BETRIEB BLAU 2007
By
Mickey Blue Eyes

“And if
You know
Your history
It’s enough to make your heart go
Oh-oh-ohhhhh-o
We don’t care
If we win or lose or draw
What the hell do we care
‘Cause we only know
That there’s gonna be a show
And the Everton boys are therrre…..”
FOOTBALL SONG (originally Celtic).

History……Ukraine……Metalist Kharkiv in the UEFA Cup……a distant memory stirred. I was prompted to look it up. The historical accounts came back with a rush, a tragedy unimaginable.

Sure enough there was a very distant coincidence…………Hitler’s Army Group South (or Army Group C, depends which history you read) invasion of Ukraine in 1941 included “Operation Blue” (“Betrieb Blau”) as one of a series of battles around Kharkiv, then universally known as Kharkov. There ends the tenuous coincidence.

The casualty figures beggar the mind, incomprehensible in a relatively peaceful era. Ukraine had already lost five million of its people to Stalin’s wall-climbing paranoia in the 1930s, then during the invasion it lost over seven million more to battles, nazi einsatzgruppen and slave labour. The long term affects are beyond calculation. Kharkiv was the site of three slaughter-ridden battles and was virtually destroyed in similar manner to Stalingrad and Kursk. But the country had long been an East European political football because of its natural resources and highly tuned nationalism and resistance to eight other countries at its borders. Kharkiv is in the north east region of Sloboda. Which apparently translates to “Land of the Free.” Those Yanks, the only thing they won’t steal is a hot stove. So predictably the game of football became another way of expressing national identity after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, though even then there were accusations of widespread vote-rigging to defeat the communists. There is similar nationalist expression amongst the Basques and Catalans of Spain and in other areas of the world.

Which is why our pairing with Metalist filled me with footy foreboding. They were third in the Ukranian league and anyone with a modicum of commonsense knew they weren’t about to roll over. Ukranians never have, not even when history went against them with a vengeance. That none of us had even vaguely heard of their club meant nothing. Our notorious English island mentality has done us no favours in the world after the wreckage of the British Empire. (Denis Healey once said the Empire left behind only two traces………the game of association football and the words, “Fuck off.”) In the first leg Metalist played much better football than we did and with eleven men might well have won it. By comparison our performance was mostly wretched, rag-tag-and-bobtail stuff best summed up by highly predictable penalties misses from Andrew Johnson. From a somewhat scatty game we deserved nothing more than a draw. Once again we were treated to the sight in Europe of Moyesy retreating to the dugout to hold his head in his hands, just as he did in Bucharest. A sure sign of trouble. I expected the return leg in Kharkiv to be very difficult.

There were other reasons. Form was patchy in spite of much pre-season optimism amongst Evertonians and early placement near the top of the table. Against Blackburn the performance was distinctly ominous in an up-and-down, lose-the-ball kind of way. Injured players or not, things looked bad. From then on I began to fear the worst despite the welcome addition of Steven Pienaar, Phil Jagielka, Leighton Baines and Ayegbeni Yakubu. My opinion of Tommy Gravesen’s return on loan was similar to my first view of a Salvador Dali painting or a meeting with a wannabe journalist: I wanted to punch him in the mouth immediately. Then, as only he can confound you, he had an excellent (so far only) game against Bolton as substitute. He hasn’t changed. He still makes you laugh or cry and you are never sure which is imminent. He isn’t JekylI and Hyde, he is Mr. And Mrs. Hyde. I can’t look at him without getting this image of an Eric von Stroheim or Otto Preminger lookalike SS man holding an electric cattle prod in one hand and a book of Teutonic bad jokes in the other while leering, “Heh heh. Haff you heard ze von about late tickets and missink flights?……Nein?……Perhaps ZIS can prod your memory…….”

