football rambles

 quite often when I go on these trips the game that I choose seems short on action and goals, but not in this case. This was a really fine match, that I had expected Bohs to win, but perhaps not in this style. I had expected a comfortable win for Bohs as Finn Harps were struggling at the time, so when Kevin Devaney opened the scoring for the home team in the first minute, I'd expected the floodgates to open. However, the sides were all square after just 3 minutes when Niall Logue found an equaliser for Finn Harps. Ryan Swan put Bohs back in the lead just before the half hour mark and that was how it stayed until after half time.  We had expected Bohemians to go on to win the game in the second half, but Rafaelle Cretaro sewed the seeds of doubt when he got an equaliser for Harps just after the break. Bohemians soon pulled away with a second goal for Swan, Mandroiu and Keith Ward before Daniel O'Reilly got another goal for Finn Harps right at the end. A great night at a great c...

 Obviously, I am a big fan of Ukrainian football and even before the trip to Kharkiv all the way back in 2008 that started the whole blog I had had 3 years at the start of the millennium following mainly Kyiv based teams, so as part of the trip to Kyiv and Kharkiv, I visited a few other meccas of football. Both of the games I saw were at the Lobanovskiy named stadium, so I also went to Olympiskiy to see the Dynamo museum. I had seen a small exhibition of odds and ends in the club shop on a previous visit, so the thought of a museum was intriguing. Unfortunately, the small exhibition in the club shop was the 'museum'. I enjoyed it, but it would be great if a club with so much history went to the bother of having a proper museum, especially as there is a massive and expensive museum just around the corner just for the Klitschko brothers. Another point to make is that nothing much is made of Start stadium and the legendary match against the Luftwaffe side. I know that Ukraine want...

 On Sunday morning after the Metalist game we were back to the stadium, well the training complex attached to the stadium to witness Metalist Yunior (the Metalist youth team) take on FC Arena in the Kharkiv Oblast Winter Championship. Metalis ran out 2-1 winners, which compensated a little bit for the loss we had witnessed the day before.  After this we went to the Metalist 1925 Fan Cafe, which is the best sports bar on Earth! I presented them with an Ely scarf and a Villa scarf and they presented me with some raspberry vodka to drink on the overnight train back to Kyiv.