – just a single point behind other tournament favourites Brazil. The theory also ignores the obvious fact that the current Swiss team is actually quite capable of getting positive results which haven’t been pre-arranged by Sepp Blatter, Prester John and the Comte de Saint-Germain over a leisurely fondue lunch.

The career of captain Alexander Frei may rival that of Saint-Germain for longevity, but the veteran Basel forward is in excellent form going into the World Cup with 15 league goals in 19 games last season, along with five in nine qualifying games for the national side. His likely strike partner Eren Derdiyok, meanwhile, had a fine season with Bayer Leverkusen, whilst man-mountain (both in size and age) Blaise Nkufo won the 2009/10 Eredivisie title with FC Twente and represents a genuinely physical goal threat.

Behind them in the midfield, the much under-rated Udinese player Gökhan Inler offers a classy combination of muscle and finesse, and Derdiyok’s club colleague Tranquillo Barnetta hits some of the best crosses and dead-balls in Europe. The defence, on the other hand, offers an intriguing combination of the old and slow (Ludovic Magnin), the young and slow (Philippe Senderos) and the young and super-charged (Lazio’s Stephan Lichtsteiner, whose ceaseless running from right-back has seen him dubbed ’Forrest Gump’ by sections of the Italian media). Lichtsteiner’s marauding does, moreover, provide an effective tactic for keeping the ball as far from the Swiss goal as possible, where doubts persist over the fitness of the normally reliable first-choice goalkeeper Diego Benaglio of Wolfsburg, who underwent knee surgery earlier this year and only made his comeback at the end of March.

The Swiss also have the slight advantage of being managed by one of the greatest coaches of all time. Ottmar Hitzfeld is not only the winner of a combined nine league titles and seven domestic cups in Germany and Switzerland, he also achieved the feat of managing two different clubs to a Champions League win before José Mourinho had even taken over at Porto. He did it in four years too, whereas Mourinho took six. Although similar success for Switzerland in the World Cup is almost certainly too much to ask, having Hitzfeld calling the shots should give them a slightly better chance than usual. The conspiracy theorists can keep watching the skies – everybody else should keep watching Switzerland.

Also See: Switzerland World Cup 2010 Squad.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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, the qualification of the Greek football team for only their second World Cup finals has, quite understandably, been largely overlooked.

Ironically enough, the caution and conservatism instilled in the side since 2001 by German manager Otto Rehhagel – apparently engaged in a personal duel with Morten Olsen for the long service in national coaching commemorative carriage clock – could not be more at odds with the state’s freewheeling fiscal philosophy. Possibly the most tactically-disciplined national team in Europe, Greece keep a rigid shape and invariably defend en masse, even when supposedly attacking. Striker Theofanis Gekas, with ten goals in 11 games, was top scorer in the entire European qualifying programme for one very good reason – with his pace enabling him to play on the counter-attack, he was virtually his side’s sole offensive outlet.

Rehhagel has spent the previous nine years creating a system rather than a team. This system is now so ingrained that following the retirement of the legendary Antonios Nikopolides in 2008, Greece were able to make use of three different goalkeepers in qualifying without their defensive balance being disturbed in the slightest. Remarkably, with their opening game against South Korea looming, it still remains to be seen whether Alexandros Tzorvas of Panathinaikos, Michalis Sifakis from Aris or PAOK’s Kostas Chalkias will be first choice, all having played alternate halves in Greece’s recent warm-up matches.

Certain players have, however, been constants in the system. Whilst Sotirios Kyrgiakos has only recently begun to show consistently good form for his club, the Liverpool centre-half has long been an excellent performer at national level and played in every match in the qualifying campaign. Team captain Giorgos Karagounis, meanwhile, still retains the ability at 33 years of age to move the ball intelligently in the centre of the field, as well as the long-range shooting which probably continues to give Portugal goalkeeper Ricardo Pereira nightmares after the two sides’ opening match in Euro 2004.

Greece’s win in the latter tournament was, of course, so unlikely that even the Delphic Oracle could have been forgiven for not foreseeing it. This time around, though, it really does feel safe to bet against them repeating the trick on the biggest footballing stage of them all. That said, Greece have every chance of progressing from Group B, where they will play two of world football’s most inconsistent sides in Argentina and Nigeria (both of whom, incidentally, they faced in their only previous World Cup appearance in 1994) along with a South Korea team which, although in decent form coming into the tournament, have only ever won a single World Cup finals game outside their home country.

Whether or not Greece will have enough to make it past France, their most likely opponents in the second round, and then possibly England in the quarter-finals, is another matter. Perhaps for the first time under Rehhagel’s stewardship, however, the team can actually hope for a modicum of sympathy from neutrals normally infuriated by their relentlessly negative tactics. Surely few could begrudge the Greek football side putting a smile back on the face of a country which, in recent times, has had every right to be disappointed with its representatives.

Also See: Greece World Cup 2010 Squad.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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 a relatively solid back line marshalled by Liverpool’s Daniel Agger and – knee problems permitting – the hugely promising 21 year-old Simon Kjær, coming from a second straight outstanding season at Palermo. The cunning thuggery of holding midfielder Christian Poulsen should, moreover, function as additional insurance. Unfortunately, Denmark have little more to offer beyond this defensive stability, and look set for an uphill struggle at the other end of the pitch.

Olsen has just three strikers in his squad – Bendtner, the megalithic Søren Larsen and captain Jon Dahl Tomasson. Whether this triumvirate have the requisite firepower for a sustained World Cup challenge is open to debate. Tomasson may have knocked in 11 goals in 24 games for Feyenoord this season, but five of those came in the first six games and at 33 years of age, his mobility has increasingly come to resemble that of Sepp Blatter after a particularly generous lunch buffet.