Still, we need someone at centre mid who can stay the pace and be at least a bit forceful. Playing Phil Neville and Lee Carsley together there makes me reach for the Panadol. In fact Phil anywhere but right back has me feeling unwell. Meantime, anyone who thinks Mikky can play centre mid for more than ten or fifteen minutes should take their medication intravenously. He is a free spirit, best wide right or left. Similarly neither Leon Osman or Steven Pienaar has the staying power to last more than an hour. In short, we have a hole in the centre of the team and until it’s filled we will stutter. Just as irritating we seem to have assembled the defensive players we need and now we leak goals like a colander when, as we all know, the centre back pairing is Joey-Stubbsy. The playing chemistry just isn’t there with these two, never has been and never will be. And our strikers this season have the potency of an unpeeled soggy banana. It’s enough to make you go oh-oh-ohhhhh-o alright. Maybe even uh-oh.

Fortunately we defeated Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough and kept them goal-less in the two games immediately prior to Beitrieb Blau 2007. Nothing to shout about, really, but at least Mikky was back to torment ‘Boro and stretch play as only he can. The way he laid on the second against ‘Boro was sublime. A great player to treasure while he’s still with us.

Apart from the Bucharest débacle my last foray into Eastern Europe was years ago, a business trip to Moscow during the Soviet Union era. The Aeroflot plane then smelled of an odd cocktail of shoe polish and bleach, and the cabin staff looked like Arnold Schwarznegger. And that was just the women. (I am told capitalism has transformed Russia and the smell of shoe polish has dissipated along with the intake of steroids. Presumably the latter were sent to Californian and Australian gyms. Certainly a disproportionate number of the women ended up in the UAE, Rome and London pursuing a career in calisthenics. However, the bleach remains and is sometimes confused with vodka. That is, of course, if you believe the Daily Telegraph, Rupert Murdoch and various crackpot Yank christian neocons……..Take that any way you want, tovarich.) I hoped our flight to Kharkiv would be better.

Thursday morning 4th October, 6.00 am and dark, our own much reduced version of Betrieb Blau had a jump-off point at John Lennon Airport. ESCWARA was scarcely a section in strength, let alone a platoon. Twelve of us, actually. Our official overall invasion force consisted of two blue-clad battalions totalling 1,500 transported as an ingenious motley by land and air. It couldn’t compare with Army Group South’s disciplined 680,000 and panzers but then we were only going to watch a footy match. For ammunition we had passports, guide books, phrase books, foreign exchange and an affection for football. Mad racist Hitler had said of his invasion, “The world will hold its breath!” He was right. Fortunately for history he and his battle-hungry army choked their last on theirs. While Western history tells us it was the Americans and British who won the Second World War, it was actually the Soviet Empire. It was the Russians and their client states who took incredible casualities over twenty million and smashed fascist Germany in the East. Without them, however uncomfortable this singular truth might be, the likelihood is Hitler might well have prevailed in Europe. We Evertonians, on the other hand, sought only peaceful playing success, reasonable food and a few bevvies. But not the local vodka, which I knew would remove a fingernail if you were foolish enough to test a digit in it.

John Lennon Airport, or JLA as it is now known to sophisticated locals, is a world away from the old dilapidated art deco terminal (now a good hotel) built between the two world wars. It is still small but growing and relatively spacious. Blues thronged everywhere in orderly quiet queues. We were on flight NO4580, check-in desks 38 and 39. At the head of the queue was Brian who had organised the flight, dispensing one-off tee shirts and lapel badges and stern-faced organisational ability. We checked in in short order and went through to the departure lounge. I wondered what was going to go wrong, but nothing did, at least not until we got to Ukraine. More shops are being built in the departure lounge, which must mean increasing demand, as does the multi-storey car park now under construction opposite the terminal. A good breakfast later and we were at the bar for an 8.00 am snifter of Carling. Banners, photographs, grins. It was all going very nicely.

