Lev Yashin and burning passion for Soviet links with Brazil feature strongly in the Pele Museum in Lugansk.
It has a host of fascinating Soviet football artefacts collected by its owner Nikolai Khudobin.
Lev Yashin, the most famous Russian footballer ever, is regarded as maybe the best goalkeeper who ever played.
Continue reading Back in the USSR! Soviet soccer at the Pele Museum
The Pele Museum in Lugansk is, frankly, utterly surreal.
Thousands of miles away from Brazil, near the Russian border, it’s a shrine to Nikolai Khubodin’s childhood infatuation with the greatest player ever.
Nikolai, who played for his home town team Zorya Lugansk, heard about him on the radio in 1965 when he was ten.
Yes there really IS a Pele Museum in Lugansk.
Lugansk is in Ukraine. Twenty miles from the Russian border, it is the easternmost major city in the country and has about 500,000 inhabitants.
There is a Pele museum in Santos, where Pele played for the local team, which is about 7,000 miles away from Lugansk. I hope to visit the Santos museum later this year.
Seen Wales play football in some strange spots over the years – Qatar, San Jose and Minsk come to mind.
Llanwern High School in Newport doesn’t quite match them for exoticism.
This friendly, earlier today, pitched the Welsh Schools FA under-18s against the Aussies’ under-19s.
Few grounds enjoy the great views from a terrace like Merthyr Town.
But the crumbling bank with that glorious vista down the Rhondda Valley is now officially out of bounds due to league regulations.
Otherwise the rest of the ground is much as it was in the 1980s – it doesn’t look fresh, a bit down at heel but the new pitch is the saving grace.
Anyone from Cardiff will tell you of the joy of watching a team play in blue and white!
Despite the stick they get, sometimes footballers really do earn their dough. This was such a night. A Europa League game not to die for.
Sleet, freezing temperatures and bitter winds in Dnipropetrovsk on a wet Thursday in November.
Well, would you fancy it?
Continue reading Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk 4 Pandurii Targu Jiu 1
On the face of it, it’s a mystery why the fifth largest city in Ukraine has the best football team in Eastern Europe.
But money talks. And Shakhtar owner Rinat Akhmetov has plenty of it.
Speak to locals and they’ll tell you he already runs the country by virtue of it – he has no need to be in Parliament as that’s a waste of valuable time.
Continue reading Basque-busters – Shakhtar Donetsk 4 Real Sociedad 0
Les Bleus were bleu-dy awful and this must rank as Ukraine’s greatest day in football – the moment the champion chokers beat a world power convincingly.
Ten years ago, Wales drew 0-0 in Moscow in the Euro 2004 play-off first leg. We lost the second leg 1-0 and, on the pitch, have never posed a serious threat to the opposition since.
The weekend was an extraordinary, surreal experience. At one point Cardiff hooligans were negotiating with local idiots to have a fight in Red Square. At the match, we had to barge policemen out of the way to enter the terrace. It was relentlessly crazy – just read Darren Tandy’s amazing tale below to get a sense of what life there is like. Here’s my piece which was first published on the Bobbing Along website:
Continue reading Extreme noise terror – Russia 0 Wales 0 (2003)
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Atletico look like a reasonable long shot for La Liga.
In some ways they are the best team in Spain. ‘Team’ in the sense of a collective effort and making the most of every talent they have.
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Not so much a football match as an outbreak of naked class war.
Rich v poor, city slickers v working class, left wing v right wing. In Spain, supporting a club is often a loaded political stance. Think of Barcelona’s ‘Mas que un club’. This was no different.
Before the match, the Rayo Ultras – known as Bukaneros – unveiled a giant banner that covered the entire Fondo Sur. It read: ‘Somos pobre como orgullo con cojones como punos’ – ‘We are poor, but proud, with testicles like fists’.
Continue reading Hasta la victoria siempre – Rayo Vallecano 2 Real Madrid 3
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