Larsen, meanwhile, only managed ten league appearances for MSV Duisburg in the 2. Bundesliga, and anybody opening a sports paper over the previous eighteen months will know that Bendtner talks a rather better game than he usually plays. Despite his often awkward performances on the right side of his club’s three-man attack, the hope is that the Arsenal striker will be able to contribute more when restored to his preferred central position in the Danish offensive line-up.

Throughout much of Olsen’s tenure, Denmark have relied on their midfield to save their bacon, with the midfielders in the squad accounting for over 40 international goals between them. However, the Danish public – despite almost unanimous general backing for the coach – have queried the fact that, aside from 18 year-old Ajax prospect Christian Eriksen, the squad’s midfielders have an average age of just under 29. How long the ageing legs of Dennis Rommedahl (31), Jesper Gronkjær (32) and Martin Jørgensen (34) can continue to compensate for Denmark’s goal-scoring deficiencies is, it seems, an increasingly pressing question.

In other words, it should be no surprise that although Denmark conceded only five goals in qualifying for the tournament – the same as Spain and one less than England – in doing so they scored fewer goals of their own than any other European side in South Africa. It could plausibly be argued that their presence at the finals is, in fact, largely due to the abject performances of both their principal group rivals, namely Sweden and Portugal.

Portugal conceding three goals in the last 20 minutes to hand Denmark a 3-2 win in Lisbon was bad enough. Sweden, however, in a completely unnecessary application of a 198-year tradition of neutrality, handed a 1-0 victory to their medieval overlords in front of a sold-out Råsunda – on the country’s national day, no less – in the biggest Swedish supporting act since Ursula Andress’s bikini in Dr No. Former UEFA President Lennart Johansson may have been weeping with patriotic fervour in the VIP box during the national anthems, but he was probably crying for very different reasons afterwards.

In summary, although Denmark have the defensive resources to stifle the world-class attacking capabilities of the Netherlands or Cameroon, their chances of outscoring either of their main Group E rivals look slim. Only by successfully nullify the threats of Arjen Robben and Samuel Eto’o and avoiding defeat in these two opening matches – still no easy task – can Denmark enter their final group game against Japan with a reasonable chance of progress. The question then will be how well an ageing midfield and a blunt strikeforce, just like Niklas Bendtner’s belt, are able to hold up.

Also See: Denmark World Cup 2010 Squad.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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 sticks, meanwhile, the village of Kukoboi in Yaroslavl Oblast is home not only to the witch Baba Yaga, who lives in a hut built on high stilts resembling chicken legs, but a goblin who mutters and plays with the taps in the local bath-house and a laughing mermaid who swims in the Ukhtoma river under the summer moon.

It’s uncommon, however, for any of Russia’s ghosts to keep to any particular schedule (although the sculptor Mikhail Kozlovsky can supposedly be relied upon to knock on the gates of the Imperial Academy of Arts on rainy nights, complaining about the cold in his grave), and predicting their appearances is consequently a tricky business. Against all probability, however, the city of Volgograd was recently able to do just that.

March 27, 2010. Polyot Stadium, Nizhny Novgorod. 1700 local time. The date had been set for weeks, and many in Volgograd could barely contain their excitement. Sure enough, and right on time, 800 kilometres away a genuine ghost, clad in the familiar blue and white of a previous life, stepped out of the past and into the weak evening sun. FC Rotor Volgograd were alive once again.

Rotor, like innumerable Russian football teams before them, died a long time ago. The reason that anybody remembered them at all amongst so many other fading memories – and why their return was greeted with such joy – is a history which, even by Russian standards, is almost impossibly rich and compelling.

The origins of the club go back to 1929 and the soon-to-be-immortal southern city of Stalingrad, where the team was formed by workers at the Dzerzhinskiy tractor factory. As a result, Rotor are, with a single exception, older than any team from outside Moscow or Saint Petersburg currently playing in the Russian Premier League. Appropriately enough, the side was initally known as Traktor Stalingrad, which probably takes the prize for the most Soviet football club name of all time.

Traktor made their debut in the city championship the following year, and then in the national competitions in 1937. Further progress seemed assured – until history intervened.

The entry of the Soviet Union into World War II on June 22, 1941 saw Traktor in Donetsk, preparing for an away match against Shakhtar. Although the game went ahead as scheduled on the 26th, the players returned to their hotel to be greeted by a telegram from the Stalingrad Committee for Physical Culture & Sports ordering their mobilisation. Following a swift journey back home, they learnt that, in common with almost all Soviet industry, the Dzerzhinskiy factory and its workers were to be evacuated beyond the Ural Mountains, out of the reach of German forces.

However, in an act of remarkable bravery, the team made a collective application to forsake the relative safety of Chelyabinsk in south-west Siberia and stay to defend their city. Although the plea was turned down, seven players – Belikov, Ermasov, Gusev, Kolosov, Plonskaya, Sheremet and Shlyapin – nevertheless remained and fought on the front lines of the Battle of Stalingrad, probably the largest – and almost certainly the bloodiest – battle in human history. Konstantin Belikov made a particular name for himself in a special forces unit, making over thirty combat sorties and once single-handedly holding out against a German ambush for over 40 minutes before reinforcements could arrive.

The Battle of Stalingrad, which inflicted the first major defeat on the German armies and was ultimately to prove a turning point in the course of the war, lasted almost 200 days and claimed the lives of up to two million. The path back to normal life would prove a formidable one, with the city almost entirely razed to the ground. Amidst the ruins, a decision was made to commemorate the liberation of February 2, 1943, and just as in the battle which preceded it, the Traktor players were again to play a central role.

