When football meant far more than a game

SIDELINE CUT:The heroic deeds of a group of footballers from Kiev still symbolise the historic suffering of the Ukrainian people during the second World War, writes KEITH DUGGAN

ONE THING is beyond dispute: it was the bravest football match ever played. In the decades since, the details of the game and its dark aftermath has inspired several versions and the courage of the players is symbolised in a simple memorial that will be seen by the tens of thousands of foreign visitors who visit the Start stadium in Kiev over the coming weeks.

While accounts differ about the precise details of the match – and as to what happened the football players – it is generally agreed that 70 years ago this summer, on a broiling afternoon on August 9th, 1942, when second World War atrocities had occurred in most cities across Europe, a football team from Kiev cobbled together from the banned Dynamo side met a selection of players from the German Luftwaffe for a challenge game.

Football was encouraged in the city as a way of hastening a sense of normality and the FC Start team had seen off all comers in the local league. The theory behind the challenge was that the German soldiers team – Flakelf – would win the match but it didn’t work out like that. The Kiev side, FC Start, were reduced to ten men – there are no substitutes – when one of their number suffered a broken leg. Nonetheless, they are clearly superior and are leading 2-1 at the break.

According to one version of events, a German official visited the dressing rooms and told the Start players that, while they had played well, they had to lose the match and that they would face execution if they disobeyed the instruction. Instead, they scored three more goals in the second half, to the delight of a local support for whom life had become a monotonous series of brutalities under the Nazi regime.

Incensed, another match was organised: professional footballers were drafted in from Berlin and SS troops patrolled a raucous, expectant stadium. Again, the Kiev team wins, this time 5-3. After that, facts become hazy. Did Klimenko, the Start defender, really bedazzle the German back line until he reached the goal line when the score was 5-3 before contemptuously declining the open goal and kicking the ball back towards the centre circle?

It seems more suited to the script of Escape To Victory. In the jubilant aftermath, when Kiev locals flood onto the pitch, it is thought three of the players had the presence of mind to take advantage of the confusion and just vanish into thin air and that they would survive the war as a consequence.

Equally, it has been established that nine of the players were arrested a week later and that one died in custody. It has also been established that three others were shot in a Kiev concentration camp but whether their killing was to avenge the humiliation on the football field or for some other misdemeanour is open to interpretation. One of the legends is that the goalkeeper, Nikolai Trusevich, shouted out a Soviet rallying cry moments before his execution.

Rumours would persist for years afterwards that the Germans insisted on a third match and were beaten 8-0 for their troubles in that game. But that seems too fantastic. Like millions of other Ukrainians, it was probably inevitable that some of the heroes of that match met with terrible, violent endings.

It’s estimated that ten million Ukrainians – half of the Soviet total – died in the war. Those unfathomably vast numbers of people make it impossible to think in terms of individual lives but because of that football match, the names of a handful of men from Kiev have been singled out and remembered.

In the years afterwards, stories of the heroic players inspired subsequent generations of Russians and the story and its 70th anniversary coincides with Ukraine’s role in hosting the European championships.

The mythology of the game features briefly and stirringly in HHhH, the riveting new novel by Laurent Binet about the Czech plot to assassinate the notorious Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. And in April, a film about the day – The Match – was scheduled for release in Ukraine but approval was deferred and now, it may never be screened in the city where it is located. The fear was that the film would cause internal tension as the heroes in the film all speak Russian while those who collaborate with the Nazi regime are depicted to be Ukrainian and speak Ukrainian.

The other concern was that the film could provoke hostile sentiment when the German team plays in Ukraine in a few weeks’ time. The film was Russian-funded and, by all accounts, is an unabashed tale of the one of the most revered examples of loyalty to the ‘Motherland’.

When the film was premiered in Kiev, it was met with local protests. Igor Miroshnichenko, a journalist and activist, said the film “offends Ukrainian honour and attaches Soviet myth to us Ukrainians”. “There was no death match. It’s a fabrication of Muscovite propaganda, of Soviet agitprop.”

The film can be added to the litany of problems which continue to overshadow Ukraine’s attempt to portray itself in a positive light through the European championships.

The jailing of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko is the most blatant offence to western sensibilities and human rights activists. Beneath that is the failure to seize the opportunity of Euro 2012 in the way that was envisaged when Tymoshenko led the Orange Revolution: that the city of Kiev and the country in general would, for the first time since Soviet occupation, show itself as a welcoming, functioning society.

Instead, stories of black market hotel prices and poor infrastructure have led to entirely negative publicity about the Ukraine.

The comments made on the BBC show Panorama by Sol Campbell, the black England player who warned fans not to travel to Euro 2012 as they “might come back in a coffin” were made in response to a documentary he was shown which highlighted instances of racism at games in both host countries.

So both fans and teams alike are heading to Kiev, Donetsk, Lviv and Kharkov expecting the worst and it was probably inevitable that the black romance of a 70-year, unofficial football match should infuse and colour the attitudes of the day.

But still, the football fans will arrive in Kiev in their thousands and they will stop and look at the sculpture outside the old Zenit stadium and some might hear about this game for the first time. In the end, the truth of the so-called ‘death match’ and whether or not it was decorated and exaggerated until it became a symbolic stand against the whole monstrous Nazi regime is not the point.

The important thing is that during the dark midway-point summer of the second World War, this football match took place and a team of men from Kiev allowed the rest of the world to fall away and just played the game, heedless of the consequences. And that, for a single afternoon, the besieged city had something to celebrate.

The best that Ukraine can hope for now is that the football played in its cities this summer can dispense some of that magic dust.