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In the annuls of the County Championship’s near-130-year history, few competitors have been so unfortunate as the South-West’s. One of the eight founding members of English cricket’s summer bastion in 1890, Gloucestershire – the county of W. G. Grace in the 1870s – are yet to taste success, and neighbours Somerset, granted admission in 1891, have endured an equally barren spell in the red-ball format.
While their Bristol County Ground has again become an international 50-over and Twenty20 venue, for Gloucestershire, adrift in the County Championship’s Division Two for the past 14 seasons, long-forbidden glory seems as distant as ever at present. The West Country’s second cricketing city, Taunton, is meanwhile playing host to a side on the precipice of unprecedented attention, after witnessing four close misses on such an elusive title in the past decade. When such a wait for honours in domestic four-day cricket finally ends, however, victory may be diminished by the format’s changing fortunes in England. The profitability of the prolonged, 90-over-per-day marathon version of the sport being stretched beyond breaking point outside of Test cricket, titles in the Championship are toasted only as the pinnacle of a bygone era. Limited overs tournaments, as the English Cricket Board is well aware, are what attract crowds and TV cameras, and the incipient ‘Hundred’ competition, to start in 2020, marks the pursuit of the urban, nine-to-five working man or woman in no uncertain terms as the source of any growth left in the sport today. In this unsettled scene, a Somerset County Championship victory could certainly mark the hypocrisies of the game in 2019. As the English and Welsh summer hosts the Cricket World Cup and the Ashes, certifiably the sport’s two most obvious sources of prominence and revenue, marketing campaigns have had few issues tapping into the traditional audiences of the game. World Cup matches, attended in force by South Asian and Caribbean diasporas, and the not inconsiderable number of English fans, have ensured respectable engagement figures for tournament organisers, but the ambition of filling grounds with entirely new viewers have undoubtedly been hampered by the paywall behind which the International Cricket Council and ECB has placed the competition, with Sky Sports guarding the rights, and Channel 4’s decision to broadcast highlights around midnight winning few fans. Whether cricket itself should become something new and separate from the County Championship’s iconic period, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, is clearly a conundrum that has been solved by the sustained progress of international competitions. Composed, however, of a largely privately-educated playing squad and a financial structure still dependent on the patronage of members, Somerset, as most other counties, operate in a reality which those above them refuse to accept. They will not be one of the hosts of the Hundred, and although with a proud recent record of hosting international matches, without regular Test cricket may rely on the ECB’s security payments to all counties inactive during their new competition, farcically, in order to stay afloat. County chairmen (17 out of 18), sensing vindication from stretched finances but without the majority backing of members, voted in support of the ECB’s proposals in February and must live with the consequences. The draft system for players, an unprecedented move in British sport, may succeed or flop, and while all will hope the BBC’s share of live coverage – the first time cricket will return to the Beeb since 1999 – proves a turning point, access to bats, balls and creases for those outside of independent schools must also be made available. For this to happen, the culture that pervades county cricket must change. Clearly, Somerset are not to blame for having some of the most successful private school sports departments in the UK on their doorstep, but their squad encapsulates the decline in players on the county circuit to attend comprehensive school since 2005, the final Ashes series available free-to-air on Channel 4. After batsman Marcus Trescothick, a rock of that English victory, retires at the age of 43 this autumn, the Somerset squad will be left with only half a dozen players educated outside of the private system. In the batting order, James Hildreth, George Bartlett (both Millfield), Tom Abell (Taunton), Tom Banton (King’s College, Taunton), and Tim Rouse (Kingswood, Bath), outnumber the ageing comprehensive-educated trio of Trescothick, Peter Trego and Steven Davies. The bowling attack, including Dom Bess (Blundell’s, Tiverton), Josh Davey (Culford, Bury St Edmunds), Max Waller (Millfield), twins Jamie and Craig Overton (West Buckland), Ben Green (Exeter), and Ollie Sale (Sherbourne), is dominated by the privately educated, although key wicket takers in 2019, Lewis Gregory, Jack Brooks and Jack Leach, are products of mainstream schooling. With players born abroad, the privately-educated trend is even more apparent in South African Tim Groenewald (Maritzburg College), Namibia-born Nathan Gilchrist (St Stithians College, Johannesburg), and Zimbabwean Eddie Byrom (St John’s College, Harare) – the pattern only bucked by bowler Roelof van der Merwe, who attended the highly-regarded public sporting college at Waterkloof, Pretoria. This class debate is as old as cricket itself, and is no slight on the players themselves, who in cooperation with the club do all kinds of work to promote cricket in local schools, where facilities may not be so apparent. Nobody – not even Prime Ministers consolidating the Middle England vote through their association to the sport – wants cricket to be the preserve of the privately-educated. However, the probability that the Overton’s, Bess, middle-order prospect Bartlett and the long-overlooked Hildreth gain England recognition will not solve the issue of representation in the national team, where although eight of the 15-man World Cup squad are comprehensively-educated, only 13 of the 31 players to earn their first Test cap since 2014 have been of the same ilk. Whether cricket can be both sexy and civil – cool enough for urban families to sport the ‘Leeds Superchargers’ and ‘London Spirit’ kits but sufficiently appreciative of at least the medium-term reality of its players’ education – is a riddle set to be broken by events looming on an ever-shortening horizon. Nothing will change overnight; no great galvanising motion will follow a swish of Jos Buttler’s bat, nor a 90mph Jofra Archer yorker, just because it is captured live by BBC cameras. However, clawing its way back into the public consciousness during gaps between Test series, cricket may place itself on political agendas. An end to austere state physical education offerings is required, and providing it is a pledge they can be held to, the fact that counties were keen to ensure the corporate benefits of backing innovation also meant further opportunities for participation is surely a good thing. Speculation continues, but cannot be considered that for much longer. Somerset’s lead is narrow at the time of writing – 15 points over closest challengers Essex after eight games – creating a title fight between two of just three counties in Division One without Test grounds. The West Country outfit won the One-Day Cup in May, and if last season’s T20 Blast Final -between Worcestershire and Sussex – is anything further to go on, the traditional honours of county cricket have chosen a rather inappropriate time to deviate from more familiar recipients. However suitable a victory for these uncertain times, it looks as if the West Country’s duck will finally be broken. When celebrations can be secured, as ever, tradition will be acknowledged, but for those not present, viewing through Twitter feeds and rolling terrestrial news, any impact will be negligible. It is not as simple as modernising or being left to stagnate – by its very fibres, county cricket may be suspended out of the linear concept of time, and may never catch up. Revolution, as such, should be treated with absolute caution. Although these two entities may have only flirted together before, a league and victorious county, both with origins dating back to the 18th century, will each understand better than most how the enormity of such an achievement has diminished. Once the sport to which domestic football passed its baton to during the summer months, the place which English cricket now inhabits demands that there is no sharing of fortunes. By the time the County Championship is decided in late September, headlines will only last a few hours, and its annual hibernation will give way to a travelling format with far more profitability. Such is life today. Wish for more, and you may be tempting for the proverbial cliff edge.
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In the isolation of a modernistic suburban training complex, the working squad of 23 or so youth players under Brighton and Hove Albion Under 23s manager Simon Rusk’s supervision share many similarities with their counterparts in the country’s leading Professional Development League level, the Premier League 2. For one, work-life balance is at the best level it ever has been for a young footballer. With press coverage mostly restricted to in-club PR, supporters unlikely to ever step foot on work premises, and round-the-clock access to extra-curricular support available, the escape from a sport ruled by lawyers and marketing experts is much appreciated. It is, at the very least, a far cry from the time players ruled the game; when local-lad status married with silverware made you an icon of the 20th century.
The legacy surrounding the Busby Babes, and the 1960s World Cup winners of East London, re-emerged in the era of Britpop and the Young British Artists under uneasy forms, through the mass media. A case mirrored on the pitch, the Spice Boys’ cream-white Emporio Armani 1996 FA Cup Final suits were ridiculed by comparison to a David Beckham-fronted Class of ’92, with whom the origin of modern player agency is often credited. Far from being unsaleable to the tabloids and general public, players in the miasma occupied by under-23 football today are sheltered for a reason. Whether that results in playing the majority of their football at low-capacity out grounds – the Premier League 2 boasts the glamour of Dagenham & Redbridge’s Chigwell Construction Stadium, the Lancashire FA’s Leyland County Ground and Stevenage’s Lamex – or receiving loans to comparable working structures in Ireland or English non-league, the worst-case scenario of individual stardom is importantly managed. Before first-team promotion, Marcus Rashford only made eight appearances at this level; Phil Foden nine; Trent Alexander-Arnold 14. Chelsea’s Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ethan Ampadu have been selected for just one Premier League 2 game each since September; Arsenal’s Ainsley Maitland-Niles one all season. Their celebrity is unmanageable after the initial step up, and standards are still too pedestrian, despite the FA’s Elite Player Performance Plan reforms in 2016, to cater for such early bloomers. Brighton’s