The match ’on the ruins of Stalingrad’ is, in its own way, as significant as another World War II game, the ’Death Match’ in Kyiv in 1942, although it has inexplicably never quite achieved the same level of fame. As a member of the city adminstration was to explain over fifty years later, the friendly game played on May 2, 1943 between Spartak Moscow and representatives of local teams at the Azot Stadium – the only sporting venue in Stalingrad to escape total destruction – ”had enormous political resonance. News of the game spread throughout the whole country and beyond and bore testament to the fact that Stalingrad had survived”.

Spartak only arrived on the day of the game, their travel plans having been delayed by German air raids. Flanked by two fighter planes, players from the Moscow side looked down from their aircraft in stunned silence on the still-smouldering city, as goalkeeper Alexei Leontiev recalled: ”Under the plane there stretched black scorched earth, where only grey squares distinguished rows of buildings which had once stretched for miles along the Volga. It was a city of ruins, where beautiful buildings were piled high”.

The team was escorted to a bombed-out school to recover from the journey, where they rested for several hours on mattresses spread across the floor. They then proceeded through the remnants of Stalingrad to the Azot in the southern suburb of Beketonskaya, riding in open-top cars the whole way.

The prepations of their opponents, meanwhile, had hardly been any smoother. Spartak were to face a side dubbed Dinamo Stalingrad, in honour of its overwhelmingly military composition. All of the Traktor players who had stayed at the outbreak of war would play, and years later they would remember the days spent searching the ruined city for their team-mates. Belikov, ever the practical man of action, was also concerned with finding enough pairs of boots amongst the destruction.

The team finally assembled and managed two weeks of hasty training, sticking rigidly to a high-calorie diet of porridge and pickled herring. As Belikov remembered: ”We were, of course, not in the best of form. But once you hear the ball sing, your heart starts to jump. It’s football, after all.”

At the 3,000-capacity Azot, nearly 10,000 were in place. Most were soldiers, as what remained of the civilian population was only slowly returning to the city. Before the game kicked off, the Stalingrad players were awarded medals for their role in the liberation. One of the fighter planes which had accompanied Spartak’s flight to the south then flew low over the ground and dropped the match ball onto the pitch, where it hit one of the many divots on the surface and bounced away into the stands. The organisers, fortunately, had a replacement to hand.

Several precious photographs and a short film clip of the match survive. One of the former shows a view of one of the stands, consisting of uneven long wooden benches, with a couple of trees behind it. Above the ground hovers an airship. In the foreground is a battered scoreboard, also made of wood, which reads ’Spartak’ and is accompanied by a smaller, lower board which supports a tile reading ’0’. Resting against the foot of this board, ready for use, is a replacement tile reading ’1’.

The tile was never needed. Dinamo, up against opponents who had spent the war far from the front, training and playing friendly games, somehow scored the game’s only goal in the 39th minute through Moiseyev, with an assist from who else but Belikov, before holding out against a second-half onslaught from Spartak. As one newspaper put it, defending a goal is simpler than defending a city.

Football in Stalingrad had secured its place in history – even as that same history continued to wash around it. That evening, as players from the two sides attended a jazz concert held in the open spring air, the peace was suddenly shattered by the thunder of anti-aircraft guns as a group of Nazi bombers passed overhead on an ultimately unsuccessful mission to undermine the banks of the Volga. Despite the ongoing war, however, league football was once again played in Moscow and Leningrad within a week of the game in Stalingrad.

The following fifty years would bring little in the way of additional glory and much in the way of name changes – the Traktor players, reunited at the end of the war with their returning team-mates from Chelyabinsk, who had kept themselves in half-decent shape by training between shifts and at weekends, saw their club become Torpedo Stalingrad three years later, before returning to the old Traktor moniker in 1958. As a consequence of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation programme, the city itself changed name to Volgograd in 1961, with the team following suit, and it was only in 1975, after two further alterations, that the name Rotor Volgograd finally came into being.

Rotor were, in short, content to live on memories. However, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, the club embarked on a new adventure which, although lacking the historical resonances of their previous achievements, nevertheless possessed a force all of its own. Winners of the Soviet First League in 1991 in its last-ever season, Rotor went on to finish second in the top division to – who else – Spartak in 1993 and qualified for the UEFA Cup. The stage was set for the old factory team from the lower reaches of the Volga to once again manufacture a name for themselves.

Which they promptly went and did. Rotor fans still pained by what came after the heady days of 1995 reminisce even today of the evenings when Zinedine Zidane, Bixente Lizarazu, David Beckham and Paul Scholes appeared at the Central Stadium in front of 40,000 supporters – and when Rotor shocked Europe.

Although holding the mighty Manchester United to a goalless draw in the home leg of their first round UEFA Cup tie was a considerable achievement, it was the return game in England on which the modern legend of Rotor rests. Those who saw it were at a loss to explain the verve with which a completely unintimidated Rotor set about their illustrious opponents at Old Trafford, going two goals up in the first 25 minutes. Although Scholes pulled a goal back on 60 minutes, only the unlikeliest of last-minute headers from goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel preserved what was then a 56-match home unbeaten streak in European competition for United, who nevertheless exited the tournament on away goals.

