Football, memories and footballing memories
This isn’t
In other words, dear readers, whether you like football or not – and I know many of you don’t - please read on. It’s more personal than just being about football. There won’t be any talk of tactics, strategies and languid descriptions of goals, just a meandering ditty about the small role football has played in my life.
7 July 2011: I spent the evening, well over 2 hours, glued to Uefa.com, watching online live ‘commentary’ of a 1st qualifying round Europa League match between Glentoran and FK Renova. A sad way to spend a Thursday evening? Probably. Even sadder that I was sitting here an absolute nervous wreck, biting my finger nails, downing gin and tonics (with good reason, more in a minute) and praying that the result would go my way.
Before going on as to why this match was so important, I really have to provide a brief, grossly simplified explanation of these preliminary qualifying rounds. Football aficionados may cringe at the simplicity and oversights, but I don’t want to bore anyone further. (yeah, right…)
There are 2 major European competitions, the Champions League (for the elite teams, your Man Uniteds, Barcelonas, etc) and the Europa League (for the next tier of ‘elite’, your Fulhams, Paris Saint Germains, Atletico Madrids). In early July, the qualifying rounds of these competitions start. If you are a good side, like Man United, you automatically go into the lucrative group stages that start in September. If you’re the champions of San Marino, you start 4 potential rounds of qualifying in late June, thus potentially having to play 8 matches (home and away legs against 4 teams) just to get to the group stages. Teams like this never make it to the group stages, they usually get clobbered in the first round by the champions of Finland or Iceland. Depending on how elite your league and position in the league table is determines in which qualifying round you enter the competition. Arsenal, for example, finished 4th last season, but only have to face a 2-legged playoff in late August to get to the group stages.
We’re focusing here on the Europa League. Winning that is still an impressive feat, but it’s the poor man’s Champions League. But what’s fun and interesting about it is that this is where you get to see some of Europe’s less established sides – often those from Eastern Europe – make a dent in the competition. Shakhtar Donetsk, CSKA Moscow and Zenit St Petersburg have won it in years past, and Fulham reached the final 2 seasons ago.
Now, here’s where I divulge just how sad I really am. When the draws for the qualifying rounds are made, I pore over all of the fixtures looking for names I recognise, looking at all of the matchups, working out all the possible permutations for future rounds. And here is where I wish I had some companion who would be willing to play this game with me: I love looking at fixtures with teams I’ve never heard of and trying to guess which countries they are from. Why don’t we play right now?
Banants v Metalurgi Rustavi
Banga v Qarabag
Varazdin v Lusitans
Ferencvaros v Ulisses
Renova v Glentoran
In some cases, this is simply a geography lesson. In the first fixture, anyone with a decent knowledge of the Caucasus would know that Rustavi is in Georgia. That’s an easy one. The trickier ones are when teams have names that don’t correspond with the city where they are based. How is anyone to know that Qarabag is from Baku? (other than me and similar sad cases). And then there’s Ferencvaros, though to the uninitiated a tricky case as well, the legendary Budapest club.
As for the last one, that was the match I had my eye on: Renova, from Macedonia (I didn’t know that) versus Glentoran, from east Belfast (I obviously knew that).
Glentoran are a team of part-time players. Though they were a more professional outfit in bygone years (they fared so-so in European competition in the 1950s, 60s and 70s), these days they almost never progress beyond the first qualifying round. Almost all of the teams they face are full-time professionals. At the moment, all Glentoran players either have second jobs, or try and make ends meet with whatever meagre wages they earn.
Though I can’t find the exact information to verify this, I believe that in the past 25 or so years, they’ve failed to advance beyond the first qualifying round of either major competition. This has never been much of a surprise. In fact, whenever I’ve looked at Glentoran’s fixtures in the past, my reaction was nothing more than mild curiosity as to the identity of their opponents. When I checked the results and saw that they’d inevitably lost, I would merely shrug with indifference.
So what made this year’s fixture so different? Why did I suddenly care so much that I wasted a couple of agonizing hours nervously watching online text (for example: 50' Boyce (Glentoran) has a shot blocked…54' Ismaili (Renova) misses the target… thrilling stuff)? For two reasons. Number one, their potential 2nd round opponent was Vorskla Poltava – Poltava is a mere 4-5 hours from Kyiv by train and I was determined to see them. And two, the date: 7 July.