approach is again different. Rather than raise players with expectations the club cannot themselves fulfil – Sussex’s verdant scenery bearing few big names, other than perhaps Gareth Barry, besides – the Seagulls have formed a squad of multiple nationalities and brogues, shelling out on a line-up of unheralded prodigies approved by a hyper-efficient scouting network. The most recent transfer deadline day was more noticeable for the arrivals of Slovenian striker Jan Mlakar and Romanian defensive midfielder Tudor Băluță, loaned back to Maribor and Viitorul Constanța respectively, than much else on the south coast. The one constant has been Rusk, the 37-year-old who only first arrived in Sussex with then-non-league Crawley Town in 2009. Once a midfielder who spent the majority of his playing career at League Two level, with six years at Steve Evans’ Boston United, Rusk himself benefited only partially out of academy tutelage; his hometown club Peterborough United releasing him, aged 19, without a first-team appearance. His own encounter of the transience at this level mean his players are under no false pretences of the potential brakes on their own careers. But Rusk has not let history hold him back – his side are storming the PL2 this season. Three seasons since their under-21 side finished 11th, of 12, in the Professional Development League Division 2, the Seagulls saw play-off promotion last term, and now only trail David Unsworth’s Everton in a division containing five senior Premier League-winning clubs. Their last four matches, hosting Arsenal and Tottenham, and travelling to Liverpool and Manchester City, have delivered eight points, ensuring that with five matches of their season remaining, they are unlikely to be dislodged by any side from the big six. They have battled players with experience in European competitions, League Cup fodder and also FA Cup fixtures, those well-versed in the demands of youth-grade football, and have repeatedly come out on top. Rusk’s arrival in Brighton in March 2012 certainly coincided with a period perceived as a salinisation of the club’s development squads. After promoting Lewis Dunk, Solly March and Jake Forster-Caskey, the club’s hierarchy were correct to demand even more, but after hauling their way back from the brink of exiting the Football League in 1998, had to reconfigure at the Championship; an unpredictable stage of mountaineering for even the most dogged of scramblers. Gradually, the embowelling process began, and the fat from League One promotion, and ambitious initial spending, was cut. Sami Hyypiä’s unexpected appointment, although clearly in the image of predecessors Gus Poyet and Óscar García as talented players and cult stars, quickly proved to be at the sacrifice of any internal youth progression. The 2014/15 season, the Finn’s only in charge, was a breakout term for Dunk and March, but after the loss of senior teammates, the responsibility could have broken them; only Chris Hughton’s mid-season arrival steered them away from the drop. The season was also Forster-Caskey’s last significant one at the club. Hughton’s stewardship has embraced the collaborative role of leading playing figures, namely Bruno and Glenn Murray, in a way that Hyppiä, Garcia and Poyet’s never could. As the surviving epithets of times that in footballing terms can appear ancient history, the authority of the Seagulls’ Catalonian and Cumbrian elder statesmen is being bestowed to Dunk, March and, in the fast-paced recruitment environment the club faces, anyone who even recalls Championship football. It is imperative to the Premier League survival of clubs like Brighton that their squad is marked primarily by humility; still feeling that privilege to not only play in England’s top tier, but to represent the club etched into their identity. This is a resource the two clubs already doomed to relegation have in desperately short supply. Whether it keeps Cardiff City, with surely one of the least inspiring playing squads to have ever graced this elite level, up over Ralph Hasenhüttl’s tactically innovative Southampton – for whom James Ward-Prowse is the most obvious leader, currently performing excellently – is a subplot yet to play out, but the stability that, contrary to popular belief, does exist at Watford and Bournemouth has undoubtedly aided them this term. Progressively, the sophistication of Brighton’s set-up has been a prime beneficiary of the Premier League brand’s local pulling power. Trips to South America have led to the club procuring Football Manager regen-worthy names Billy Arce and Alexis Mac Allister, and only a small handful of players, such as Billingshurst’s James Tilley and Horsham’s Will Collar, make up the academy’s Sussex contingent anymore. But this nucleus has risen to the challenge, and has sustained their run under Rusk while others are loaned out; a balancing act which holds in it, for any top-flight academy, the making, or breaking, of fledgling careers. Clubs will invest in these young men efficiently, to tailor their footballing education as best as possible, and many would be tempted to shelter them somewhat more. Unfortunately, both parties understand the reality; if things don’t work out, you may find your new employers, and be safely re-accommodated, albeit at the cost of a multi-division slide, and unintended salary constraints. For many, of course, this means buying a ticket to a false economy. Whether or not any credit can be given to the revision of under-21 grades – reasonably deemed outdated and unsuited to the Jesse Lingards of the world – for an explosion of English youth, its replacement