The secret to Rotor’s fearlessness was only revealed years later by their manager Viktor Prokopenko shortly before his tragically early death – despite a lifetime’s abstinence from alcohol – in August 2007. In Prokopenko’s words, the atmosphere in the dressing room before the game was actually very different: ”I could see that the players were trembling. The match was to start in five minutes, but they couldn’t go on the pitch in that state. So I said to them: ”You know what’s most important about driving a tank? Not to shit your pants”. They all burst out laughing, relaxed and went onto the pitch. Twenty minutes later they had scored two goals…”

Although Rotor narrowly lost in the next round to eventual finalists Bordeaux – with Vladimir Niederhaus, scorer of the opening goal at Old Trafford, again netting in the away fixture – the club had once again written themselves into the annals of Russian footballing history. Sadly, that night in Manchester was to prove the high point of what was to become a precipitous slope. Almost as rapidly as it had arrived, their dynamism and strength began to slip away, and Rotor – despite another runner’s-up finish in 1997 – endured a series of increasingly poor campaigns before finishing last in the Russian Premier League in 2004. Perhaps ominously, it had been their thirteenth season in the top flight.

The descent to the Russian First Division may involve a cold, hard landing, but there was still no excuse for what happened next. Despite a devoted fan base, despite widespread national affection which transcended ordinary club loyalties, despite one of the best youth systems in Russia, and despite the veteran’s associations who organised regular games between old Rotor and Spartak players to commemorate the match on the ruins of Stalingrad, the city of Volgograd, which had previously provided the majority of the team’s funding, let Rotor die the following winter. Even United hadn’t forgotten them – with a touch of real class, they had sent the club a card every New Year. Seemingly the only people indifferent to Rotor’s fate were those closest to them.

The Russian Professional Football League (PFL) therefore had no choice but to deprive Rotor of its professional licence on the final day of January 2005. The club had been unable to provide the necessary financial guarantees, with several debts unpaid and no backer willing to step forward, despite sterling efforts by management to strike a deal with the city. One exasperated board member asked, with some justification, why the regional authorities in Kazan and Rostov were willing to help support their local sides, whilst those in Volgograd were seemingly determined to do nothing.

Strong passions were aroused by the disappearance of Rotor, with fans of sides across Russia – notably those of Spartak – registering vocal disapproval at great length. A single word was enough for one local paper in Volgograd, however, which simply ran the headline ’Buried’ across the front page.

Rotor had not long been laid to rest before the ghosts began to appear. The first bore the most resemblance to the departed, as the pale, haggard form of Rotor-2 Volgograd, Rotor’s former reserve team, shuffled into the spring sunshine several months later to compete in the Russian Second Division. A year later, Rotor-2 changed name to just plain old Rotor.

Hold onto your hats here (or at least a pen and some paper). The new Rotor continued to play in the second division until 2009, when the financial problems which had bedevilled its ancestor once again reared their head. With an embargo placed on the club and court orders issued to seize its property and accounts, an entity which could be described as Rotor Volgograd 3.0 was formed in the opening months of the year, intending to take over the treasured name. However, it took until July for Rotor to withdrew from league competition, meaning that the newcomers were forced to dub themselves FC Volgograd in the interim.

This latest ghost finished third in the south zone of the Second Division at the end of 2009, with 39 year-old midfielder Oleg Veretennikov, who had starred for the original Rotor back in the 1990s and still the Russian Premier League’s all-time leading goalscorer, voted the league’s player of the season. Full of confidence, FC Volgograd applied to replace Vityaz Podolsk in the First Division (the latter having been forced by financial pressures to give up their spot, despite finishing eleventh in 2009), and on February 8, 2010 club officials, flanked by regional governor Anatoly Brovko and PFL head honcho Nikolai Tolstoy, announced the success of the petition. FC Volgograd would play in Russia’s second tier – and would be known as Rotor Volgograd.

How far the new Rotor is a genuine successor to the original club remains a matter of discussion. Perhaps surprisingly for a part of the world with such a strong sense of historical propriety, opinion has been overwhelmingly positive. It is certainly worth noting that Rotor’s complex resurrection is by no means a unique phenomenon in Russia – anyone asking for the real Torpedo Moscow or FC Zhemchuzhina-Sochi to stand up should be prepared for a deafening chorus of ”I’m Spartacus!” – and fans are fairly used to clubs disappearing and metamorphosing on a regular basis. As usual with ghosts, the consensus seems to be that if you believe that something’s real, then that’s good enough.

Which brings us back to the Polyot Stadium in Nizhny Novgorod. Although the many who followed Rotor’s inaugural game, both across Russia and beyond, ultimately had to be content with a goalless draw, they could nevertheless bear witness not only to Veretennikov, now Rotor’s assistant manager, manically waving his arms about on the faded touchline, but also to the insuppressible past, alive once more. Through wars, fame, betrayal and rebirth, from the ruins of Stalingrad to the Theatre of Dreams and beyond, FC Rotor Volgograd just will not die.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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 discuss the virtual absence of any progress in infrastructure development with the Euro 2012 organising committee and announced that: ”if there are no stadiums there can be no games”.

Just over eighteen months later, however, things are looking brighter. As the qualifying draw for the tournament in Poland and Ukraine took place last month in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture & Science, the new National Stadium across town was at last beginning to resemble a football arena ready to host the opening game, rather than an outdoor version of Piotr Wiwczarek’s hotel room after a final tour date. Likewise, construction of NSK Olimpiyskiy in Kyiv, the venue for the final on July 1, 2012, seems to be back on track after an apparently interminable series of bureacratic wranglings.

Progress on the grounds outside the capitals is also generally satisfying. In Ukraine, both the Metalist Stadium in Kharkiv and Donetsk’s stunning Donbass Arena – the construction of which consumed ten tonnes of paper in technical drawings alone – opened last year. The Polish venues, meanwhile, are not too far behind, with the reconstructed Stadion Miejski in Poznań probably the most advanced, followed by the over-sized Chinese lantern which will become the Maślice in Wrocław.

