EUROPA FACTIFLE: DYNAMO KYIV

Dynamo Kyiv - a colossus of a club in both the Soviet and the post-Soviet eras which produced sides that were among the very best in Europe - the legendary coach Valeriy Lobonovsky (VLB) whom I quoted in a previous article, and of course generations of excellent players who were taught the doctrine of collective discipline and effort (one wonders whether RLB has been channeling Lobonovsky this season?).

Andriy Shevchencko and Sergiy Rebrov were two outstanding players who came to England at their peak in the 2000s but (sadly) ended up playing for a pair of London clubs Sunderland disposed of this season in order to qualify for Europe.

Prior to their Premier League spells, the on-field partnership of Shevchenko and Rebrov at Dinamo captured the essence of a culturally and linguistically diverse country that was essentially living in peace with its neighbours - Shevchenko came from Kyiv Oblast and Rebrov grew up in the Donetsk mining town of Horlivka, now one of the main vectors of Russian attacks during this unending war.

Shevchenko naturally played for Dynamo Kyiv from the start, while Rebrov, the older of the two strikers, had played a season at Shakhtar Donetsk before signing for Dynamo. A season later, the younger Shevchenko would join him and the rest was history.

Against a bleak backdrop of war and with their country threatened with total destruction, Shevchenko and Rebrov would then face what was undoubtedly their greatest challenge - fielding a national team in Euro 2024. Their team made it onto the field, and in doing so elevated the plight of Ukraine into the consciousness of the millions of football fans watching around the world.

Coming from the north-east, with our own proud tradition of football, built amid the adversity of modern industrial capitalism and therefore steeped in the durability, passion and vitality of our communities, I was naturally curious to listen to the footballing stories in Ukraine and in particular to hear about football in the Donbas which consists of Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts or regions - a bit like the pre-Thatcher north-east but on steroids - a huge, dense, dirty, labyrinthine industrial, urban and even maritime complex, in which villages and towns are set incongruously among quiet undulating hills, towering slag heaps and flat open fields interrupted by occasional dense thickets of trees. Hard to imagine now we have all seen the drone footage over the cities whose mines and steelworks have been annihilated through war not politics - like Mariupol, Pokrovsk, Toretsk and Bakhmut.

Once this region generated a vast proportion of Ukraine’s national income, and gave rise to industrial oligarchs - each the modern Ukrainian equivalent of a Lord Londonderry or Duke of Northumberland - who largely unlike our aristocracy went and invested considerable wealth in Donbas football clubs whose players in turn brought Ukrainian football into the European consciousness.

On one of my trips to Ukraine in 2023, I was lucky enough to meet one of the original architects of Donbas football: none other than the former owner of Metallurh Donetsk.

Growing up in Mariupol, he originally trained as an engineer and rose to the top of the pole at Azovstal, while entertaining dual passions for skiing and cycling, both of which he indulged as a rather modest but clearly elite athlete.

Somewhat later, he acquired the ownership of Azovstal and built it into the giant citadel-steelworks. Eventually, he was wealthy enough to buy a local football club, Metallurh, who played their football in Donetsk city - in the intimidating shadow of their wealthy rivals Shakhtar.

Unfortunately, though, Metallurh were locked in what can only be described as an unrelenting Samuel Beckett situation vis-a-vis Shakhtar - and it was slightly worse and more surreal for their fanbase to watch them struggle in the Derby than if Jean-Paul Sartre had brought his latest theatrical play to town for an endless run. The 18 meetings between the teams in the so-called Donbas Derby, an event which in itself could require contingents of UN peacekeepers, resulted in 18 straight defeats for lowly Metalurh. All in all, my friend in Ukraine had a worse track record than Mike Ashley and the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund and all their glittering entourage of princes (and Princess Shearer) combined.

And to add insult to the many injuries incurred on the field, in an infamous act of crossing club boundaries (with which we are familiar in the north-east), Metalurh’s rising star Henrikh Mkhitaryan, just one season after transferring to Metallurh from his native Armenia, traitorously signed for Shakhtar - where he went on to star in their Champions League campaigns before moving to Serie A and then Liverpool in the English Premier League.

No disruption for Metallurh, who were eventually evacuated to Dnipropetrovsk in 2014 but Shakhtar are still a prominent club. Yet over and above them and every other Ukrainian or former Soviet club loom Dinamo Kyiv.

It was a dream (in vain) of mine in the early 2000s that Sunderland, approaching a disruptive apogee under Peter Reid would get to play Shakhtar Donetsk or Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk in the UEFA Cup (the latter being not strictly part of Donbas, but close enough). But now, here we are - and I’d love it if we are drawn against Dynamo Kyiv. RLB v VLB will be quite the two legged football feast.