Then through the overt fascism of a security check, virtual undressing, metal detectors and x-ray scanners. The last time I came through JLA security a girl behind me set off every alarm in sight. It turned out she was a heavy metal fan festooned in chains, pins and belt buckles. The security man said in a broad scouse accent, “Fuckn ‘ell, gerl. You goin’ on ‘olidee or lookin’ ferra fight?”………………I tell you, only in our beloved city. This time Terry had his bottle of water confiscated but they missed Stu’s. The security staff were more inconsistent than Graham Poll or Mike Riley.

We took off after 9.00 am facing East and the rising sun (thrust and lift, thrust and lift, always remember it at the end of the runway) seated in a narrow metal tube with motorised wings, a Boeing 737 named Cita di Torino. After a lifetime of flying I don’t much like the tedious process, but for once it was a pleasure to be there. The cabin staff were Italian and included a beautiful, diminutive raven-haired beauty named Francesca. Steve immediately wanted to chat her up but had no Italian, so we rang Ron the pink (no, not gay, he supports the other lot) who speaks it fluently. He provided a few basic phrases. Steve repeated them and promptly forgot all of it. After which he couldn’t summon the courage to ask for anything other than a coffee, milk and two sugars please. Meantime, Chris reckoned one of the stewards was the spitting image of Inzaghi.

It was a bright, alcohol-free, cheerful flight spoiled only once or twice by the kind of inevitable loudmouth King of the Kids you get in every group of males. One of them was a drunk who managed to get some booze onto the plane and the other was told by the captain if he didn’t put his cigarette out we would have to land and spray him from a vat of CO2, or preferably throw him in it. But apart from these two yoyos everyone was in fine form and amazingly optimistic for a four hours journey in an overcrowded and underventilated space. And people came from everywhere. One fan was from South Wales, another from Kidderminster, and there was even one with a Rumanian passport.

Footy chat turned to match prospects. Apparently I was the only one who thought we were on a hiding to nothing. Everyone else thought we would win. I said whoever got the first goal would win it. There was so much optimism around I didn’t want to spoil it so I kept private the view that I thought we might get massacred. The first leg really rankled with me, though not as much as the imminent culinary experience. When the food came it was an inedible slab of half-set, curled-up yellow glue someone laughingly called lasagne. I concentrated on the orange juice and a period of jeering at the pinkies unexpected home loss the previous evening. As chat ebbed and flowed it became quite obvious we all thought Moyesy had made a major hugely expensive transfer error with Yakubu along the lines of Koldrup-Beattie-Davies. The jury was still out on Jagielka and Pienaar but Leighton Baines was the bees knees at left back. All in all, team-wise two steps forward and one-and-a-half back. Moyesy, beware – the crackpots who hate you are still there and you’ve given them more ammunition.

Europe was covered in clouds so there was nothing to see until we got over Ukraine. When the clouds broke up it revealed a landscape the colour of embalmed saurkraut. English green really IS as vivid as we think it is. The roads were scarce and didn’t contain many cars. Then again, Ukraine is vast, the second largest country in Europe and still recovering from the ravages of history. We landed on a runway that was bits of concrete stuck together with random streaks of asphalt. The plane didn’t exactly bounce up into the air again but it did feel as though a tyre had gone flat or the suspension system had failed as we bobbled up toward the terminal. This, I thought, is where our fans start having trouble with the Cyrillic alphabet and uniforms. The Boeing came to a halt in front of a small circle of curious people taking photographs, one of them an untidy late middle aged woman with dyed dark red hair and an unforgettably creased pink track suit made from crushed budgerigars. We all stared back, as curious as they. Then we bussed to the terminal, maybe a hundred metres away. There was a smattering of police uniforms, crazily disproportionate hats, regimental berets and camouflage fatigues but the faces were generally relaxed and a good deal more welcoming than, say, the loathed Northumbrian or Midlands police.