Platini should probably hold off the cigar for a while longer, though. Those responsible for the PGE Arena in Gdańsk do not appear to have prioritised actually building it, preferring to spend far more time trying to sell the naming rights or producing incomprehensible promotional material which describes the stadium as having ”a striking amber-like form, which opens into its surrounding environment in all directions like flowing streams”. Those of a less poetic bent would probably describe the designs as a fairly blatant knock-off of the Allianz Arena in Munich.

Gdańsk is nevertheless some way ahead of Lviv, where authorities are still trying to find an official name for the as-yet barely begun stadium, let alone a pair of scissors for the opening ribbon. The main problem is that preparations in the city lack significant support from local business figures, and where Kharkiv and Donetsk have been able to call on the resources of Oleksandr Yaroslavsky and Rinat Akhmetov in the construction of their new arenas, the already cash-strapped authorities in Lviv have been forced to rely almost entirely on central funds.

The then-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko declared on a visit late last year that the government had given around UAH 50 million to the city, but even this failed to stop the stadium contractor from downing tools in February, ostensibly in protest at sub-standard designs produced by an architectural firm without a license to operate in Ukraine. The real news here to anyone who had passed the site over the previous months was that the tools had even been picked up in the first place.

On the whole, however, the issue of Euro 2012 stadiums is gradually being resolved. By the standards of the 2004 Olympics, where the main stadium in Athens was completed only two months before the opening ceremony, they may even be ahead of schedule. On the other hand, the real questions about the prospects for a successful tournament lie – as so often in this part of the world – strictly off the pitch.

Preparations for sporting events – and often the events themselves – on the scale of Euro 2012 inevitably become politicised, and the practical consequences of this are rarely positive. That UEFA could award the tournament to a joint bid from Ukraine and Poland and involve not one but two sets of governments, local authorities and governing associations – none with any experience of similar projects – and not expect political complications seems unlikely, but the scale of these has been enough to surprise even the most cynical observer.

The most prominent example has undoubtedly been the Olimpiyskiy in Kyiv. With no sign of any building activity several months after a USD 300 million construction contract was awarded, Ukraine’s president at the time Viktor Yushchenko issued a statement claiming that officials at the sports ministry were set on what he described as ”sabotage” of the project, and requested that Tymoshenko investigate the matter further.

Platini then weighed in with the announcement that the Troitskyi shopping centre under development alongside the stadium site would endanger the latter’s UEFA certification, as it would prevent the ground from being properly evacuated. Yushchenko issued an executive order to have the centre demolished but nobody listed to him, and only a visit from Platini succeeding in getting the bulldozers moving.

Unfortunately the demolition work ceased almost as soon as the UEFA president was safely on his way back to the airport. A furious Tymoshenko immediately pointed the finger at Leonid Chernovetskyi, known to moonlight occasionally as mayor of Kyiv when not trying to run Arsenal Kyiv into the ground, and alleged a plot to damage the goverment’s credibility. The mayor, she added, had ”issued the construction permit on a corrupt basis”, and the Troitskyi ”was put up illegally”.

Chernovetskyi’s response was to claim that the company responsible for the centre was due compensation of 8,000 hectares of prime real estate on the outskirts of the city, and that Tymoshenko was responsible for the stoppage in demolition by refusing to sign the relevant paperwork. With Football Federation of Ukraine chairman Hryhoriy Surkis doing his utmost to calm the situation by claiming that: ”If work on tearing down Troitskyi is truly stopped, it is one step nearer to the final downfall of all our hopes”, Yushchenko intervened again with rather more success than the first time and ordered Tymoshenko to transfer the land.

The Troitskyi is merely the highest-profile example of how the Euro 2012 preparations not only have to contend with governments, but local authorities and innumerable sets of interests. That these intersecting pressures would cause difficulties was almost universally accepted by the wider Polish and Ukrainian public from the very beginning, and few held out any real hope of substantial co-operation.

This negativity is in fact so extensive that, according to one poll, over three-quarters of Ukrainians expect the management of the tournament to be at least partially corrupt. Only four per cent believe that the preparations will not be tainted in any way. Yushchenko himself openly confirmed the problem, complaining that: ”Right now we have three different government agencies working on preparations – not to help us get ready, but to divert the maximum amount of money possible into the black economy”.

When corruption in relation to Euro 2012 has been raised as an issue in the international media, much of the focus has been on events in Poland. A succession of revelations over the past four years involving match-fixing and bribery have seen over 200 arrests – including the son of former national team manager Jerzy Engel – and several top-flight clubs forcibly demoted to the lower divisions. In an interview with Bild, Jan Tomaszewski claimed that: ”Poland is the most corrupt country in the football world”; and as the current domestic season kicked off in July 2009, only 15 referees had permission to officiate at the highest level.

Tomaszewski went on to suggest that: ”If nothing happens, he [Platini] should take Euro 2012 away from us”. The corruption battle has certainly not created an ideal working environment for the organising authorities, not least because of near-permanent chaos at the Polish Football Federation (PZPN). FIFA, it should be pointed out, have hardly helped matters, threatening to exclude the national team from competition after viewing an attempt by the Polish Olympic Committee to suspend the PZPN board in September 2008 as constituting undue political interference.

Yet it is hard to see how turmoil in the domestic game is in itself fatal to Poland’s capacity to host an international tournament – no Polish clubs and, hopefully, very few Polish referees will be involved. When it comes to corruption, the real problem in both Poland and Ukraine is instead, as Yushchenko recognised all too well, graft on a municipal and political level.

