From ruins to World Cup, football’s healing power still at work here
VOLGOGRAD: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
Is it? No, of course not. And yet, yes. Perhaps it is.
Bill Shankly’s famous remark about the meaning of the beautiful game has rarely appeared more challenging than in the geographical setting of an otherwise forgettable 1-0 win for Poland over Japan. A narrow victory for an eliminated team, who, courtesy of results elsewhere, failed to prevent the opposition from progressing to the round of 16, is not the stuff of an all-time classic.
But for at least some of those who travelled to Volgograd to witness the final match of the city, this fixture offered a glimpse of the reconciliatory and unifying power of football.
Decades before Shankly offered his pithy phrase, the future Liverpool manger served as ground crew in the RAF during the Second World War. As conflict raged across Europe, North Africa, Asia, one city endured unparalleled suffering and hardship.
After being heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe, Stalingrad (now Volgograd), a model centre of industry on the banks of the Volga, was fought over bitterly by the Wehrmacht (forces of Nazi Germany) and the Red Army (Soviet force) from July 17, 1942 to Feb. 2, 1943, when the remains of the German Sixth Army surrendered.
Just three months later, Dynamo Stalingrad and Spartak Moscow played “the match in the ruins”, a moraleboosting fixture held at the Azot Stadium, one of the only sporting venues to escape destruction.
Few of the estimated crowd of 9,000 present at that game could imagine, 75 years on, the gleaming new Volgograd Arena, boasting a capacity of 45,000, witnessing Jan Bednarek score the winner for Poland against Blue Samurai.
Coincidentally, this was a game between an ally of the Nazis and Poland, a country that suffered more than almost any other during those dark years.
The venue for such a symbolically powerful contest may be one of the newest and most eye-catching structures in the area, but the Volgograd Arena will forever find itself in the shadow of a neighbouring spectacle. Adjacent to the stadium and rising above it, the memorial ensemble “Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad” is a collection of statues strategically positioned along the climb up Mamayev Kurgan, the highest hill in the city.
In 1983, 40 years after the game that defied the bloodshed and misery of the war, the players who participated in the match between Dynamo and Spartak returned to the city for a reunion at the memorial.
This month, others took the opportunity presented by the World Cup — long a harmonising force crossing cultural and political boundaries impenetrable by other means - to pay their respects to the city’s tragic past.