football rambles

 We followed up the game on Saturday with a trip to London to see Shakhtar take on Spurs in a friendly at the Tottenham Stadium. It was good to catch up with Jonny, Phil and Dean and also to go to the Elbow Room for the first time in years. Not for Spurs fans, but for me the highlight of the match was the chance to see Piatov play in goal for the Miners for the last time before hanging up his gloves. He only lasted 15 minutes and was given a guard of honour.  Ukrainian football has obviously been impacted by the war and to be honest Shakhtar look to have suffered a bit more than other clubs and for the first time in years are not favourites to win the title, therefore it's perhaps not surprising that Spurs dismantled what was a bit of a makeshift team.  Tottenham opened the scoring in 38th minute when Maddison went down like the proverbial sack of ..... to 'win' Spurs a penalty, which Kane converted from the spot. Their lead was short-lived though with Venezuelan, Kevin K...

Shakhtar are really not popular in the West of Ukraine, mainly for political reasons, so they were probably glad to get their 2 games in Lviv out of the way. However, after losing to FK Lviv on the first day of the season and drawing with Karpaty at the weekend they have not had the best start to the season. Already, they have dropped valuable points in what looks like being an exciting season

I have just noticed that I have been spelling Shakhtar as both Shakhtar and Shakhter. The reason is the first variant is the transcription from Ukrainian, which is used in most official documents and on websites, where as Shakhter is the transcription from Russian, as used by Komanda and the club's fans. Changing the writing from cyrillic to latin letters is always a headache, and I don't even know the real spelling of some of the foreign players in the Vische Liha, due to only ever seeing their names written in cyrillic. The Ukrainian dimension also leads to further headaches, as when they write names using the latin alphabet there seems to be about 20 more 'y's than you would expect. Is it Kyiv or Kiev and Krivoy Rog or Kryvyy Rih? I think I need to make a decision here somewhere along the line. I'll probably write Shakhtar as Shakhtar from now on, but leave the tag as Shakhter and try to keep to the Ukrainian variant with other names. Mind you I'm not alone, ...

Semechki.... The small sunflower seeds that are so popular at Eastern European football grounds were in abundance at the Arsenal v Shakhtar game on Sunday. Free entry and enough seeds , served in red cups with the Arsenal logo on, led to a crowd of 33,000 chomping fans entering the ground. I don't know what state the ground was in today, but I presume the local sparrow population was pretty chuffed. The game was also fantastic and one of the best I have seen in a while. Unfortunately Arsenal lost 4-2, but they always entertain. Nobody apart from Metalist has scored more, and nobody apart from Zakarpatty has conceded more. Arsenal went ahead in the 25th minute with a goal from Zakarluka, who I haven't seen play so well since his CSKA days of yesteryear. The same can't be said of Vitaliy Reva, who was a goalkeeper of heroic status at CSKA, but seems to be a nervous wreck in goals for the Arse. Anyway, surprisingly it stayed at 1-0 until half time, and we expected Shakhtar to ...

On Sunday Arsenal will take on Shakhter. Arsenal have made a couple of impressive performances lately with the win over a desperate Vorskla being followed by an away drubbing of high flying Metalist. So you might think that there would be reason for optimism, as second place Shakhter come to town this weekend. However, that is the problem, Shakhter are in second. Their lead before the winter break seemed unasailable, as Dnipro were starting to buckle and Dynamo looked a shadow of their former selves. Dynamo are now top and in fine form, although Shakhter still have a game in hand. After losing to Tavriya last week they are going to be angry and God knows what form of punishment their lunatic, billionaire, political manipulator and club owner Renat Akhmetov has subjected them to. In the past after humiliations in Europe he has allegedly had them doing push-ups on the plane home and ordered a steamroller to crush all the cars belonging to the players in the car park. This season he has b...