Ukraine's Shakhtar defy war to shine in Champions League

Anatoliy Trubin

I was aware of Shakhtar Donetsk qualifying for the group stages of the current Uefa Champions League season. However, I expected the club from the Donbas region to finally throw in the towel and not show up, given the growing intensity of the war in their country. 

However, after missing the club's earlier matches in Group F I finally got the chance to watch the "Miners" in action when they met Real Madrid in the Spanish capital on October 5. I was amazed by the youthful outlook of the team, fitness and competitive levels. 

Champions Real sweat for their 2-1 win. It did not look like they were playing a team living in the shadow of a devastating war.  After it lost nearly its entire foreign legion who fled the war, the club had to find new ways to survive and honour its fixtures.

But Shakhtar are made of a sterner stuff and are used to conflict and adversity more than most of the Ukraine. The club had been living and playing in exile since 2014 after Russian invaded the coal-rich Donbas region, the precursor to the eventual invasion and war in the whole of Ukraine since February 24, 2022.

Shakhtar have had to find ways and means to honour their fixtures, like this past Wednesday when they hosted Real Madrid in Warsaw for the round 4 of Champions League fixtures. It's on record now that it had to take an effort of epic proportions by Antonio Rudger to equalise for the Spaniards in the final seconds. 

The big Madrid centre-back stiches to fix his head afterwards, after collision with Shakhtar's ice-cool 21-year-goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin during the goalscoring effort. 

Tomorrow, Shakhtar meet Dynamo Kyiv in the Ukrainian Premier League. The new season began in August after the previous season was abandoned before it ended due to the war.

Though most of the players of both Shakhtar and Dynamo live in Kyiv, which had offered some reasonable safety for long periods of the war, that relative safety was shattered by systematic missile strikes into the capital city in the past week.

The usually biggest football match in Ukraine will be played in Lviv.

Follow the action on live streaming platforms and see if how much the football has been affected by the war, if there would be any signs. 

Caleb or Shalulile, SA football loses

Bonfils-Caleb Bimenyimana

Earlier this week the suppoters of two of South Africa's biggest clubs, Mamelodi Sundowns and Kaizer Chiefs, engaged in a duel of wits which trended on Twitter about who between the two clubs' top strikers was going to win the local league's Golden Boot. 

While Sundowns followers vouched for their goalgetter Peter Shalulile, the Chiefs legion punted their new striker Bonfils-Caleb Bimenyimana. 

Namibian international Shalulile is the hottest goalpoacher in the South African league for the past three season for the champion club Sundowns, while the lanky Burundian simply known as Caleb is still new in the league. The pair is locked at 6 goals apiece at the top of the league charts, after 9 matches for Shalulile and after 10 matches for Caleb.

My response to the debate is that, both Shalulile and Caleb add value to their clubs and the league but at the end of the day - or the current season in the context of the scoring race - whoever wins between the two, SA football loses.

It loses because the poor scoring rate by South African players would be extended to another level. The difficulty of this situation can be seen with the poor fortunes of the national team Bafana Bafana. Despite the South African Premier League (aka PSL) being touted as one of the best leagues around, whatever that means, the physical evidence is far from the claim. 

Next month the Fifa World Cup kickoffs in Qatar and South Africa is not one of the five countries representing Africa there. Fair enough, Cameroon, Ghana, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia did not qualify entirely based of the strength of their national leagues. They had mostly benefitted from fine talent based in top leagues in Europe, with some of the players even born and developed by better equipped structures in European countries.

But it is also the truth that many of those overseas-based African players in the 5 African national teams in the 2022 Qatar World Cup worked their way up to the top leagues, from their towns and villages and clubs in Africa. 

So, if the PSL is one of the finest leagues around, why it's South African-born players battle to attract the attention of big clubs in Europe? 

The fairness of the question can be seen through the fact that South Africa does not feature in the next CHAN tournament to be hosted by Algeria in January 2023. CHAN is an African championships played by senior national teams consisting of players campaigning in their domestic leagues. For the record, SA's Bafana Bafana are habitually eliminated in the qualifying rounds and this time were kicked out by Angola via a humiliating 4-1 aggregate score last month.

This outcome clearly means the Angolan Girabola is stronger that the PSL. Angola therefore joins host Algeria, Congo, Mali, Ghana, Ethiopia, Niger, Uganda, Senegal, Mauritania, Madagascar, Sudan, Libya,  Morocco (two-time defending champion), Mozambique, DR Congo, Cameroon, Ivory Coast in the final tournament.

Even in the CAF club championships, clubs from Morocco and Tunisia and fellow North African neighbours Algeria and Egypt,regularly produce results that are far better than the PSL clubs can manage.

Last season, PSL powerhouse Orlando Pirates did well to reach the CAF Confederation Cup final. But they were reduced to runners-up by Berkane, until a decade ago an unfashionable regional club from Morocco. 

The woes of South Africa in international football are rooted in so many wrong things about the PSL. Above struggling with getting the basic techniques right, goalscoring has become like rocket science in the PSL.

I will use the two matches playing today to illustrate my point: Orlando Pirates vs AmaZulu and Golden Arrows vs Stellenbosch. 

Pirates have not scored a goal in their last 3 matches - two league and 1 cup; AmaZulu are winless in their last 5 league matches due to their poor scoring form. Both clubs are desperate for goals in order to win tonight. However, a reasonable punter will bet for a safe but sad 0-0. 

In Durban, hosts Arrows and their vistors are not doing great either in the scoring charts, with rates of 1.2 (from 9 matches) and 1.3 (10 matches) respectively so far. 

I appreciate Shalulile and Caleb very much because of the excitement they bring to the game. However, SA football has a bigger task in its hands to produce similarly reliable, prolific strikers. Without accomplishing this task, and others that are urgent about South African football, our game is heading nowhere. 

Peter Shalulile