In some of my more existential posts, I’ve crapped on about the themes of ‘home’ and ‘identity’. And although I briefly mentioned some of the places I grew up, I hardly discussed the importance of Belfast in my upbringing. Belfast has always been the closest thing I had to a ‘home’. It was/has been the only constant in my life, the one place, the one house, that I returned to year after year. I first went to school there as a wee nipper, and it was where my Granny lived for just about all of my existence. It was also instrumental in my development as a football fan.
But how’s this for a shocking revelation: in the beginning, I barely liked football at all. In fact, I used to be dragged reluctantly to matches. Just across the road from my Granny’s house – 13 Dundela Avenue – was Wilgar Park, the home of Dundela FC. You could see just about the entire pitch from her bedroom window and I’d often sit on her ottoman watching. If Glentoran are part-time, then Dundela are even more part-time. The keeper might be the local butcher and the star striker might also double as east Belfast’s resident plumber. Most of the players probably earned around 25 pounds a match if they won, nothing if they lost. That was their incentive. ‘Tickets’ were 1-2 pounds (which is the same price for some current Ukrainian top division teams, bizarrely enough).
I went to quite a few Dundela matches, mostly with my cousin and uncle. They also took me to my first Glentoran match at the Oval, against their heated rivals Linfield in a tempestuous Boxing Day affair that ended 3-3. Linfield (the Blues) and Glentoran (the Glens) make up the Big Two of Northern Irish clubs. They usually contest the league title though every now and then another club like Portadown or Crusaders (north Belfast) will put up a fight. Linfield is easily the most dominant club, however, and that’s the club that my relatives all support. Me being the contrarian, I automatically adopted Glentoran as my side, though I thought this was more logical anyway: their ground, the Oval, was in east Belfast, barely a 10 minute walk from my Granny’s. Linfield play at Windsor Park, also the home of the Northern Ireland national team, which is much further away, on the other side of Belfast. Over the years, I’ve attended plenty of matches at both stadia, but it’s fair to say that I’ve seen Glentoran play more often than any other team from any other country. They’ve been the side I’ve most consistently ‘supported’ over the years, even if most of the time I couldn’t name more than 2 or 3 of their players. More significant than my support of Glentoran, perhaps, has been the role that their iconic ground, the Oval, has played in my memory. So often I’d go for walks in the park near the grounds, staring off into the distance at the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding cranes, nicknamed Samson and Goliath, landmarks which are famous for building, among other mighty ships, the Titanic.
Unfortunately, all of my pictures pre-date the digital camera era and are tucked away in drawers thousands of miles away, but here are some photos of the Oval. Wilgar Park, sadly, is nowhere to be found online. For more photos of the Oval (and lots of other stadia from around the world), look here.
the Oval, and the view from my walks
Suffice to say that Glentoran and the Oval are full of precious memories, and 7 July brought back floods of emotions and waves of nostalgia of years past. I’m not a huge believer in signs, but I did think that the date was a significant sign of sorts. My Granny died on 7 July 2006, so this match was taking part on the 5-year anniversary. Not that she was a Glentoran supporter or anything, but she loved hearing my tales of the matches I went to and played a formative role in my upbringing. She would have undoubtedly been delighted that I would be getting to see the Glens play in Ukraine – what are the chances I ever foresaw such a thing happening in my lifetime?
Hence the reason for my angst and nerves over seemingly dull online commentary. Much more was at stake here. And I wasn’t quaffing gin and tonics to ease my nerves. Every 7 July, as a tribute to my Granny I always drink either a G&T – one of her all-time favourite tipples – or Tia Maria, which is awfully hard to come by in Eastern Europe.
The 1st leg, in Macedonia, finished 2-1 to Renova, a tremendous result considering the Glens finished with 9 men and with a defender playing in goal for the final few minutes. In the 2nd leg, the Glens were up 1-0 for a while (putting them through 2-2 on aggregate, due to away goals counting double) before Renova equalised, putting them ahead 3-2. I started getting even more anxious. More than the damn memories, I wanted to go to Poltava to see the Glens in action. I faced an agonising wait for a 2nd goal…and it finally came, in dramatic fashion: 74' Murray (Glentoran) scores! (exclamation point not mine) Well, that’s as dramatic as Uefa.com commentary gets. But it meant that at 2-1 up, the tie was now level at 3-3. Extra time loomed.
