Players in tears before games, one match interrupted by three hours in air raid bunker
Twice displaced by Putin’s wars, but Shakhtar still fighting hard on field to make Ukraine proud
YOU might not think it from his upbeat demeanour, but Igor Jovicevic has endured a tumultous 12 months since the war broke out in Ukraine. When the first Russian tanks rolled in on February 24, the Croat made a dash for the border, travelling 60 hours by road to reach his home city of Zagreb whilst witnessing ‘chaotic’ devastation en route.
Then the manager of Dnipro, he accepted a new job with Shakhtar when Ukraine’s domestic football restarted in the summer, leaving him with the formidable task of rebuilding the team denuded of its 14 foreign players.
In the intervening seven months, he has managed a club trying to survive amid all the restrictions of war, among them air raids, blackouts and curfews, as well as the terrible uncertainty about loved ones’ well-being. Reflecting on this experience from a hotel in Turkey, where Shakhtar are completing winter training, it is impressive to find the 49-year-old so energised about the resumption of their season.
‘It’s because we know for who we are playing,’ he says, on a video call with The Mail on Sunday lasting nearly an hour. ‘My players and I understand we are playing for the Ukraine people. We want to make them proud, from deep in our hearts, [just as] they make us proud, fighting for our freedom. We have a synergy with each other and we keep going with this emotion.’
Jovicevic could easily have chosen to stay with his wife and two sons in Croatia, but the prospect of helping Ukraine ‘from the inside’ was too strong to resist. Especially when Shakhtar offered him the opportunity to replace Roberto De Zerbi, giving him with the opportunity to test himself in the Champions League for the first time.
FIFA’s decision to allow foreign players to leave Ukraine clubs without a transfer fee meant Jovicevic lost all the club’s foreign legion, including 12 Brazilians and Manor Solomon, an Israeli, to Fulham.
By then the club’s recruitment department numbered only two scouts, but the task still emboldened the new coach. He knew the domestic game well enough to recruit some of its best homegrown players and was encouraged by the prospect of working with Shakhtar’s own crop of emerging talent, not least Mykhailo Mudryk, Chelsea’s recent £88million recruit.
‘I knew it would be a big challenge,’ he says. ‘But at that moment, I didn’t feel fear. I was convinced that they were talented young guys [at Shakhtar]. I had been hearing about them for years before.’
Elite athletes were exempted from both the national conscription and the law banning men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country, but every club except Dnipro chose to remain in Ukraine.
Sides based close to the worst fighting, like Kharviv’s Metalist and Chornomorets Odessa, relocated to the west of the country.
The most popular destination was Uzhhorod, close to Slovakia and sheltered by the Carpathian Mountains.
Shakhtar had already been in exile from Donetsk since war broke out in the Donbas in 2014, moving to Lviv and then Kharkiv before settling in Kyiv in 2020. Over the past year, they have played in the capital and trained in Lviv, while playing Champions League ties in Warsaw, travelling 11 hours by coach to Poland to catch flights to away ties as Ukraine airspace is closed.
Such exertions hardly told on his team. Sticking to a carefully organised 4-3-3 and playing with the same attacking intent that De Zerbi’s Brighton have shown, they opened their European campaign with a remarkable 4-1 victory away to RB Leipzig, an achievement that Jovicevic puts down to ‘not wanting to disappoint 45 million people’.
In October, they hosted holders Real Madrid. On the day before the match, Russia launched a brutal assault on Kiev. Jovicevic woke up to discover his players in tears, unable to locate loved ones who had taken refuge in shelters without access to the internet.
‘At breakfast, all my players were reading the news, crying. I was crying. It was a catastrophic.’ He shelved his plans for the day.
‘Imagine the emotion of the team. And I must speak about tactics? It’s impossible. I could say nothing to them, but you know what? We played the best match ever. Because the emotion, it was up here.’
He gestures to a point above his head. ‘We were fighting for our country. We are fighting for all their families. It is like the Ukraine people will never accept the defeat, so we couldn’t accept defeat.’
Antonio Rudiger equalised for Real in stoppage time though boss Carlo Ancelotti conceded his side deserved to lose. Shakhtar ended third in the group, putting them in the Europa League, an improvement on last season. They will host Rennes on Thursday night.
Jovecevic is rightly proud. ‘For this generation, the new Shakhtar, it is unbelievable. It shows you that sometimes in football, money is not important to make success.’
Shakhtar have suffered bereavements. A youth coach was killed within a fortnight of the first Russian invasion. Ivan Petryak, their experienced midfielder, lost his father-in-law in May after the 48-year-old rejected the family’s appeals not to take up arms.
Air-raid sirens sound as soon as a missile is launched from enemy territory and sometimes force the squad to take cover several times a day. When one match against Oleksandriya was halted, players spent three hours beneath ground without electricity before completing the game.
Such an imposition hardly compares to life on the front line of course, not when players used the winter break to complete a training camp on Turkey’s south coast, safe from the destruction wreaked by last week’s earthquake. But Jovicevic admits the pressure can get to him, particularly when live streams of games provide Ukrainians with a brief distraction from war.
‘It’s not nice at these times. It’s difficult to control your emotions, but you’re playing football in the
All my players were reading the news and crying. It was catastrophic
I have power and strength, but I can’t see light at the end of the tunnel
territory of Ukraine and you’re sending the message that life is going on. Maybe for 90, 95 minutes the people forget their problems. It helps them feel alive.’
Shakhtar will restart the domestic league in second place, behind Dnipro. Runners-up spot would grant Shakhtar another crack at the Champions League, but Jovicevic prefers not to think too far into the future when the situation on the ground remains grim.
‘I have strength, I have power,’ he says. ‘But I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel between Ukraine and Russia. I don’t see the solution. It’s impossible to completely [conquer] all of Ukraine. It’s like in chess when no side can win, and people are suffering. We’re just trying with football to give them a little bit of happiness.’