has had more of an effect on club structures, as opposed to individual development. While the FA obviously aspired to the cultural benefits of this – patience is now heeded by CEOs once happy to cut an entire group of trainees, considered spoiled goods aged 22 – they, in eternal optimism, overlooked the fact they were merely kicking the can for others to resolve. Brighton, and others, have successfully manipulated the new laws. This season, Norwegian midfielders Henrik Bjørdal and Mathias Normann, both 22 years of age, were sold to Zulte Waregem and FC Rostov respectively, each without a first-team appearance to his name. Normann had only played 13 games in Rusk’s under-23s, with one assist to show, yet has found his feet at Russia’s seventh biggest club. It could be considered gerrymandering on the Seagulls’ part. Or it could be considered gaining a competitive advantage in an area where they are otherwise outclassed. It depends hugely on how funds are reinvested, and whether opportunities are blocked for genuine local talent. Neither count seems to stack against Tony Bloom and co. in this case, so should we just consider it fair? Elsewhere, these practices are not so keenly tolerated. Jadon Sancho, Brahim Díaz and Rabbi Matondo’s departures from Manchester City expose a developmental environment rotten at its core. It is no wonder Pep Guardiola obligingly blooded youth in League Cup ties at Leicester City and Burton Albion, and has groomed Phil Foden as the standalone pinnacle of the production line. Few can refute the reasoning of Mukhtar Ali, Jérémie Boga and Harvey St Clair, who have opted to try their luck with Vitesse Arnhem, Sassuolo and Venezia, rather than on the Chelsea loan carousel. Despite being credited with the more notable pro-youth policies amongst the big six, Arsenal’s abundance of talent has resulted in a total haemorrhage of those considered future first-teamers; Marcus McGuane, Chris Willock, Kaylen Hinds, Stephy Mavididi and Arsène Wenger-era signings Jeff Reine-Adélaïde and Ismaël Bennacer finding better hospitality on the continent. In the shadow of English U17 and U20 World Cup victories, this exodus was predictable. Parallels have been drawn to how the icons of ’66, and the Class of ’92, were also empowered by silverware, but it is insufficient to say the susceptibility of young men to big promises will ruin English academies. The ambiguity of the relationship between the FA, uncertain in an age where it is no longer the single national authority, and Premier League, the mutated spawn of imperialistic Western culture, has repeated this case, to a point where, in the end, those who make a living from the game have to handle these responsibilities themselves. For now at least, and with little of the fate of future world-beaters resting on their shoulders, there are few managing this uncertainty better than Brighton. On a midwinter’s evening in the Arab Gulf, the world order tipped a little further, again, in favour of the unknown. Four-time champions Japan witnessed opponents Qatar run away with a 3-1 victory at Abu Dhabi’s Zayed Sport City Stadium for their first Asian Cup title. Veterans of multiple World Cup, Confederations Cup and UEFA Champions League tournaments have fallen by the wayside as a pockmark state, faced with financial levies from a 15-strong bloc of Gulf nations, has gushed and philandered its way to the crown of the most disparate continent on earth.
Hunkered down in Mumbai, New Delhi and New York, and collapsing conceptions of statehood and sport in Paris, Qatari investment mechanisms could navigate around trade barriers. The purchase of Paris Saint-Germain by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) months after winning the 2022 World Cup bid in December 2010 was followed by the Qatar Foundation’s five-year sponsorship of Barcelona. State broadcaster Al Jazeera’s sport arm invested heavily in Ligue 1, and beIN SPORTS, launched in 2012 under Nasser Al-Khelaifi, has grown from that first kernel to broadcast the sports market in competition with Sky and NBC. Qatar’s sporting influence is, in the strictest sense, unprecedented, and less than four years from their World Cup, it is to be expected that some are decrying this result as inevitable. The Asian Football Confederation’s President, Shaikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, has become once again embroiled at the heart of controversy this tournament for his refusal to even comment on countryman Hakeem al-Araibi’s detention in a Thai prison, awaiting extradition back to his nation of birth, and in that event certain imprisonment. When accompanied by Gianni Infantino for the FIFA President’s first Asian Cup trophy presentation – predecessor Sepp Blatter attended in 2015 and 2007, but did not award the successful Japanese sides of 2004 or 2011 - the financial implications of the result were confirmed. Crowning the French, Belgian and English FAs as guarantors of the wealth of diversity, disposing of ethnocentrism and embracing an age of self-actualisation to great effect, makes for difficult revision in the case of the Qatari association. Before 1971, the arid outstretched limb of the Gulf was in British hands, and has since built skyscrapers on the backs of Indian, Pakistan and Bangladeshi labour. Fewer than one in nine Qataris today are ethnically native – not unusual for a state only settled by Bedouin nomads before the post-war oil rush – and this tournament has gone some way to unpacking that complex national identity. With his record nine goals, Sudanese-born striker Almoez Ali became the first winner of the Best Player