We herded – it’s the only word – into the terminal for a first meeting with old style Soviet bureaucracy. Like bureaucracies everywhere they made you want to scream. So did the high ceiling “neoclassical” building, which looked like it was a reclaimed orthodox church or perhaps an old aristocratic mansion gone to seed and must. The woodwork was painted brown and the walls cream and one of the domed ceilings had an orthodox church fresco with the central figures painted out. The light fittings were 1930s or even earlier and looked as though they had been gas mantles at one time, some working, some not, some with clear light bulbs and some with opal light bulbs, often in the same fitting. Signs in Cyrillic and English were stuck to the walls with sellotape. The place was similar to your average British pub, as though nobody was really arsed how it appeared to visitors. We had to go through a single door to passport control where a harassed, uniformed young female bureaucrat (don’t most beautiful women look even more gorgeous in uniform?) behind a glass screen lingered over every line of your landing form and passport before stamping it with a flourish. They must have been short of ink too because when I looked at the stamp you could barely make it out despite the force of the stamp. There was no customs check, not unless you count a few uniforms and suspicious looking characters in mufti. It was slow, but not much slower than trying to get through paranoid Yank bureaucratic controls, on whose house I would not piss if it was on fire.

There’s something else.

You know this Western stereotypical image of former East bloc countries, the one where they’re all stiff-faced political gangsters who only stand on a podium in Red Square and applaud arrogant, goose-stepping serried soldiers on May Day? Well, it’s just as much bollocks as the redneck Yank garbage that all Brits are stuffed-shirt Limeys. Odd weirdo aside – about the same proportion as our own brand of misery-arse – the Ukrainians we met were warm, friendly and welcoming almost to a fault.

Outside we assembled near to four coaches and waited for everyone to clear. More photographs. Small groups of police refused to join in out of embarrassment rather than anything else. From outside the building looked even more like a reclaimed church. A collonaded portico supported a pediment with the word “Aeroflot” chiselled into the fascia. A green tiled narrow steeple had a gilt wreathed hammer and sickle stuck at its apex, probably as a replacement for an orthodox church cross.

We were delayed because of the Rumanian passport, which apparently needed a visa. The lesson with any bureaucracy is: Always cover your arse because they’ll be into it if they get a glimpse. It’s their only function. Some fans couldn’t wait and did one in what few scruffy taxis there were. It’s funny how language difficulties disappear when it comes to haggling over dosh. Somehow, the taxi drivers – surely the most international and world-weary of breeds – make their demands and their passengers (or victims if you are in cynical) settle for what they think is agreed. Only to find at the end of the trip that both parties have mysteriously misinterpreted the amount and have to go through it all again.

The coaches were tacky-free and clean and we had an English-speaking tourist guide named Viktor. He kept up a valiant stream of cultural information on the twenty minute journey to the city centre despite the efforts of a few making nervous, unfunny “jokes” at the expense of him, his country and his countrymen. Kharkiv turned out to be a bland city with wide roads, plenty of unkempt landscaping and trees but with truly awful buildings many of which bore a striking resemblance to grubby cereal boxes. Most of it has been built, or more accurately rebuilt, in the last fifty odd years from a distraught economy bankrupted by war and subsequent totalitarian inefficiency. Nevertheless people have made a life for themselves and nobody looked any more unhappy or disconnected than in Western society. It was the surroundings that were the giveaway, not the people.

As we journeyed in I more and more thought of the American columnist H. L. Mencken, who wrote in the 1930s that communism “……will probably disappear altogether when the Russian experiment comes to a climax, and Bolshevism either converts itself into a sickly imitation of capitalism or blows up with a bang. The former seems more likely.” You can’t help admiring that level of presience. But, just to strike a balance, anyone couldn’t be more wrong who figures Mencken was an unthinking vaudeville Yank. He also wrote, “That Americans, in the mass, have anything properly described as keen wits is surely far from self-evident. On the contrary, it seems likely that, if anything, they lie below the civilised norm.” Which also explains what I regard as Mencken’s greatest ever put-down, to a taxi-driver of all people. As he got out of the cab the driver said to him, “Have a nice day, Mr. Mencken.” To which he snapped, “Young man, I’ll have exactly what kind of a day I want.” Hands up everyone who has yearned to say something similar to unfeeling mechanically-mannered Yanks ………………………… thought so.

