Nick Smith
Miodrag Bozovic: Why Europe Should Be Out for the Count
As everybody knows, the most famous Count of them all had no reflection and could only be seen by others, never by himself. A curious inversion of this phenomenon appears to have recently afflicted FC Moscow coach Miodrag Bozovic. Long ago christened ‘the Count’ by an unknown Serbian newspaper – for reasons which will soon…
The Europa League: There’s a New Sheriff in Town
- How come nobody ever heard of you? I mean, how come you ain’t got a reputation? (Support Your Local Sheriff!, 1969) With the visibly terrified Shakhtar Donetsk midfielder Jadson looking like he’d just been told that one of the small plastic spheres in his hand contained a hilarious paper snake on a spring –…
Arsenal, the Oligarch and the UPL
He’s obviously finished the brandy. When club president Vadym Rabynovych handed over Ukrainian Premier League side Arsenal Kyiv to the city’s mayor, Leonid Chernovetskyi, in January 2009, rumour had it that a bottle of the good stuff came his way in return. Considering that Arsenal went on to barely scrape clear of the relegation zone,…
Where’s Willer? A Brazilian in the East
Summer in the east. After a short break in June which felt almost as long as the frozen abyss of winter, football across eastern Europe is underway once more on green fields and under blue skies, half a continent and a whole world away from the frenzied din of a Bernabéu unveiling. And yet something…
Russian Football: The South Will Rise Again
According to a Russian proverb, the future belongs to those who know how to wait. And for some of those far beyond the long afternoon shadows of the Luzhniki, the waiting is over. Late last year, gold was wrenched eastwards to Tatarstan, from whence the Golden Horde once poured west. Rubin Kazan, crowned champions of…
Chaos in Kaunas: The Decline and Fall of the Romanov Empire
The Big Four? Try the Only Four. If fans of the English Premier League are increasingly bemoaning the seemingly unshakeable dominance of the former, imagine the absurdity of a division comprised solely of four teams. Yet when the new Lithuanian football season finally kicked off at the beginning of this month, there was a profound…
No Deal or No Deal: The story of Adrian Ilie and Terek Grozny
Twenty-two minutes isn’t long. Yet who knows how precious those short moments were to Ronaldo, finally back on a football pitch last week in Corinthians’ 2-0 cup win over Itumbiara. After a year spent wrestling with the aftermath of more surgery and rehabilitation, and with the hurried panting of time becoming almost as loud in…
Shaky Shakhtar Not Digging for Victory
Surrounded by thick morning mists, the train arriving in Donetsk slows down as it snakes through the slag-heaps. A century and a half of wrenching coal from the depths of the Donbass has left the ground fragile. This is the land of Stakhanov and his 227 tonnes. Far below, the ominous rumbling of the train…
The French Connection: Georgia, Gabon & Giresse
In the spring of 2008, the Georgian National Investment Agency (GNIA) ran a series of short promotional films across the major international news networks promoting the country as an attractive destination for foreign capital. The most notable of these featured an American reporter inside Dinamo Tbilisi’s Boris Paichadze Stadium breathlessly drawing our attention to the…
A Farewell to Arms: Goodbye Torpedo Moscow
Given the long history of the torpedo as the purveyor of silent death, it could be considered a cruel irony of fate that the recent demise of Torpedo Moscow, once one of Russia’s greatest clubs, has received so little comment. Condemned by last Thursday’s 2-4 home defeat to Vityaz Podolsk to relegation from the Russian…
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