The author | Lin Jiao
The editor | abundant
Lead:
Now, no football team in the world has a more special fate than the Donetsk Miners. In 2014, Indonitek became the forefront of a firefight between Ukrainian government forces and independent forces, a team that has been forced to wander between three other Ukrainian cities for eight years. With Russia declaring independence for the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic on February 21, the team looks like it will be difficult to get home.
Honestly, before the real war broke out, it was the football of the "war without smoke" that let more people in the world know that there was such a place as Donetsk.
Donetsk Miners Club, with two hammers, a handful of coal, and a cluster of flames on the logo.
Thanks to the investment of mining tycoon and Ukraine's richest man, Rinat Akhmedov, since winning the Ukrainian league championship for the first time in the history of the team in 2002, the Donetsk miners have won 13 of the 20 league titles, completely replacing the capital Dynamo Kiev as the new ruler of Ukrainian football. As a result, this working-class team, which was founded in 1936, has the opportunity to participate in the Champions League frequently in the past 20 years, taking turns against the world's top giants such as Barca, Real Madrid and Bayern.
If you've seen Tony. Judt's statement in "A History of Postwar Europe" that "what really connected the whole of Europe was football", you can see that this is one of the most important evidences of Ukraine's existence in the contemporary European map.
However, absurdly, the Donetsk miners are long gone. Since the Donbass region of Donetsk Oblast became the forefront of the firefight between Ukrainian government forces and independent armed forces in 2014, the Donbass Arena was seriously damaged by the war, and the miners were forced to leave their homeland and temporarily relocated their home stadium to Lviv, Kharkov and Kiev in the west. Their last four league titles, as well as the 2020 Champions League 3-2 victory over Real Madrid, were made on the go.
Putin's serious and forceful speech is just a reminder to everyone: Oh, it turns out that the Donetsk miners have been wandering for 8 years, and their desire to go home is now completely shattered?
The wandering miners, accustomed to wandering, were calm as usual. Many fans searched the club's official account after Putin's speech and found that they did not say anything, only posting a post related to the game: the winter break of the league has passed, and the team will usher in the first match of 2022 in Kharkiv, the temporary home of February 26, hoping that fans will buy tickets to watch.
The atmosphere of war is like this, the more silent, the more unusual, the more depressing. No matter how the official account pretends to be calm, there is still a dazzling comment at the bottom: "Are you playing in the Russian league?" Moreover, some careful people found that the chest of this photo of the player on Twitter had a complete map pattern of Ukraine.
Sport has nothing to do with politics? Wandering habits? impossible. In fact, for the past 8 years, all those associated with Donetsk have been using different options to prove the harsh reality: rifts cannot be ignored, and taking sides is inevitable.
President of the new football league and oligarch boss
Who betrayed whom?
A former Ukrainian national team captain named Ihor Petrov raised the banner of independence in a clear light.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became a member of FIFA in 1992. Petrov, a midfielder born in the small town of Khorivka in donetsk Oblast, wore the armband of the ukrainian national team captain in 1994.
Now, Kholivka is a front line repeatedly divided between government forces and independent militants, with each side controlling half of it. Petrov, who is now president of the Football Union of the "Donetsk Miners' Republic", sounds like he is already a clear anti-Ukrainian.
Petrov went to Israel as a player, but spent all his time playing in Ukraine in Donetsk. Petrov played for the miners three times in his career, making more than 281 appearances. After retiring, he founded the first children's football academy in Donetsk, which was later absorbed by the miners as a youth echelon. For his various contributions to youth sports on the sidelines, he received the "Labor and Courage" Ukrainian State Medal in 2011. The medallion is a bit awkward now.
Petrov was not alone. Also staying in Donetsk to try to revitalize local football is Degdeleev. One of the greatest goalkeepers in football history, Lev Yasin, saw Degdeleev as his successor to Dynamo Moscow in 1977, but Degenereev refused to leave his hometown club. Degdeleev made 16 appearances for the Soviet national team, and the club's career was spent entirely with Miners. Today, he is also part of the football league of the yet-to-be-recognized republic.
For Petrov and Degdeleev, this is a great and difficult but even more embarrassing task, not only because of the "Donetsk People's Republic" football is in disrepair, but also because they have lost their main backbone, the miners.
After the outbreak of war in 2014, the miners fled and kept Donetsk's name. The Donetsks would not deny that it was a purely blooded home team, a name that would be difficult to take away from them. The team is decidedly more tenacious than Crimean Sevastopol, which was dissolved in 2014 after crimea unilaterally announced its secession from Ukraine.
The role model for the miners is Cyprus' Famagusta Club, although the story sounds a bit sad. When Turkish descendants occupied parts of Famagusta in 1974 to establish an independent state, the club was forced to move to another City in Cyprus, Larnaca, and the team, which occasionally competed in Europa League qualification matches, never returned to its hometown. However, nearly 50 years later, the club still retains its original team name "Famagusta", and the team's avid fan organization Ultras has named itself MAXHTEC (Warrior), meaning never to stop fighting until it returns to the beloved town of Famagusta.
Many years from now, will there be a professional league in the "Donetsk People's Republic", and will there be a new Donetsk team in the Donetsk region? Petrov thought to himself how good it would be if the miners did not move away, as a spiritual totem they must help to bring together the "citizens of the Donetsk People's Republic".
But miners owner Nat Akhmetov didn't think so. Descendants of Tatars exiled to Donetsk by the Tsar, the ancestor was born into a local family of coal miners who seized the opportunity of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s to become a private energy oligarch. Although russian media have reported that Akhmetov privately funded the separatist movement, Akhmetov has publicly issued several statements calling on Ukraine to remain intact and proving his position with practical actions. After the outbreak of war, he immediately moved the club he had invested heavily in to the capital Kiev, and continued to invest.