There were graffiti, but nowhere near the levels we get in our cities. Sadly, the uniform multi-storey mediocre internationalist tackiness was similar to something a Brit structural engineer would produce but on a much wider scale, if you were mad enough to let one loose on your buildings. Occasional Coca-Cola signs made an appearance, though there were mercifully few advertising hoardings. The streets were usually cleaner too and lacked the disgusting adolescent signature of too many modern Western cities: splodged chewing gum ground into the pavement as a grisly piebald carpet. For me it was summed up by the hugely amusing sight of two Vespa scooters, one towing the other with a rope and the second one with a rider with his foot on a detached rusty exhaust balanced uncertainly on the footplate. Everybody on the coach roared their encouragement. Oh yes, there was poverty too but none of it at the intensity of, say, American, British, French and Italian ghettoised misery, not that we saw anyway.

My overall cultural impression (necessarilly narrow because of the type of visit) was of a dreadfully tired, worn out industrial city – a bit like the East End of London on a rainy day. The friendliness of the people made you hope they could get through it all and make something for themselves, because they’ll get precious little help from Moscow or the West. As our convoy of coaches made its way in the locals either smiled and waved or craned their necks with touching curiosity. On the coach we had only an occasional spurt of English purblind Ptolemaic nonsense and that was limited to a couple of unfunny knobheads sitting at the back. As we got closer to the city centre a smattering of mostly unkempt Victorian/Edwardian buildings materialised. Thus we arrived at Freedom Square with four or five hours to kick off. Or Independence Square. The guide books were uncertain. Then again, the phrase book was in Ukrainian and Russian too, but nobody could be bothered learning all those consonants and never-ending syllables when the word for “beer” was “pivo.” You have to say, though, both languages are ravishing and to hear a woman use them is, well, very nice.

During the flight I said I was buggered if I was going on a trip of 1,700 miles to a different culture if all I was going to end up in was a Plastic Paddy or Plastic Tommy pub. I didn’t see the point. I had spotted three such in the guide book and dreaded the prospect. Instead, I suggested in compromise, “Let’s go to the Pivobar at Frunze 3 – it says here it’s a Ukrainian bar with big screen footy.” Fat chance. We walked a few hundred yards and ended up in a beer tent gazebo not dissimilar to anything else you’ll see anywhere else in the world. Tables were pulled together and the waitress quickly stuck with a Lavo sign language order for fifteen beers. When they came they were in plastic containers. You didn’t know whether to blame communism or interpol bizzies. Plainly we weren’t going to get to the Pivobar, let alone the former KGB Headquarters (just around the corner), the three cathedrals, the Opera House, the Folk Craft Museum, the Metro or the heady delights of the Kharkiv Tractor Factory. We would have to make do with a giant sculpture of the great revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in heroic pose complete with the famous flapping overcoat, bald head, moustache set and determined expression. Stick a beer in front of your average Brit and all sense of anything evaporates to foam-flecked inanity.

The gazebo quickly filled up with Evertonians, flags and banners. Everyone set about doing exactly what the medics tell you not to do – after travelling, rehydrate……but not with alcohol. After a few beers it erupted into a high-spirited chorus of every Everton song you ever heard, travel-weariness blown away with every line. In the confined space it was deafening. And it was loud enough to escape through the sides and draw yet more Evertonians, increase the volume and finally get curious locals to gather outside and peer in at the loony tunes. Gawd knows what they really made of it, even though they were smiling and some even ventured into what must have looked like Bachanalia. It was all good natured, hand shakes, souvenir swapping, group photographs and ineffective attempts to chat up the gorgeous waitresses. I freely lent my phrase book if only to see classic hapless Brit surrender in the face of another language. Watching all this I figured most of our fans would be so goosed by the time of the match they would sit silently as we got done over. I was wrong. And how.

