'The game's successful if we finish the game'

A WEEK before Iryna Koziupa left her home in Ternopil, almost 500km west of Kyiv, Russian rockets smashed into the city, killing at least 35 people, including six children, and wounding almost 100 more.

- MARK MCCADDEN

Koziupa, a sports journalist with ua.tribuna.com, was preparing for her trip to Dublin to cover Shakhtar Donetsk's Europa Conference League match 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.

"[The attack happened] in the morning, in the other part of the city. 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. For example, 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, to borrow a phrase from the Covid pandemic, people had adjusted to their new normal.

"You start to not react even to the air [raid] alarms," she remarks, adding that the return of football

"I was so pleased and so happy with how people treat me here. It was really amazing.

"A couple of years ago I read James Joyce's Ulysses. It was a Ukrainian translation. For Ukrainian literature, it was a big one, because the translator spent a lot of years to translate this book. It was quite a big event for the literature world.

"I read this book and for me it was a moment of pride, because I read such a big and difficult book.

after a pause during the early stages of the Russian invasion has become a much-needed distraction.

The game at every level — from the Shakhtars and Dynamo Kievs to Koziupa’s second-tier side Nyva Ternopil and all the way down to grassroots — has become a beacon of hope and national pride.