These guys have played all over the shop. One season up the road in Yuzhne, then down the road in Ovidiopol,  and now across the city of Odesa at Spartak.

No wonder the Pharma chameleons have got no fans – they’re probably flummoxed by the ever-changing venues and underlying sense of impermanence when all they want is a local club they feel they can relate to.

I swear this game (piece written in Nov 2016 and only now going up) was originally fixed up for the, by local standards, swanky Sparta stadium in the centre, and overnight they changed the venue. 

At five minutes to kick off time at Spartak there was no one around and an internet check revealed the correct place to be was several miles away across town.

The taxi got there with 15 minutes and no goals missed.

Real DO play at Spartak but they also don’t play there as and when the whim takes them. Or so it seems.

Boasting a knock-off badge that fell of the back of a Real Madrid shirt, they’ve been kicking around the third division for a while and are now sponsored by a chemical company.

Stadion ‘Ivan’

Note the inverted commas as if Ivan doesn’t exist, or it’s a pseudonym. A stadium passing itself off as something it isn’t. Doesn’t want you to know what it’s really about.

And in many ways an amazing venue for the football.

Walk through the portals and you hear the shouts of players, maybe low chit-chat from fans and, of course, the gentle tinkling of water trickling softly past – is that a stream?

No, it’s a plastic pipe feeding the sort of feature you see at a garden centre on a Sunday afternoon. It is what must be football’s only fishpond.

Complete with rockery and mural depicting a delighted brown bear who has snaffled a salmon. Big fan of football murals in general but this sort of tops the lot.

Not very football but still very impressive. I spent at least five minutes admiring it instead of watching the game.

I started idly wondering how many fans have been pushed in the pond by japester mates in the past. The peahen below was probably caged for its own good.Maybe that was why the residents  – four very large goldfish, one surely called Ivan – were huddled under the central weeds. They’d heard the whistle for kick-off and knew what might be on the cards.

Who am I to carp on about ponds at football but the reason for its existence seemed obvious. ‘Ivan’ is in the heart of an industrial port city. A huge embankment behind one goal holds up a railway line, empty factory areas are nearby. Wild dogs roam the area. Desolate would be a good word.

The groundsman, surely, is a straw-chewing, dog-loving, trout-catching country boy (or girl) at heart. Washed up here from the Carpathians and is stuck amid the chimneys and the grey, pining for the fjords of home.

Can’t plough up the playing field to plant beetroot but CAN give the stadium a homely, bucolic touch or two. Mum would be proud of him/her.

Top topiary on show and the groundsman’s sign reads : Keep off the grass

Nyva Vinnytsia

Ten hours on train each way to watch your lads? You wouldn’t, would you?

But a hardy band of ten fans made the trip from Vinnytsia. The guy in a blue coat asked me at half-time: “Groundhopper?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He pointed at a female fellow fan and said: “Golden supporter.” Meaning that she’d been to every Nyva game this season. Home and away.

And with Ukraine being a big place that’s a lot of train miles and many hours on the slow network. She’s seen a lot of boring, flat fields from those windows as the plains in Ukraine soon drain the brain of activity.

Nyva re-formed earlier this year and are trudging around the third division, and this hardy lot definitely dEserve some sort of medal.

Especially after seeing their side equalise in the last minute through Braslavskyi, only for the home side’s Pavlo Novytskyi’s to grab a winner in the third minute of injury time.

Heading towards the fishpond to tell the goldfish the final score, the Nyva brigade were walking en masse towards me and onwards to the away players’ changing room.

Long way to go to be knifed in the guts with the last header of the game. Ten hours each way to get to the game – that’s some commitment.

I did the palms-forward ‘Ah, well’ shrug gesture and smiled apologetically as the Golden Supporter passed.

She smiled, and said: “That’s life.”

• Postscript – both teams are still playing third division football in 2024.