Simply put, the central funding pots allocated for Euro 2012 represent the chance of a lifetime for the more unscrupulous operators within the system. As any of the Ukrainians who delivered such a bleak verdict in the above poll could explain, the lengths to which some officials will go in order to divert funds into their own pockets are endless – and often remarkably creative.

Although the specifics vary, the most popular formula remains broadly unchanged. City officials, faced with an issue – real or imagined – which needs resolving before the tournament begins, apply for central funds far in excess of the cost of the solution, deal with the problem in question as cheaply as possible, and pocket the balance.

To take just one of the more bizarre examples, council managers in the eastern city of Luhansk, expected to serve as an arrival point for fans attending matches in nearby Donetsk, have been accused by animal rights groups of drawing up plans to kill stray dogs in the area by using discounted poison, rather than the more humane (and expensive) methods on which their funding application was budgeted.

Problems such as these have the effect of exacerbating the difficulty of already monumental tasks in infrastructure development. Along with the stadiums, Ukraine alone has been estimated to require investment of up to USD 25 billion in roads, hotels and general services. Whilst much of this is expected to come from the private sector – in addition to the Metalist Stadium, Yaroslavsky has also financed the renovation of Kharkiv International Airport – the country is essentially being asked to make good in two years what went wrong in fifty.

Half the problem is even knowing where to start. The distances between some of the hosting cities are the longest ever for a European Championship – the 1,556 kilometres between Poznań and Donetsk means that the Polish city is closer to London than the Donbass. Travel the same distance south-east from Donetsk and you’ll almost reach Tehran. To complicate matters further, there are currently no direct flights or trains between the two cities.

Even for those venues located closer together, logistical headaches loom for many supporters. Whilst both government have promised improvements to the often-dilapidated road networks, visitors will still need to plan for rail delays at the border caused by the need to switch train gauges from the Polish track width to the narrower Ukrainian setting, along with the small matter of the European Union frontier running right down the middle of the hosting area.

Unfortunately, the problems may not be over once everyone actually makes it to their destinations. Kyiv is some way off being able to provide the 7,300 four- and five-star hotel rooms demanded by UEFA, and the chronic shortage of accomodation in Donetsk has lead the authorities to consider plans to base fans in the coastal city of Mariupol.

As if that wasn’t enough, a curiously fascinating study recently bemoaned the lack of public toilets in the Ukrainian capital, where only six facilities are signposted (all of them on the main Khreshchatyk thoroughfare). The same analysis also effectively put the kibosh on any prospect of near-term improvement by calculating that any loo entrepreneurs should expect a wait of up to seven years for a return on their investment.

How much of all of this will be fixed – and how much it is even possible to fix – by June 8, 2012 remains an unanswered question. Whether it is the most important question, however, is another issue. Few seem prepared to look beyond the building sites and ask what hosting the European Championship in Poland and Ukraine really means.

For starters, it represents the righting of a historical wrong. Aside from the 1976 tournament in Yugoslavia – which featured only four teams – the European Championship has never before taken place in eastern Europe. Given the glittering contribution of the region to the development of the game over the past decades, it seems only fitting that the latter should at last give something back to the lands of Tomaszewski and Valery Lobanovksyi, lands where some people are so hopelessly in love with football that they actually pay to watch Polonia Warsaw.

Secondly, it might just be the last chance to enjoy a tournament which actually has its own characteristics and soul. Poland and Ukraine represent, at least in some ways, an antidote to football across the continent which is increasingly becoming a homogenised plastic shell, and represent a challenge to the idea that ’developed’ tournament infrastructure and ’positive’ fan experiences must resemble those found in western Europe.

Memo to UEFA – if you don’t want your tournaments to have eastern European features, don’t hold them in eastern Europe. It’s not going to be perfect, and surely even Platini would accept that the normal way of running things is not going to be turned upside down just because there is a football tournament involved.

But offering different experiences is surely the whole point behind rotating the host nation, and it is interesting to reflect that the most memorable sporting events – for better or worse – are those which contain something of the society which surrounds them. Just over 800 days to go. See you there.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

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 positive headlines from the worldwide sporting press later, and the gig is up. Everything is just fine at Shakhtar.

Or not. Last year I floated the idea that Shakhtar, thanks mainly to the astute backing of Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine, had largely immunized themselves against the difficulties faced by the majority of other football clubs in the country – and were instead, for no obvious reason, apparently set on creating their own unique set of issues.

To their considerable credit, some of these have now been fixed. In particular, the inspirational Romanian coach Mircea Lucescu, in charge since 2004 and the architect of three Ukrainian league titles, was finally offered a new contract towards the end of Shakhtar’s successful European campaign after some completely unnecessary dithering by the club’s hierarchy, who were rumoured to have been winking in the direction of CSKA Moscow’s 47-day-wonder Juande Ramos. Perhaps they caught a bit of coal dust in their eyes.

Even more importantly, Akhmetov and particularly CEO Sergiy Palkin have loosened up considerably in the transfer market. The former had already admitted as far back as late 2007 that the club’s ’golden cage’ policy, which tied players to lucrative long-term contracts with only a minimal chance of being allowed to move on to bigger things, was in fact proving damaging both to team morale and Shakhtar’s prospects of attracting players of a higher level, but only recently has Akhmetov begun to put this insight into action.

In the past twelve months Dmytro Chygrynskiy (the new toast of Barcelona – at least in Cornellà-El Prat), Evhen Seleznyov (whose strangely familiar appearance could lead one to query Palkin’s movements in November 1984) and Brazilian striker Brandão (a monster probably hewn from inside a rock somewhere under the Donbass) have all been allowed to leave with minimal fuss.