award born outside of Asia. He and Baghdad-born defender Bassam Al-Rawi formed quite the partnership of multicultural icons in the month’s events, spotted talking to Emirati children in the local KFC, and after a Semi-Final in which the celebrating Qatari players were targeted with the protesting home fans’ shoes, becoming the subject of the UAE FAs’ appeal – quickly dismissed by the AFC – disputing the location of their mothers’ births. And it has been a victory of stable foundations – expected of a future World Cup host, but so often lacking in the miasma of Asian football. Spaniard Félix Sánchez Bas, after becoming the first coach in 20 years to achieve a seven-match clean sweep of victories in the tournament, will now be touted as a global managerial talent to look out for. But the Catalonian’s story may have been very different. In 1996, Barcelona appointed a 21-year-old Sánchez as a youth coach, and a decade later his efforts were supplanted into a nascent academy in Doha. The multi-sport Aspire Academy, opened in 2004, has heralded a world champion in the form of high jumper Mutaz Essa Barshim – also of Sudanese heritage – and, headed by former Director of Strategy at Real Madrid Ivan Bravo, has invested heavily in Sánchez’s talents. Familiarity with a limited pool of players helped him step up from the academy, and through the national team’s ranks, before completing his rise in 2017 with a first senior appointment. When tactics in the Asian continent can be argued to too often err on the side of caution, Sánchez has thrown the cat amongst the pigeons in the UAE. Alternating between a back four and a three-man defensive line based on the demands of the opposition, his side have demonstrated flexibility, heart and some excellent technical ability – admire Ali’s overhead kick opener in the Final, available on all respectable social media formats. It does not omit the human rights abuses, blatant disregard for worker safety in the construction of stadiums for 2022, or corruption sustaining FIFA’s relationship with the Gulf for Qatar to have won here, however. Both broad churches of nationality, backgrounds and careers, FIFA and the Qatari state are institutions sustained only by corporate greed, subject to few moral regulators. If that means Aspire claiming to scout 400,000 young players from Africa alone every year – the talents of 18 nations whittled down to three players from each for trials in Aspire’s Senegalese branch – in order to assuage the all-important developing world’s delegates, so be it. If that means Xavi Hernández being the latest Spaniard, following the lead of the man credited with discovering Lionel Messi, Josep Colomer, or others who ended their careers in the state such as Pep Guardiola and Raúl, being groomed for ambassadorial duties at no short cost, then that is what shall be done. If that requires buying out Belgian club KAS Eupen to use as a springboard for Aspire’s graduates into signing for major European powers – Belgian league rules need only eight of a 25-man squad to be homegrown, and offer citizenship fast-tracks – very well. No questions asked. Infantino’s glee is hard to conceal at the best of times, and as the pieces of the puzzle are neatly slotting into place, his only quibbles – shared with few outside of a protectionist bloc – can be of the behaviour witnessed at the Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium. The images of shoes and plastic bottles scattered across Emirati goalkeeper Khalid Essa’s 18-yard box, whilst Qatari midfielder Salem Al Hajri lays shielding his face, at the second highest attended match of the tournament (after the UAE’s group match against India) will stick. They could put an end to Infantino’s ambitions of multilateral hosting in 2022 – his resolution to the dampeners applied by the 2017 tariffs – where he would play the part of prophetic peace broker. Whether or not he imagined himself riding into the region, legs astride a donkey, there certainly were palms lining his path, courtesy of Saudi Arabia’s pursuit of the same positive PR; the same Vision 2030 plan as Qatar. The mooted Saudi purchase of Manchester United, the $25 billion offer tabled to revolutionise club football with an elite tournament, and to introduce a global Nations League format usurping the Confederations Cup, and the ever-open arms of Mohammad bin Salman, a leader Infantino presumably estimates more the equal to Vladimir Putin than anyone in Qatar, all fire the Swiss lawyer’s cogs. After the Khashoggi killing, and the al-Araibi crisis in Bahrain, the last thing Infantino needed was the UAE to squeeze from his grip. It was already going to be a risky month; after the Qatar-Saudi meeting passed almost without incident, geopolitical revenge served up in a four-goal thrashing of the host nation was not a recipe for success. It is not Infantino’s story, this month, but his gluttony and desire for adulation, searching for the formula Blatter had, has framed the victory entirely within his narrative. Instead of the Swiss neutrality and altruism to which he sees himself the pinnacle, Infantino is a manipulator, a diplomat whose only technique is to pit the interests of global powers with necks far broader than his shepherd’s crook against one another. In the worst possible circumstances, he will be a warmonger. Less so a Clemenceau, Lloyd George or Wilson, with his terms of peace about to rear up in his own face, however, he’s more just a sh*t Bono. While this could have been a tournament remembered for the debuts of three nations through continental expansion, Kyrgyzstan and Vietnam’s valour triumphing over the