Ukraine's richest man, Akhmetov, is reported to have a total fortune of $7.6 billion, but his assets were as high as $22.3 billion before the war in Donetsk in 2014. Like the vast majority of businessmen, Akhmetov called for a "peaceful solution to the crisis."
For Akhmetov, the miners are still in their hands, their hometown seems to be still in their hands, and football has always been more important than sports in many places. But the opinion of The Russian Diplomatic Representative Konstantin Dolgov was tit-for-tat: "Akhmetov not only stole the mines and factories, but also ran with our football club to what he called 'United Ukraine', which is now dead for us." ”
Dolgov said in the tone of his master: "We will take back the natural resources and the stadium, and the future will play in us not by Brazilians (Akhmetov has spent a lot of money on Brazilian foreign aid), but by boys from Donetsk who are ready to die on the pitch for the honour of the club and our region." ”
"Traitors" who do not sing the national anthem and
A stranger waiting to go home
In the years of wandering west, the results of four consecutive championships are enough to prove that the team is united. Captain Srna said the war made the team more cohesive. He said what he had to say as captain, but that didn't necessarily mean he was telling the truth.
The war did not destroy the pursuit of professional players, but it certainly destroyed the atmosphere of the dressing room.
In February 2015, Miners had just moved to Lviv, near Poland, to face German giants Bayern Munich at home. Left-back Shvchuk showed the excitement of his homecoming in an interview. He did go home. He's from Lutsk, a town just over an hour's drive from Lviv — the kind of patriot he's busy with who strives to teach the Ukrainian anthem to all the miners' players. "I didn't sleep well last month, I watched the news all day and had nightmares all night. All I want is an end to the war, a unified Ukraine. ”
But teammate Rakitsky, who is from the Donbass region, has a different view of the war and considers himself a Russian. Starting in 2014, while playing for the Ukrainian national team, he refused to sing the Ukrainian national anthem before the match. "I was born in Donbass, a place like no other on earth. Growing up there we had a special mindset in our own culture. ”
In contrast to Shvchuk, Rakitsky hated the home team's move to Lviv because he could always see banners hanging from the stands of lviv stadium by Stjepan Bandra, a controversial figure in World War II. For Lviv fans in the west, Bandera was the nationalist hero who led Ukraine to independence, but for Rakitsky, who grew up speaking Russian in Donetsk in the east, Bandera was a fascist war criminal who had organized anti-Soviet guerrillas in cooperation with the Germans.
Rakitsky made 210 career appearances for Shakhtar Donetsk, and after four years of wandering with the team, Rakitsky chose to leave. In January 2019, he joined Russian Premier League club Zenit. Rakitsky's transfer choice has angered many Ukrainian fans because Zenit is sponsored by Russia's state-owned energy giant, who had cut off gas supplies to Ukraine during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Rakitsky has made 54 appearances for the Ukrainian national team, and since turning Zenit, Rakitsky has not been called up by the Ukrainian national team.
The same fate as Rakitsky was Yevne Seleznyov, a striker from Shakhtar Donetsk who played for the Dnipro team. Dnipro reached the final of the Europa League in 2015, leading 1-0 at one point, just a stone's throw away from the European trophy. Also because of the war in eastern Ukraine, Dnipro temporarily moved his home stadium to the capital Kiev, 400 kilometers away, in 2015, but the following year they were financially in trouble because they lacked oligarchs like Akhmetov.
Seleznyov, who chose to join Russian side Krasnodar in 2016, responded to the media at the time: "I have never confused sports with politics. Maybe someone says I'm a traitor, I don't know. But I didn't betray anyone. ”
Perhaps only the unsurprising veteran Donetsk captain Srna can adapt to all this. He was an old Yugoslavia — a current Croat to be precise — who had been traumatized by war since childhood.
In 2015, many foreign aid left the miners. Douglas Costa was sold to Bayern, and Teixeira joined the Jiangsu team in the Chinese Super League for $50 million. Silner chose to stay.
This was not the first war Silner had fought in his life. During World War II, his grandmother and aunt were burned alive at home, and his grandfather was killed by snipers; his father entered a foster home in Slovenia, where he forgot his language and name, and did not reconnect to his true identity until he became an adult.
When the Yugoslav civil war broke out, Silna was 10 years old and his family was displaced in Croatia. When he was forced to move out of Donetsk with his daughter, he thought of what his father had been like in the summer, and he was now saying the same thing he had to his daughter as he had heard him say in the past:
"Sometimes she would ask me questions that I couldn't answer, like why I was leaving Donetsk, and I said there were roads being built, airports being built. A few days later, she wondered if the repairs had not been completed. 'Not yet,' I said. ”
Srner played as a player in Donetsk for 15 years, making 493 appearances for the team, winning 10 league titles, 7 Ukrainian Cups and the only Europa League title, making him the greatest player in the history of the team. Serna spent the final year of his career at Cagliari in Italy, and after retiring he decided to return to the wandering Shakhtar Donetsk as assistant coach, and in 2020 he became the club's sporting director.
He almost tied himself to a team whose future was unknown.
Silner has done a lot of things off the field over the years. In the year of the Wudong War, he bought 20 tons of oranges from Croatia and sent them to war-threatened schoolchildren in Donetsk. In April 2016, he donated supplies to boarding schools in the area.
"Donetsk is my home and Ukraine is my second country. Our native fans live in Donbass in Donetsk and we must remember the importance of helping children and the elderly. "After the war, we will return to Donetsk and kiss the streets. ”
Now, the Donbass Arena, the real home of miners, is overgrown with weeds. Will Silner still have a chance to take her daughter home?