An hour of this was enough for Macca to say, “This is insane. I’m going to find a bar or a restaurant.” And he disappeared off on a mission with Simon. Ten minutes later I got a text from him via England and a round trip of 3,500 miles – isn’t technology WONDERFUL? – telling me the name of the restaurant, but not where it was. Eventually I wandered away from the umpteenth chorus of “Ever-tern-O” and found the venue just around the corner. Macca and Simon were sitting in an empty restaurant. Good, I thought, I’ll try the borsch………never had it, time I tried. The two Blues were just finishing off, wait for it, fish and chips, or what passed for the Ukrainian version of it. It was a small slab of white fish with the grey skin attached and a scoop of tubular potato sticks the diameter of a straw. I thought of Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” and forgot about the borsch. I asked for a ham sandwich and a glass of Ukrainian white wine. The wine was good, then the sandwich arrived. For a few seconds I was nonplussed. No shit, it was an inch thick piece of palm-sized MDF with two slices of spam on it. I ate it because I was starving, the way Koestler said Rubashov was. The wine got rid of the “taste” so I ordered a glass of local rosé to finally do it in. It had the texture of diesel and camomile lotion so I reverted to the white wine. Meantime, Macca and Simon were happily quaffing multiple tankards of beer and glasses of local vodka. Their faces gradually assumed the expression of slack torpor we all get at the peak of the best affects of alcohol. From then of course it’s all downhill on a greased toboggan.

While this comedy was going on a couple of men slipped into a nearby table. Eventually one of them turned around and started talking in perfect English. His name, he said, was Patrick, and he was Swiss, from Zurich, and this was his friend Slava who was Ukrainian and flew MiG 21s. I thought of asking Paddy a few pertinent questions about Switzerland that I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer but I figured there was some amusing mileage in it so we strung him along. Macca engaged Slava in short-sword verbal combat while trying to get a translation for “redshite.” Finally the conversation came around to what was obvious from the beginning. Paddy said, “Ukraine is full of beautiful women, no?” Aye aye, here we go. “Yes, it certainly is.” He glanced over his shoulder and then leaned in. “Well, we have three beautiful girl friends outside we are due to meet.” Oh aye yeh. Funny that……three of them and two of you – but three of us. Uh-HUH. Simon said straightfaced, “Do they like footy? They can come the game with us if they want.” I looked over at the maitre’d. He was studying the ceiling. I almost asked Slava if he could get me a cut price MiG 21. Macca had finally got his translation, including one in the Cyrillic alphabet. Time to go and get a taxi. The coach had left without us. Patrick and Slava looked stricken, the way anglers often look when a catch wriggles free. We paid the bill and crossed cobbled Freedom Square in the dark to a taxi rank in the knowledge that “free” market capitalism has surfaced in Kharkiv the way Mencken forecast it would. How can they fail with “risk taking entrepreneurs” like Patrick and Slava?

Macca squeezed into the front seat next to the driver and took charge of directions, payment and the language. Since it wasn’t far all we had to do was head toward the floodlights and follow the crowd the way footy fans do around the world. There was a real buzz and genuine footy excitement about the place, thousands thronging toward the stadium. It was irresistible. Well, almost. Discharged from the cab, Macca was thirsty again and funny enough so was I. The ham/spam sandwich lingered. Outside the ground Macca asked a local where to get more beer and we were directed to a spot two hundred metres away behind some trees, to a small kiosk between two multi storey apartment blocks. You queued up, paid, and took your bottled pivo from a glass fronted fridge. No sooner had we done it than we were surrounded by locals who wanted group photos and to shake hands. It was marvellous. You won’t get THAT in the Amish country in Pennsylvania, or some gawd-forsaken Brit suburban hell-hole like Penge, no sir.