greater sophistication of set-ups in Thailand and Jordan, or even the confirmation of how little quality Australia really do have, instead, when media fanfare is concerned, Qatar will continue to gazump all Arab counterparts. Conflicts in opinion will hypertrophy, but soft politics will win out in the end. From here, a four-year cycle begins, Qatari ambitions with more obvious validation. Victory in the hostility of Abu Dhabi sets the tone for PSG’s eventual Champions League title, and for Aspire alumni to enter the European elite. Both will signify the further shift of global power, to be despised by imperialists of old and the counter-imperialists of today. In June, Qatar play their first Copa América, joining Paraguay in Rio, Colombia in São Paulo and Argentina in Porto Alegre; it is no coincidence that other top-tier nations will search out Sánchez’s side for competitive action. These will be prosperous times in the desert. Football forms only a small mechanism of the wider pattern of redemption, and whether Infantino’s FIFA can repeat the trick performed in Russia, or exceed it by unifying not only one state but three, will depend on the increasingly unpredictable place of sport in social politics. And in this brave new world for football, with all its innovation and philanthropy, no case better illustrates its naked scramble for identity, aligning its values with internationally contradictory law, as al-Araibi’s. I can’t pretend that the Lonely Planet guide to ‘The World’ can elaborate the cultural complexities of Tashkent, Astana, Bishkek, Dushanbe or Ashgabat; the former USSR’s monuments to redemption and reflection. It does at least offer some distraction from the reportage of Kremlin meddling, though.
Exposure like this does little to harm the gradually shifting global understanding of the quintet of Central Asian states. LP promote none of the aforementioned capital cities of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan or Turkmenistan as foremost tourist destinations – although they do admit that the overall picture is undeveloped. Architectural, equine and volcanic parlance suffices for the average tour guide. It takes a brave soul to wade unguarded into the region, and I’d imagine that, as little sympathy as Jarvis Cocker spared them in Sheffield, tourists seeking comparisons with the old USSR here are amongst the most unwelcome on earth. Dissolution of the fifteen Soviet republics is seldom credited much to activism in any of the five most economically burdensome of Moscow’s frontiers. There was no scale of dissent like the Baltic linking of arms, no ethnic conflict as required between the divided diasporas of Armenia and Azerbaijan, few demonstrations like those in Tbilisi, Minsk and Kyiv, and no real cause for independence, some argue. The cities of the former Silk Road were revived by central investment, and isolated rural communities were treated with equal indifference as they had been by Persian, Chinese and Russian empires before. Few were sufficiently educated to be aware of the ecological repercussions of Moscow’s profiteering from Kazakh coal, Tajik aluminium, Kirghiz textiles and the oil and cotton industries of the Uzbeks and Turkmens. As the abundancies of oil fields had always laid underfoot, sporting excellence was not superfluous before Russification. If you can imagine the scarcity of leisure tourism there today, consider the mighty horses and dromedaries of the region carrying a spare pig’s bladder on long-haul merchant ventures through to China. British gentlemen were bereft of connections in the inaccessible post-Ural regions, and soccer hardly migrated by alternative means. Gradually, some culture did reach the outposts. A Kazakh national association was established in 1914, and soon the republics consumed by the nascent USSR submerged themselves into imperial expectations. Football, in the harsh reality of civil war and famine, did not take off immediately. Suspension continued until the Union’s second coming, the 1950s. Inevitably, the purpose of the Cold War-era club game was divergent from the only competition of comparable geographical scale at the time, the European Cup. Until the 1965-66 season, no Soviet side had entered a UEFA competition, and after 1960 expansion added Estonia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Soviet Top League had already spanned twelve different republics. It comprised the Union, and reaffirmed centralist superiority. The threshold of a power shift appeared in the early sixties, as Dynamo Kyiv became Top League champions, and followed Shakhtar Stalino (now Donetsk) as Soviet Cup holders. Eduard Streltsov’s Torpedo Moscow regained the cup in the 1968 final, but it was their opponents’ run that commanded interest. A Uzbek outfit with little in the way of luxury, Pakhtakor Tashkent are most famously recalled as the victims of a 1979 air disaster, in which seventeen members of their squad died, including the now-iconic Korean-Uzbek luminary, Mikhail An. Even if it meant the demise of their own success, after riots broke out in 1969 in protest of Russian migration to the city, their achievements precipitated a string of anti-Stalinist victories in the late 1960s and throughout the ‘70s; the cities of Lviv, Voroshilovgrad (now Luhansk), Yerevan, Tbilisi, and then into the 1980s Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Rostov, unfashionable and industrial, surging to the fore. The clean-cut goalscoring icon behind the Tashkent club’s rise was Gennady Krasnitsky. Having joined as an 18-year-old in 1958, two years after the formation of a team to fill the city’s