For people, going to the football feels normal..even during a war

A WEEK before Iryna Koziupa left her home in Ternopil, almost 500km west of Kyiv, Russian rockets smashed into the city.

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They killed at least 35 people, including six children, and wounded almost 100 more.

Koziupa, a sports journalist with ua.tribuna.com, was preparing for her trip to Dublin to cover Shakhtar Donetsk's Conference League tie against Shamrock Rovers when the cruise missile attack, which hit two residential buildings and an industrial complex, rocked the city of just over 200,000 people.

“My husband heard the sound of the explosion, he was terrified,” Koziupa says. “It showed that you can't be safe in any city, even if it is far away in the west or near the Polish border.

“The city is small and in one moment a lot of people died. One family, only the father survived. His wife and two small children died. There was a picture, I cried when I saw it, he had in his hand the small coffin of his son.”

Up to that point, people had adjusted to their new normal.

‘You start to not react even to the air alarms,’ she remarks, adding that the return of football after a pause during the early stages of the Russian invasion has become a much-needed distraction from the horrors of war.

The game at every level has become a beacon of hope and national pride.

Every game is an opportunity to honour the dead and pay tribute to wounded heroes.