Beer downed, there was no time to walk around the stadium and assess it so we went straight in. It was crammed to the gunnels on three sides, the fourth side a building site with the beginnings of a structural skeleton for a new stand. The pitch was surrounded by a running track made from black matresses, spectators in a single tier under a cantilevered roof right around. The noise rolled around the place in waves, wafted onward by thousands of blue and yellow Ukrainian national flags and roars of “May-tah-leest! May-tah-leest!” But from their corner section the Evertonians were giving every bit as good as they got and then some. Here we were on the very edge of Europe in what is basically a second-tier competition and we had what sounded like four or five thousand giving it loads. Without, let it be said, a trace of nastiness. When the teams came out the noise stepped up another gear. You didn’t want to be anywhere else. If the team can survive this, I thought, they can survive anything.

We missed the teams announcement and had to make do with trying to recognise the players. That was easy. What I couldn’t make out was the overall tactical intention, especially when it became obvious the centre midfield was Jagielka-Pienaar-Osman. For all the good it was, it might as well have been made of marshmallow or powder puffs. I gave up on the rest of the formation and, plainly, so did the players. Metalist ran through us, over us, and around us in rings of varying diameter much the way they had done for large parts of the game at Goodison. I spent most of the half slumped, chin in hands, staring at the mess that began to shape as a playing catastrophe. Occasionally I jumped to my feet to yell, “DON’T GIVE THE FUCKING BALL AWAY!” only to find myself in competition with almost everyone else in the vicinity. Right back to outside left we were absolute garbage. And I promise you I’m trying to be diplomatic.

We caved in soon enough when one of their Brazilians strolled through the middle with Joey and Stubbsy waving him on and he stuck one under an unprotected Tim, who looked so dispirited he couldn’t even be bothered to berate the two “defenders.” Even at this early stage it looked like Metalist would need an adding machine. Tim made a couple of close-in saves without which we would have been dead and buried. While they were passing it around rather easily all we could do was send it unerringly to their feet to help them on their way. Even Mikky couldn’t get going. It was so bad the only consolation you could reach for was we couldn’t be so awful in the second half. There was no point singling anyone out because they were all playing with their boots on the wrong feet tied together with duct tape.

I tried to imagine what the dressing room was like at half time. Would Moyesy shatter some crockery? Would the centre mids suddenly wake up and realise they were professional footy players paid a more than reasonable weekly sum? Would Tom ever catch Jerry? Do Ukrainian bears shit in the woods? Why didn’t I stay home and watch it on Channel 5? The amazing thing was, most Evertonians were wildly irritated but not despondent. Go figure.

So we came out and got an equaliser within two minutes of the second half when Joleon got up front and deflected a Pienaar effort over the line from close in. Suddenly, inexplicably – Game On. Which was great for all of four or five minutes, when Joey and Stubbsy screwed up again and it got smacked in after a rebound from Tim’s right post. Almost back to square one. But Simon didn’t think so. He said, “We’ll win this. Their legs have gone.” I thought he was mad and said so. I thought there was more chance of Lavo stapling his scrotum to David Cameron’s arse. I couldn’t see any sign of tiredness in them. Then he corrected me, “When we equalise and hold it, they’re out.” He was right and I was wrong. Moyesy had changed the team shape and had Mikky playing deep centre mid just our side of the centre circle where he was less likely to get done in a tackle. For the first time we started to play. Even Jimmy Mac looked likely. Metalist were indeed wilting. Then they broke wide open as badly as we had in the first half after Victor Anichebe came on for Jagielka and started winning the ball from their excellent big centre back, something that hadn’t happened all night.