new sporting amphitheatre, Krasnitsky never left. The tonic for an increasingly divided nation, his form as a young player gained recognition by a Soviet side that just emerged victorious from the 1960 European Championships. and famously on a 1963 tour of Soviet domestic stars scored twice against the reigning world champions Brazil. Rumours of alcoholism were rife, and his professional career only lasted a decade, before he made the natural evolution to become a coach at Pakhtakor. In 1988, Krasnitsky, one of the most ubiquitously popular players of the mid-Soviet era, committed suicide, aged 47, in the remote Tajik city of Qurghonteppa. Accounts read of a gifted working-class man with a thirst for education, losing his father in adolescence to the Great Patriotic War, a victim of the pressures applied to all sportspeople, and particularly those of his ilk after Streltsov’s imprisonment in 1958. Krasnitsky was named Uzbek player of the century in 2000, when he would have only been 60. There will be no usurpers of Krasnitsky’s fame in Uzbek football, but attempts are being made to advance the national team, after their narrow margin of failure in qualifying for this year’s World Cup. Héctor Cúper has taken the reins of the Uzbek national association. His is not quite the path of splendour laid for international greats Zico, Luis Felipe Scolari and Rivaldo, at FC Bunyodkor in the late 2000s, but it is certainly a new beginning. Former ruler Islam Karimov’s death in 2016 has opened the nation to several questions of identity. Little is in doubt over their footballing potential, either way. They have a competitive domestic scene, contested by three high-quality Tashkent clubs, Pakhtakor, Bunyodkor and Lokomotiv. Each of these clubs has on at least one occasion in the past 15 years reached the Quarter-Finals of the AFC Champions League, Asian football’s premier club competition. If there was any one side to emerge from the primordial Central Asian soup, as we will see, it would be the Uzbeks. What defines the Eurasian identity has always been open to interpretation, and as the largest economic segment of the former Soviet Union, Kazakhstan was a perennial adoptee of Russia’s Western intellectuals. Almaty, the nation’s largest city, is now unpopular for its position on the southern border, and lost capital city status in 1997 under the action of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Presidential regime, now entering its 30th year. Nazarbayev is determined, moreover, to lift what he views as the taint to Kazakh patriotism; association with the wastelands of the south and east. National broadcaster Channel 31 entered Junior Eurovision in 2018, sending 12-year-old Daneliya Tuleshova as the first ever national representative, and there are suggestions that a senior debut is awaiting the state at some stage after 2019. Authoritarian Kazakhstan is exempt from many more constitutions, however, and would only be considered credibly European in any sense by the corruptible characters at UEFA. It was in the spirit of unity, and a begrudging acceptance of Nazarbayev’s weight being thrown, that in 2002 they received commission for continental reassignment; they have been proudly wreaking havoc with scheduling ever since. Astana, ever the gleaming epithet to the sweating gallons of oil that pour out of the nation on the daily, manufactured its footballing culture from a skeletal existing structure; in 2008 Almaty’s FC Megasport and FC Alma-Ata merged, their fans and stadiums disposed with, and Lokomotiv Astana imagined as successor to a paltry throne. The 30,000-seater Astana Arena was erected in its honour, completed by 2009 and now also homing FC Bayterek, a side most famous for their affiliations to the national FA, shipping youth products off to the academies of São Paulo. In late September 2015, the Champions League finally arrived in the city, and Astana went unbeaten in all three group stage matches played at their high=spec stadium against Galatasaray, Atlético Madrid and Benfica. The man who masterminded such scalps, Bulgarian Levski Sofia icon Stanislav Stoilov, was in March appointed the next Kazakh boss. His tenure began confidently; Hungary, the supplier of many a statement victory to minnows in recent decades, going down 3-2 in Stoilov’s first match, but in the first international match held in Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s much-funded home village Felcsút, losing to a 94th minute goal from opponents Bulgaria. The Nations League was received lukewarmly afterwards; home thrashings of Azerbaijan and Andorra, but a painful series of defeats to Georgia, and failures to produce more than single points from visits to Riga and Andorra la Vella. It was, however, a start. Stoilov may have reasonable aspirations for achieving the nation’s best qualification record ahead of Euro 2020. Having never achieved more than a couple of victories in any prior campaign, they face decent prospects against Russia, Scotland and Cyprus, and have San Marino’s points as a given. If they cannot force through qualification at this opportunity, then they have sealed their own irrelevance. Incandescent neighbours Kyrgyzstan could not be have stronger continental ideals to the contrary. Stifling frustrations of the geographical might of the Kazakhs, the nation’s population of six million adopt views not beyond their global reality. If you were to draw, for example, an intersect between oil riches and abject rural poverty, Bishkek, the capital, would sit daintily in that midpoint. A million technologically isolated citizens reside in the city that time openly