And so it was 30 more minutes of nail-biting, which called for another G&T (the intention is to honour my Granny’s memory with 1 drink, not to get sozzled with multiple drinks, even if that’s what she did in her later years). If neither team were to score in extra time, then it was down to the cruelest of sporting finales, the lottery of penalties.
And of course, penalties is what we got. At this point my stomach was in knots and I was shaking. I’m not kidding. And this is what I had to endure:
Murray (Glentoran) misses from the penalty spot.
Simovski (Renova) scores from the penalty spot.
Waterworth (Glentoran) scores from the penalty spot.
The delay between updates was killing me.
Statovci (Renova) misses from the penalty spot.
At this point, they were even. The next kick would be crucial.
Hill (Glentoran) scores from the penalty spot.
The Glens were 3-2 up. Renova had 1 penalty to go. They score, and we are into sudden-death kicks.
Waiting…waiting…waiting…
And then…
Gafuri (Renova) misses from the penalty spot.
The penalties are over.
I couldn’t believe it. My eyes misted up. I ran around the room celebrating, fist-pumping and badge-kissing. I was fairly tipsy, mind, but still, I couldn’t control my emotions. The Glens had somehow pulled it off, against the odds. And now I would get to see them play. It would like a tiny part of east Belfast being transported, for 90-odd minutes anyway, to east Ukraine. Hell, I might be the only Glentoran supporter in attendance. I’m wondering whether it’s safe to wear my Glentoran or Northern Ireland top. Probably not.
(Another thought that occurred to me, after I had sobered up a bit: was I the only person in the world following this online commentary? Any Glentoran supporters in the UK who weren’t at the match could have listened on BBC Ulster, which I couldn’t pick up that night. Any Renova supporters would have probably had their own radio broadcast. How many Glentoran supporters elsewhere in the world were following this as closely as I was? I wish there were figures to record this type of thing.)
Enough with the memories, on with the football, and my upcoming travel plans in brief (it starts to get a bit more football-heavy now, but by all means, read on!)
By most accounts, Vorskla Poltava are not a great side. They finished 6th last season, becoming the final team from Ukraine to qualify for European competition. If the Glens could get by Renova, I thought they had half a chance to get past Vorskla. Sadly, my travels may be all for naught: Vorskla won the first leg 2-0 at the Oval this past Thursday, meaning the Glens have a massive mountain to climb. They obviously have to score at least 2 goals, probably as many as 3, just to advance. As for their potential 3rd round opponents? That’s one road trip I won’t be making: they would face the Republic of Ireland’s Sligo Rovers. At least it would be a short road trip for their supporters.
Being the ‘devoted’ fan that I am, I’ll be heading just up the road Sunday to watch Obolon Kyiv play Vorskla. Consider it a scouting mission.
But there’s a 2nd motive in going to watch Obolon play. I can tick them off the list of stadia I want to visit. For after arriving in Ukraine, I decided that one of my projects/goals was to attend matches in as many different cities as possible. Thus far, I’ve only been to three different stadia: Lviv and two in Kyiv (Dynamo and the Olympic Stadium).
This is no mean feat. Ukraine is a damn big country, and realistically, I probably won’t make it to a match in every city. But I at least want to visit the stadia of the major teams (in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk) to start with.
Now, as much as I love watching sports, I have a slightly funny or unorthodox approach when it comes to watching them live. This might border on the contradictory, but bear with me. To a certain extent, there is something to be said about the ‘atmosphere’ of a sporting event. To go to an English Premier League match and listen to the passionate supporters launching into song and the absence of any artificial stadium noise being pumped in through the loudspeakers is truly an experience to behold. Likewise, for me, attending matches in small venues in the middle of nowhere is part of the appeal. Let’s be honest: in many cases, I’m not going for the quality of the football. When I went with some friends a few years ago to see a 2nd division Prague side play, none of us were there for the brilliant displays: we were there to sit in the gorgeous spring sunshine, drink high-quality cheap beer and relax in the company of some 150-200 other people. Oh, was there a football match going on? I for one took little notice of any tactics.
When it comes to major sporting competitions or a significantly important event, I’d rather watch it on television. I’m glad I had the opportunity to go to 5 matches during the 2006 World Cup in Germany (an experience where I can say once was enough), but my biggest complaint over 2+ weeks of travelling was that, ironically enough, I missed too many matches. With live events, you don’t have the benefit of replay, you can’t analyse what’s going on to the same extent, and it’s more about taking in the atmosphere.
