While the Shakhtar Donetsk first team, and the Ukrainian Premier League at large, had conceived an improvised finish to 2013–14, the under-19 and under-21 seasons had just stopped. There needed to be a plan to resume for the following campaign and it was far from straightforward.
“The city was already taken by the separatists,” Miguel Cardoso, Shakhtar’s under-21 head coach and youth academy coordinator, says. “I went to Kyiv and far from home I discussed the situation with Sergei [Palkin, Shakhtar’s CEO]. He asked me: ‘Miguel, are you capable of going back to Donetsk?’” The club’s under-19 and under-21 teams were still in Donetsk, ready to begin their season. Cardoso quickly agreed to a task that he knew was big, but didn’t realise quite what an undertaking he had committed to until he was on the road.
“I flew to Kharkiv,” he details, “and went from Kharkiv in a minivan together with my translator and the driver. I went to Donetsk and crossed 14 checkpoints. Fourteen. So I crossed the frontline of the war and I arrived in a ghost city, because Donetsk was a ghost city at that moment. No one on the streets. And for two weeks I coached under-19 teams in the morning, under-21s in the afternoon inside Shakhtar’s academy training ground.”
It was an incredible effort from Cardoso and his staff, all of whom were Ukrainian. “I had not been allowed to bring technical staff with me,” he explains. His job had another aspect – developing coaches. The situation, however, was unsustainable. “During these two weeks, I received many phone calls from the consul of Portugal in Kyiv,” he says. “At that moment, I could hear the bombing, the shelling in the night. It was already clearly war. And after 10 days, I had to leave Donetsk because my consul told me: ‘Miguel, we will inform the Portuguese government that we’re not going to take responsibility for you any more.’ So I called Sergei Palkin and told him: ‘Sergei, I received this phone call, and I need to leave the city.’”
Palkin asked Cardoso to sit tight while he made plans. “So the next day he called me and a convoy was organised with two or three buses [carrying] all the players from the under-19s and under-21s, me and my Ukrainian staff, the medical staff. We had police ahead and behind us. And we travelled around the frontline. We entered Russia. We came back into Ukraine. And we went to a city called Poltava.”
Out of concrete grew roses, as Cardoso is understandably keen to underline. If the first team struggled to adapt, the age-group teams were doing Shakhtar proud. “Let me point out one thing,” he insists, “because this is historical. The year we were in Poltava was the year when the under-19 team went to the final of the [Uefa] Youth League. So the most difficult year of the club was the year the biggest sporting achievement of the academy happened.”
In April 2015, approaching a year since the withdrawal from Donetsk, Shakhtar reached what was essentially an age-group Champions League final. Shakhtar’s youngsters had not lost a single one of their nine games on the way to the final against Chelsea, in which they were edged out 3–2 by a very good side. There were a clutch of recognisable names in the Chelsea lineup, such as Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Andreas Christensen. Tammy Abraham came on as a late substitute. Six of the 11 that started for Chelsea in Nyon on that sunny April afternoon are now regularly playing in Europe’s top leagues, including England, Italy and Spain.
A couple of modern-day Shakhtar regulars played that day too – Mykola Matvienko and Oleksandr Zubkov, who was one of the leading assist-makers in the competition. Andriy Boryachuk and Viktor Kovalenko, now at Empoli in Italy, also played. (Kovalenko came on and scored the goal of the game, even if it turned out only to be a consolation.) The benefits for the club were already clear, but quite how Cardoso put up with the demands on him is a mystery.
“Later on, we were able to start the training sessions from the under-12s to the under-17s.” Those younger boys worked at a training camp in Shchaslyve, a village in the direction of Kyiv’s Boryspil airport, to the city’s south-east, where Shakhtar had begun to set up camp. “During that season, I had to divide my job between coaching the under-21s in Poltava and travelling to Kyiv to coordinate the other groups,” says Cardoso. “So in summer conditions, I was driving by car at least 400km every week. Two days in Kyiv, five days in Poltava. And in winter [I went] by train, travelling with the soldiers, travelling with the spirit of the war. Because this road, Kyiv-Poltava-Kharkiv-Donetsk, is the road that takes people from Kyiv to Donetsk.”
It was the journey that reminded Cardoso of what the club had lost, and how precarious it all was. “Ukraine is very big and when you live in Kyiv and there’s the war in Donetsk, despite you’re living every day with the war you [don’t have to] deal with the war. Poltava was a calm city. There you could not feel it. But when travelling from Kyiv to Poltava, you felt the war. Every day you could feel the war on people’s faces.”
It was most difficult for him and his family immediately after he returned to Donetsk. “I was giving interviews on a regular basis, almost every day for the Portuguese TV. So they [his family] were aware of the situation. It was on the TV everywhere.”
He managed to retain calm. “I never really felt under threat despite the fact I could hear the bombing, despite every day in the evening I had visits from journalists.” He eventually moved to stay in the same accommodation as those journalists, showing him that compartmentalising sport and real life wasn’t really an option. Speaking daily to war reporters, camera operators and photographers deeply affected Cardoso, seeing their indefatigability in the face of extreme difficulty, and their commitment to sending daily reports to their networks.
On a human level, he tells me, “it was an extraordinary experience”. It also gave him the perspective to allay the fears of his family back home, though he frequently passed the message that his posting was temporary, not permanent. “They also knew,” he says, “that Shakhtar would protect me. We knew that we were not targets because we believe that Shakhtar was respected.”
Even if Cardoso dealt with the situation with his degree of sang-froid, something had to give. The plan had never been for the situation to last for that long, with Cardoso and his staff propping it all up. Eventually the whole academy ended up relocating to Shchaslyve. A development project that would normally take several years to plan and build was pulled together in just over 12 months. “The club took control of a full hotel,” Cardoso says. “They took control of the free pitches, so after one year we could be all together again.”
This is an edited extract from We Play On by Andy Brassell (Little, Brown, £22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
