Kick-off at Shakhtar’s game against Metalist was performed by an injured soldier as a path through the darkness was marked
Early on Tuesday morning, Igor Jovicevic had been jolted from sleep by the air raid alarm. He was far from alone in that and it brought home, in a way that disconcerted him, the jarring contrast with what he was about to face. “You wake up and hear it: siren, siren,” the Shakhtar Donetsk head coach said. “And then you think you’re playing later in the day, coaching the match, wanting to think about tactical aspects. We’re playing football and at the same time we’re fighting to be free men.”
The first game of the 2022-23 season had just passed with little incident, whether in a footballing sense or the one that really mattered. Shakhtar should not normally be held to a goalless home draw by Metalist 1925, but this was no everyday encounter. The real victory here would be in showing that Ukrainian football could thrive again as a symbol of a country’s resistance and regrowth; this was a promising start and, at least on any level discernible to those present, no recourse to the new campaign’s exhaustive security protocols had been required. There will now be justified confidence that a once unthinkable feat can be pulled off.
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