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.

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