Jimmy Mac added to his World Cup scoring for the Jocks when he shimmied a bit in the centre of their D, checked slightly, and then clipped a left footer inside their unsighted keeper’s left post low down. Bejaysus we were in front on aggregate with twenty minutes to go. You could almost feel the team finally locked together in determination. A few minutes later Leighton Baines, left out for some reason, came on for Yakubu and restored the sanity of Joleon at centre back and his own stability at left back. The grip tightened.

Then the killer with three minutes to go. A raid down the right, a short cross into the box, a defender headed it up in the air, and Anichebe was on it in a flash and muscled aside another defender, adjusted himself not once, but twice – by which time every Evertonian screamed, “Hit the fucker! HIT IT!” – and finally banged it home from the centre. The place went crazy. Macca, Simon and me fell three rows still clinging to each other. Fortunately, Macca was on the bottom and I fell on top of him. I know this sounds selfish but it might have been me who broke two ribs instead of him. Later, Gary sent him a text from a business trip in Milan saying, “Believe you tripped over your quiff.” Gossip around the planet almost at the speed of light. It was all a long, long way from playing Carlisle at Brunton Park.

For the final minutes the Evertonians really let rip, the frustrations of years vented on the atmosphere. How they richly earned it!

Macca sat at the end of the row nursing his side as the minutes ticked away unbearably. When the final whistle went we were reduced to ruffling his quiff instead of including him in the usual hysterical group hug. Then there was a sight I haven’t seen in a lifetime of watching football. As the crowd emptied out, Metalist fans naturally despondent at the result, Evertonians ecstatic, both sets of fans in the vicinity applauded each other East European style. Just when you think you have seen it all you find out you haven’t. You never have.

So with the match finished we headed for the coach, airport and home. It would all go over with a rush, right?

Wrong.

I say this in advance because you probably won’t believe this end bit. But sadly it is all true.

At the airport we disgorged from the coach and joined everyone else thronging through yet another single door. We were watched by a bizarre character standing on the portico steps. Where the rest of the police or militia or army had standard drab green or camouflage outfits, this guy was wearing a beige uniform with a beige hat and, I shit you not, white shoes. He was almost Kafkaesque surreal, but I’m willing to bet he was central to what followed. Inside, another single door to filter through a couple of hundred tired and sore throated Evertonians who only wanted to check in and go home. Yet another fat chance. We couldn’t see what was going on up ahead but it was obviously taking about a quarter hour per passenger, at which rate we would have taken off at about 6.30 am. Even the airplane captain appeared to try and hurry matters along with the interesting observation that JLA was fogged in. This could only have been a kick-a-bureaucrat’s-arse tactic since our beloved homeland was four hours and 1,700 miles away, and even if there was any fog – there wasn’t, I checked later – it would have cleared by the time we got there.

The problem was the checking in procedure where two girls supposedly couldn’t make head nor tail of the passenger list. Which meant Brian got up front and helped them check off the names against the passports. Actually, it was just a delaying tactic so the local bizzies could shake down one in three of the passengers. It turned out they “invited” individuals into a side room and then “invited” them to contribute “a present” for their “help.” For some reason I was lucky enough to avoid this disgusting corruption. But the delay got so acute it began to really try everyone’s patience in the queue and drew some ripe comments. One guy tried to start a chant of, “Jo-seph Stalin is an Ever-to-nian,” that fortunately didn’t get traction or I might be writing this from a Ukrainian cell with my head resting intermittently on a warm rubber truncheon.

Two hours later we were all through and crammed onto the bus under the watery eyed gaze of The Man In A Beige Uniform And White Shoes. Four hours later we were at JLA and out into the clear, chilly air of an imminent English Autumn. I drove home past trees just turning gilt and swirling their first drop of leaves onto deserted roads. The sky was completely crystal clear and star crowned. The river reflections have never looked more beautiful. It was good, really good to be home. I liked our brief encounter with Ukraine and Ukrainians but there’s no place like home, not ever.

So who do we get next? (12/10/07)