The choice of players to replace them also tells its own story. Lucescu has explained that raising the number of Brazilian attacking midfielders at the club to six with the signings of Brazil U-20 internationals Alex Teixeira and the much-hyped Douglas Costa – leaving the squad more top-heavy than Victoria Zdrok in a concrete bikini – is a preliminary to departures in the summer, and Costa for one has already voiced his intention to move on to Western Europe within two years. It also seems unlikely that his former club Grêmio would have been at such pains to include a 20% sell-on fee in the deal if they thought that, like Brandão, Costa was being sentenced to seven years in Donetsk.

Shakhtar’s Paranoia

So problems solved? If only. Unfortunately, Shakhtar Syndrome has entered a new and particularly virulent phase. From reacting to the absence of issues by creating their own, the club has now moved onto imagining them. Put simply, both the club leadership and Lucescu have become ever more convinced of a grand conspiracy against them on the part of the Football Federation of Ukraine (FFU), and although this mindset is not entirely new, recent months have seen Shakhtar’s paranoia become increasingly pronounced.

The specific grounds for complaint are these. The club has, in numerous public statements over the past year, alleged that the FFU is running a concerted campaign to stifle Shakhtar’s progress on behalf of their principal domestic rivals, Dynamo Kyiv. These statements are almost too numerous to mention, although some notable instances include Lucescu’s comments in the run-up to November’s match between the sides where he named three referees he felt could not be relied upon to adjucate fairly, and the club press office posting a video compilation on the Shakhtar website of allegedly dubious on-field decisions given to Dynamo.

The supposed motivation for this campaign is found in what should probably be called the Axis of Surkis. The FFU is headed by Grygoriy Surkis, the brother of Dynamo president Ihor Surkis, and the various ploys claimed to be in use include deliberately inconvenient fixture planning, misleading media pronouncements, and attempts to unsettle key employees. Above all, the association is alleged to exert undue influence on referees, who are appointed by an FFU committee.

None of these grievances are particularly convincing. What is claimed to be a general issue with the scheduling of fixtures is in fact a simmering resentment over the two consecutive away trips to Lviv with which Shakhtar opened their title defence last season. The longest domestic trip possible for a side from the south-east and a traditionally tough away venue, Shakhtar picked up just a point in from the games in Lviv and then won just once in their next eight league matches, effectively conceding their crown to Dynamo by Christmas.

However, there is little in the current season’s fixture list which immediately suggests anything untoward, and the fact that the club received permission to postpone a league match with Metalurh Zaporizhia to prepare for their European Super Cup match with Barcelona in late August would appear to support this contention.

Unfortunately, the Lviv issue is not the only problem Shakhtar have with the calendar. The club was also critical of the decision by the FFU to clear the league programme for three weeks at the start of November in order to allow the national team to prepare for the World Cup playoff with Greece, instead seeing it as a ruse to give Dynamo a breather before their next game – coincidentally against Shakhtar.

That the Greeks had themselves arranged a similar (although shorter) intermission in their own domestic competition was seemingly lost on all parties, with the controversy subsequently descending into political point-scoring with Akhmetov – not without some justification – criticising the FFU for setting excessive ticket prices for the playoff at the Donbass Arena before offering to buy them all up himself to sell on to supporters at a discount.

The flat rejection by Surkis and the FFU of Akhmetov’s proposal or to even reconsider their pricing policy, resulting in a stadium which was less than two-thirds full for Ukraine’s most important game in recent years, does not exactly reflect gloriously on the association. Neither does their bizarre decision shortly after the match to offer the national manager’s position to none other than Lucescu, who although to all appearances was initially intrigued by the prospect of forming half of Europe’s first simultaneous father-son national management arrangement (his son Răzvan is currently coach of Romania), soon turned the offer down.

That the FFU in these and other matters come across as self-serving is indisputable – a sell-out for the Greece game would have raked in around $4.5 million for the association, who had previously been content with $0.3 million from the qualifier against England in Dnipropetrovsk barely a month earlier. The proposal to Lucescu, who was hardly likely to accept, was also a cynical piece of work clearly designed to irritate Akhmetov, who came out of the affair with his public image much enhanced at the expense of the suits in Kyiv. But it is a big step to claim that this politicking is also reflected on the field of play, and that Shakhtar are getting a raw deal from referees as a result of influence from the FFU. The only way to settle the issue is to look at the numbers, rather than the words.

How can referees change games?

How can a referee directly influence a match? There appear to be two main possibilities – the distribution of red and yellow cards, and the awarding of penalties both for and against. If Shakhtar’s claims are to hold up, it should be shown that the team is either awarded disproportionally more red and yellow cards, fewer penalties for or more penalties against than the other teams in the division – or preferably all of the above.

One other factor remains to be considered. A necessary corollary of the theory has to be that if Dynamo are to benefit fully from Shakhtar’s treatment, they must receive the opposite – in other words disproportionally fewer red and yellow cards, more penalties for or fewer penalties against.

A total of 532 yellow cards have been distributed in the first half of the 2009-2010 Ukrainian Premier League season. Dynamo Kyiv have received 41 of these – the third-highest total in the division. Only Metalurh Zaporizhia (42) and Obolon Kyiv (47) have received more. But interestingly, Dynamo have yet to have a player sent off, despite the high number of yellows. Vorskla Poltava are the only other side to have escaped any dismissals, although they have only picked up 30 bookings and are a generally upstanding side shaped in the image of their manager Mykola Pavlov, a principled fellow who once refused to countenance the club chairman making any new signings until his existing players had been paid outstanding wages.