This is why I would much rather attend the matches of small teams in central and eastern Europe. Yeah, it might be nice to see England play in a sold-out Wembley against decent opposition, but I get so much more excited over the prospect of watching Northern Ireland play Slovakia in Bratislava in a World Cup qualifier (Sept 2008), even if the stadium was not even half full.
You call that a stadium? Olimps (Riga) v Daugava, Latvian league match, Nov 2007
Here’s my litmus test: if I deem a match worthy of watching on TV, then I probably don’t want to go to that match, with one or two exceptions of course. But would I actually watch on TV a lot of these more obscure European matches I like attending? Uh, I better not answer that. We’ll say no, just to keep this somewhat consistent.
In around 10 days’ time, I’m setting off on a month-long jaunt around eastern and central Europe and down into the Balkans, culminating with a week in Greece. I’m travelling solo for the first 2 weeks before meeting up with Dr Wasabi Islam in Budapest on 11 August. The tentative plan is for me to head west to Lviv, and then over into Slovakia and Hungary for some quiet time in the mountains and hills before a frenetic trip with Dr Islam from Budapest-Zagreb-Dubrovnik-Mostar-Sarajevo-Belgrade in just 9 days. I’ve spent hours – I kid you not – scouring all of the leagues in these necks of the woods and compiling a list of potential matches to attend. This includes not only league matches, most of which are kicking off right around now, but Europa League and Champions League qualifying. I had planned to head to Poland for a match, but I’ll save that for another journey.
My point is this: I’m basically planning my first couple of weeks around football. If I see a match in a certain city (Kosice v Zlate Moravce on 6 August, for example), then I tentatively plan to be in said city on said date, and work my way around that.
This has gone on way too long. I think I meant to say more about Belfast and growing up but went on a bit of a tangent (for a change!).
Appendix A
Definite upcoming matches:
17 July: Obolon Kyiv v Vorskla
21 July: Vorskla v Glentoran
26 July: Dynamo Kyiv v Rubin Kazan (Champions League 3rd round qualifying)
28 July: Karpaty Lviv v Shakhtar Karagandy (Kazakhstan) or St Patrick’s (Ireland) (Europa League 3rd round qualifying)
Potential matches during my travels: way too many to count here. I’ll recount those later, as and when they do happen.
Appendix B
Despite Glentoran’s lowly status in comparison to the world’s elite teams, their striker Matty Burrows found himself rubbing shoulders with the world’s greats – Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, et al – not long ago as his stunning goal in an Irish League match last season was one of the finalists for Fifa Goal of the Year. Quite an accomplishment for a part-timer who has recently announced he’s leaving Glentoran for a move to Spain. Not necessarily to play football (for now), mind. But at the ripe old age of 27, perhaps he thinks that his footballing prospects are limited.
Regardless of whether you like football or not, have a look at his unbelievable goal. Even more impressive is the fact that it came in the 92 minute and was the decider in an absolutely crucial match. Ronaldo himself said he didn’t think even he was capable of pulling off something like this:
Appendix C
This might be a stretch, but below are highlights of Glentoran’s epic win over Renova. If anything, it’s worth watching for just a minute or two to catch a glimpse of the Oval, as well as the Harland & Wolff cranes in the background.
Glentoran v Renova, 7 July 2011
Glentoran v Renova, 7 July 2011
Appendix D
This is just comical. It’s the wrap-up of the second leg of Glentoran v Renova from the Vorskla website. I’m guessing they used Google translate for this, but either way, it’s so painfully bad that it’s funny:
Difficult match with a dramatic denouement over in the capital of Northern Ireland. Losing the first leg 1-2 in Skopje, the "Glentoran" had excellent chances to go further. To do this would be enough, and one goal scored, but that's missing in this case it was impossible. At the 31st minute, Clark led the home team ahead, and this effect remained until the break. At the 59th minute, "Renova" efforts Ismaili result equalized, and Murray on 74th scored for "Glen s" - 2:1, and there were two extra-half, in which no one has failed to distinguish himself. In the penalty shoot-out several times wrong ones and others, but have scored the decisive goal from a mark of the Hill and miss the Macedonian Gafuri. Thus, on July 14 "Vorskla" will play first game of the second qualifying round in Belfast, and waits for the return leg of the Poltava 21th. Appendix E
As you can imagine, the spell-check on this post took bloody ages!
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