In this excerpt from his new book, Andy Brassell speaks with Miguel Cardoso, who continued to coach academy players in Ukraine during the war in Donbass.
While Shakhtar Donetsk’s first team and the Ukrainian Premier League as a whole had devised an impromptu end to the 2013-2014 season, the U-19 and U-21 seasons had come to a halt. We had a recovery plan for the next crusade and so it was. It’s not easy.
“The city was a position taken by the separatists,” said Miguel Cardoso, Shakhtar’s U21 head coach and youth academy coordinator. “I went to Kyiv and, away from home, I discussed the situation with Sergei [Palkin, the Shakhtar coach. “CEO]. He asked me, ‘Miguel, can you go back to Donetsk?’ The club’s U19 and U21 teams were still in Donetsk, ready to start their season. Cardoso temporarily took on a task he knew would be great, but he didn’t know which company he’d signed up for until he was on the road.
“I flew to Kharkiv,” he says, “and left Kharkiv in a minibus with my translator and driver. I went to Donetsk and passed through 14 checkpoints. So I crossed the front line of the war and came to a ghost. “There was no one on the street. And for two weeks I coached under-19 groups in the morning and under-21 groups in the afternoon at the Shakhtar Academy educational ground.
It was an effort by Cardoso and his team, all Ukrainians. “I wasn’t allowed to bring technical staff with me,” he explains. Another facet of his job was to exercise the coaches. But the scenario was unsustainable. ” For two weeks, I received a lot of phone calls from the Portuguese consul in Kyiv,” he said. “At that time, maybe I only heard the shelling, the shelling at night. Obviously it was already war. And after 10 days, I had to leave Donetsk because my consul told me, “Miguel, we will tell the Portuguese government that we are no longer going to work for you. So I called Sergei Palkin and said, ‘Sergei, I got this phone call and I have to get out of town.
Palkin asked Cardoso to remain seated while he made plans. “So the next day he called me and a convoy was organised with two or three buses [carrying] all the under-19 and under-21 players, me and my Ukrainian staff. , medical staff. We had the police in front of us and us. And we went along the front line. We went into Russia, we went back to Ukraine, and we went to a village called Poltava.
Roses were born from cement, as Cardoso is willing to point out, and rightly so. While the first team struggled to adapt, the age groups made Shakhtar proud. “Let me underline one thing,” he insists, “because this is historic. The year we were in Poltava was the year the U19 team qualified for the [UEFA] Youth League final. The most complicated year for the club was the year in which the academy’s greatest sporting fortune occurred.
In April 2015, almost a year after taking off from Donetsk, Shakhtar reached what was necessarily a Champions League final in their category. Shakhtar’s teenagers had not lost a single one of their nine games before the final against Chelsea, in which they were beaten 3-2 through a very smart team. There were a handful of recognisable names in Chelsea’s line-up, such as Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Andreas Christensen. Tammy Abraham arrived as a belated replacement. Six of the 11 who made their Chelsea debuts in Nyon on that sunny April afternoon are now regular players in Europe’s more sensible leagues, including England, Italy and Spain.
That day also featured some regulars from the current Shakhtar: Mykola Matvienko and Oleksandr Zubkov, one of the main passers in the competition. Andriy Boryachuk and Viktor Kovalenko, now at Empoli in Italy, also played. (Kovalenko came on and scored the game’s goal, though it turned out to be only a consolation. ) The benefits to the club were already clear, but how Cardoso coped with the demands placed on him remains a mystery.
“Later, we were going to start with education from the under-12s to the under-17s. “The children were running at an educational camp in Shchaslyve, a village on the way to Kyiv’s Boryspil airport, southeast of the city, where Shakhtar had been stranded. “During this season, I had to divide my paintings between educating the under-21s in Poltava and going to Kyiv to coordinate the other groups,” Cardoso said. “So, in summer conditions, I would drive at least 400km every week. Two days in Kiev, five days in Poltava. And in winter I took the train, I traveled with the soldiers, I traveled in the spirit of war. Because this Kiev-Poltava-Kharkiv-Donetsk road “is the road that leads other people from Kiev to Donetsk. “
It was this vacation that reminded Cardoso of what the club had lost and how precarious everything was. “Ukraine is very big and when you live in Kyiv and there is war in Donetsk, even if you live with war every day, you don’t have to deal with war. Poltava was a quiet city. You may not feel it there. But when you travel from Kyiv to Poltava, you might feel the war. Every day, you can feel the war on people’s faces.
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It is very complicated for him and his family immediately after his return to Donetsk. ” He gave interviews regularly, almost every day, for Portuguese television. So they [his family] were aware of the situation. all over the TV.
He managed to keep his composure. ” I never felt threatened, not even even though I heard the shelling and even though the hounds visited me each and every night. “He eventually moved into the same house as the hounds. , showing him that compartmentalizing sport and real life was not an option. Speaking daily with war reporters, cameramen and photographers made a deep impression on Cardoso, seeing his tireless skill in the face of extreme hardship and his commitment to sending every day. Inform your networks.
On a human level, he tells me, “it was a normal experience. ” It also gave him a chance to allay the fears of his family circle back home, although he conveyed the message that his assignment was temporary and not permanent. “They also knew,” he says, “that Shakhtar would protect me. We knew we weren’t goals because we thought Shakhtar were respected.
Although Cardoso treated the scenario with composure, everything had to give way. It was never expected that the stage would last this long, with Cardoso and his team backing it all up. Eventually, the entire academy ended up moving to Shchaslyve. A progression project that would normally take several years to plan and build was completed in just over 12 months. ” The club has taken over a complete hotel,” says Cardoso. They’ve taken over the vacancies, so after a year it’s possible that we’ll all be back in combination. “
This is an edited excerpt from We Play On by Andy Brassell (Little, Brown, £22). For The Guardian and The Observer, ask for your copy in Guardianbookshop. com. Shipping fees may apply.