Scottish manager Bill Shankly was the architect of the great Liverpool of the 1960s/1970s and author of a phrase as romantic as it is debatable: “Football is not a matter of life and death. It is much more than that.”
Also born in Scotland, journalist and writer Andy Dougan went further. In the book “Futebol & Guerra” (Zahar, 2004), Dougan separates legend and reality to recount the clash between FC Start and Flakelf. The first was made up of prisoners, including what was left of the pre-World War II Dynamo Kiev. The Flakelf was the Luftwaffe team, Hitler’s air force.
The legend was that all the players would have been murdered after a 5-3 rout imposed on the Germans. The fact is that eight of the winners were arrested by the Nazis during the war. Five died before the conflict ended – not right after the match.
A supreme contradiction, the Zenit stadium in St. Petersburg has a statue of a man stepping on a ball with one foot and an eagle, a Nazi symbol, with the other. The work is supposedly a tribute to the victory of former Dynamo Kiev players over the Luftwaffe.
The spectacular city of St. Petersburg was, until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, sure to host the Champions League final on May 28. No more.
For the third year in a row, the decision of the biggest club tournament on the planet will have to change the stage. That’s if the war doesn’t progress to the point where it threatens the entire tournament and even the World Cup in November.
It seems premature to think about it and, at the same time, belated to note that Shakhtar Donetsk have not played at the Dombass Arena since 2014, in the self-proclaimed independent region with the support of Russia. After the 2013/14 season, Shakhtar played their Champions League matches in Liyv or Kiev, more than 600 kilometers from their stadium.
It is obvious that international analysts understand the origin of the conflict much better and understand the gravity of the separatist process from the beginning.
Studying Russian in preparation for the World Cup five years ago produced discoveries, such as that part of the people of Moscow support Putin, believing that Ukraine has always belonged to Russia.
Half truth.
But my language teacher was born in St. Petersburg, when it was called Leningrad, and she never recognized the Ukrainians as an independent people.
Among his arguments, that Kiev was the capital of the Rus principality, which gave rise to the Russian state.
The Cisplatina province belonged to Brazil and, even so, Uruguayans do not feel Brazilian.
Some of the greatest players in the Soviet national team were Ukrainians, such as Mikhailichenko and Dobrovolski, Olympic champions in 1988, Blokhin and Belanov, named best players in Europe in 1975 and 1986, respectively. Times when red shirts carried the CCCP insignia.
The joke in Brazil was that the letters indicated the words “Careful Comrade Com Pelé”, instead of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Союз Советских Социалистических Республик).
Pelé and Garrincha starred in the most incredible three minutes in football history, as described by French journalist Gabriel Hanot, in the first game of the two geniuses in World Cups, Brazil 2-0 against the Soviets.
How nice it would be if Putin only had the wisdom to make the world celebrate the approaching end of the pandemic, with a Champions League final in beautiful Saint Petersburg.
Instead, it brings yet another threat to humanity, two years after the coronavirus.
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