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Stories
One-team dominance has been broken in Georgia but, as Margot Dunne finds, football’s continued revival depends on peace and politics
On a warm August evening in Tbilisi’s Boris Paichadze National Stadium, a crowd of over 20,000 is roaring on the Georgian champions Zestafoni in their Europa League play-off against Club Brugge. But, strangely, the majority aren’t supporters of either of the teams involved in the tie. Most are fans of Zestafoni’s main domestic rival and Georgia’s biggest club, Dinamo Tbilisi.
A History of the People's Team in the Workers' State
by Robert Edelman
Cornell University Press, £21.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Wilson
From WSC 278 April 2010
Listen to some fans of Spartak Moscow and they would have you believe that their club almost single-handedly defied the state machine, that the 12 league titles they won in Soviet times were each clear and decisive blows for liberty and independence. Spartak's founder and long-time president, Nikolai Starostin, is hailed as some sort of sporting saint, whose years in a prison camp in Siberia were a form of martyrdom for the spirit of freedom he kindled in others.
The conflict with Russia placed Georgian football in the forefront of the struggle to maintain morale, as Jonathan Wilson explains
Under normal circumstances, Wales’s friendly against Georgia in August would not have been of too much concern to anyone – perhaps not even those playing in it. As Russian military support for the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia continued, however, and threatened at one point to escalate into a march on Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, it became for the visitors a rallying point.
Football in Belarus hit a new low in October, with defeat to Luxembourg, but November 19 is the 25th anniversary of its finest hour: Dinamo Minsk’s sole Soviet title success. Jonathan Wilson looks back
“There were people with flowers and kisses and love,” Mikhail Vergeenko remembers. It is that, rather than anything else, that seems most to affect the former goalkeeper as he looks back on Dinamo Minsk’s title success of 25 years ago, the club’s only trophy in the Soviet era. “Nothing organised, just love.”