The most logical way to explain the discrepancy is that the high yellow tally is in fact caused by the absence of sendings-off, and that referees are dishing out yellows to Dynamo where other teams could expect reds. But how significant is this? It has long been accepted – rightly or wrongly – that big teams get big decisions, regardless of country. And whether the yellows are serving as substitutes for reds or not, the fact that the average Ukrainian side has only amassed 1.6 red cards this season would still leave Dynamo with a notably high tally of bookings. One would imagine that a team supposed to have the league’s referees in its pockets would be more effective in keeping the former’s cards in their own pockets.

The penalty issue is more clear-cut. Dynamo have been awarded five penalties so far this season. Although this is the second-highest total in the league, three other teams have been awarded four and every team has received at least one. Dynamo’s numbers are, in other words, not unreasonable for a team playing an attacking style of football in a league where referees are not undisposed to give spot-kicks. Penalties against, on the other hand, are conclusive. Two have been awarded to opposition sides against Dynamo, whereas Chernomorets Odessa have been penalised only once and four teams – or 25% of the division – have yet to concede any at all.

These figures suggest that, on the whole, Dynamo Kyiv are not being unduly favoured by Ukraine’s referees. The main question, however, is whether Shakhtar are being discriminated against. The application of the same metrics as above to their games thus far in the 2009-2010 season throws up some fascinating results.

Shakhtar Donetsk have received 26 yellow cards this season – the second-lowest number in the Ukrainian Premier League and only three more than the side with the lowest total, their city rivals Metalurh Donetsk. That Shakhtar are falling victim to the reverse of Dynamo’s supposed arrangement by receiving reds where other teams receive yellows can immediately be discounted, as just one player – Olexandr Chyzhov against Zakarpattia Uzhhorod – has been dismissed so far.

The average number of bookings per team in Ukraine this season stands at 33.25. This means that Shakhtar get almost 22% fewer yellow cards than the average Ukrainian team – and almost 37% fewer than Dynamo. This is without any statistically meaningful increase in the number of sendings-off.

An examination of the penalty figures is similarly enlightening. Shakhtar are one of the four teams noted above who have yet to have a penalty awarded against them in league competition this term. However, it becomes a different story in the opposition penalty area, where Shakhtar have so far received seven spot-kicks – more than any other side. Given that the average team in Ukraine has been given 2.7 penalties, Shakhtar are awarded over 2.5 more penalties than the average side. Moreover, in a surely decisive blow to the claims of conspiracy, Shakhtar’s settling-in process at the $400 million Donbass Arena was smoothed by five penalties in the first four games at their new home, which included three in the first two matches and one after only 18 minutes of the inaugural tie against Obolon.

It is largely irrelevant whether these specific spot-kicks were deserved or not (in fact, most seem justified on review). The point is that were referees really out to get Shakhtar, they would not be given in any case. That these penalties were awarded at all – and at a rate which considerably outweighs any other team in the league – supports the similarly favourable yellow-red card numbers and leads to only one sensible conclusion.

Shakhtar, contrary to the club’s insistence, are at present not being discriminated against by Ukraine’s referees. Dynamo, meanwhile, are not receiving anything from the officials that Shakhtar themselves are not also getting in abundance.

Of course, a more extensive analysis covering all the years since the foundation of the Ukrainian league in 1992 would give a clearer picture. As a sample, however, the data seems telling, as it covers the period in which Shakhtar’s complaints have been particularly voluble. So why, if there appears to be no conspiracy, are they so convinced that one exists?

Reasons behind the Shakhtar Syndrome

Shakhtar Syndrome arises from a unique conjunction of factors. Firstly, the club has always seen itself in the vanguard of a regional identity clash between the scheming politicians and aesthetes of Kyiv and the honest toilers of the Donbass mines. A need apparently still exists to measure and validate the success that Akhmetov has brought to the side against its equivalent from the capital, rather than simply enjoying it for its own sake, and imagined conspiracies and plots by competitors are a way of reinforcing the achievement and also giving it a positive moral spin.

The combination of this mindset with Lucescu’s own psychological peculiarities is a potent one. A marvellous coach with a truly admirable footballing philosophy, the Romanian also drags around an enormous persecution complex which both feeds into and is fed by the atmosphere of suspicion which surrounds him. The result, as should have become all too clear, is a kind of institutional paranoia which is distinctly unbecoming for a club with designs on cementing a place amongst Europe’s elite.

All of this is not to say that the Axis of Surkis is not, in fact, ensconced in a bunker under Kyiv plotting Shakhtar’s destruction. However, any evidence of this would have to be found somewhere other than refereeing decisions, and Shakhtar would be well advised to avoid attributing to intrigue what can reasonably be attributed to incompetence – which the FFU has in spades. The association has often behaved inappropriately, both towards Shakhtar and other teams, but there is simply no evidence that this is due to anything other than poor management.

Much of what the association does is handled in an inept and amateurish manner (just ask anybody who wanted to see the Greece game), with point-scoring and general machismo highest on the agenda, and as far as Shakhtar are concerned, there is little reason to believe that the FFU would be any more successful in orchestrating a grand conspiracy than they are in arranging anything else.

The ultimate irony in all this is that overall refereeing standards in Ukraine are in fact pretty poor. But it is disingenuous for Shakhtar to continue playing the role of put-upon victim when the numbers just do not add up. Or rather, they add up too well.

Shakhtar’s protestations of martyrdom are only confusing the issue and delaying the proper reform for which numerous clubs in the country have been crying out for years. And in truth, they should be above all this.

Despite their nouveau-riche image, Shakhtar boast a proud history and a promising future, have great supporters and a great stadium – and stand not only as a regional, but following their UEFA Cup win, also as a national symbol. Why moan about the ref?

From Soccerlens.com - Football News