admitted its confusion to; where Black Sea-style classicist architecture clashes with vast open squares, a mini caricature of Moscow and Beijing’s might, and paling monumentally to Kyrgyz natural elevation, with an enduring image created by the arcing stretch of the Tian Shan range’s embrace of the hardy throngs in its bosom. Brewing nicely at Bishkek’s altitude, newly-elected President Sooronbay Jeenbekov’s rivalry with predecessor Almazbek Atambayev has gained international focus this year. Questions of democratic credibility before the election have mutated into investigations into the nature of loans of several hundred millions of dollars to the Chinese firm who worked on the modernisation of power plants that packed up during this January’s seriously sub-zero winter. The cat-and-mouse game in government has created almost unbreakable tension, with firings and threats of impeachment not just the items of ongoing White House narratives. Fortunate, then, that there is some distraction in the nation’s first ever Asian Cup qualification for the tournament that begins in January 2019. Drawn in what is almost certainly the strongest group, alongside South Korea, China and fellow debutants the Philippines, 40-year-old Russian manager Aleksandr Krestinin’s side will battle wits with Marcello Lippi, Sven-Göran Eriksson and former Portugal manager Paulo Bento at just the first hurdle. Krestinin could not have trekked much further from his birthplace of Krasnodar, near the Crimean border, to find stable employ. In 2008, he rocked up in Kochkor-Ata, a town of only 16,000 people on the Uzbek border, as a 30-year-old centre-back coming off the back of spells in central Siberia and the Russian Far East, where winter chills of -30oC quickly become the daily norm. Within two years, he had made the step up to become coach, and won FC Neftchi Kochkor-Ata their first ever First Division title, while only missing out on the double in a Cup final decided by one goal. Instead of becoming a caricature of the spluttering Russian, unwelcome in cultural isolation, Krestinin found his home in Kyrgyzstan, and in October 2014 moved to Bishkek to take up very serious duties. A far cry from the bazaar town of the Jalal-Abad region, where walnuts are as famous an export as oil, the capital could not overwhelm the imperturbable Krestinin. The relationship he and the national team have formed since has been serene; four years, and more, of vastly improved fortunes. It has helped that the plans laid before him have been followed to fruition, and that divides that could easily exist between Turkic, Chinese and Russian roots have not troubled his premiership. Viktor Maier, Vitalij Lux, Viktor Kelm and Edgar Bernhardt, Kyrgyz’s raised in Germany, were convinced of their patriotism, and Ghanaian-born player Daniel Tagoe has been retained from the trio of countrymen who arrived in the Top League in the late 2000s. The continuity of current Kirghiz football is also to be admired, imposed through Krestinin’s temporary role as manager of record national champions FC Dordoi Bishkek, who won their first league title for four years in 2018. Almost apologetically, relative to Astana and the Kazakh national team, the Spartak Stadium, based only a block away from central Bishkek’s Ala-Too Square, hosts both Dordoi and the Kirghiz FA, and can be a lively office when regulars of the athletics association are also thrown into the equation. Many national team players have represented Dordoi at some stage of their career, but it is far from a pre-requisite for notice today. Players take advantage of emerging Kyrghyz ties to the outside world, and football in Kyrgyzstan is leading from the front in a pro-active recruitment search. Margins, as with investment, attendances and attention, may be minimal, but stability counts for a lot in the humblest of the Central Asian states. In a decade of unarguable ambition, ten managerial changes speak of little continuity in boisterous neighbour Tajikistan. By a distance the smallest of the five brotherly states, its barren natural vistas are far more envied than any of the distinctly abject cities, but indignity, insecurity and democratic chastity have become part of several fundamental facts for the Tajik people. Theirs is not a distinguished Russian or ancient Chinese identity, but Persian, and sharing its lengthy southern border with Afghanistan, was treated merely by the Soviets as a buffer zone during proxy conflict. Although Islamic faith, shared by 98% of the population, is what binds the Tajik people, Emomali Rahmon, permanent President since 1992, has negotiated an uneasy national relationship with worship. The nation is officially secular, and practice must be undertaken in less overt terms than in any neighbouring states. The Tajik Civil War of 1992 until 1997 certainly influenced the policy, with hard-line Islam factions countering the nascent government, and threatening to tear the nation into even less significant halves, eternally at odds. The Tajik capital, Dushanbe, was of course critical in the conflict, and government forces rallied in its position in the nation’s west, exerting extensive control over the halls of power as regional politics came to stabilise. Formerly a distinctly Islamic variation on the name of their great overlord, Stalinabad, the city only grew to its current status in the years after 1929, when uncle Joseph’s need for industrial productivity and overzealous governance resulted in the swelling of a town of just 6,000 to a foremost city of over 200,000. Russian influence fixated throughout the next set of decades, and during Mikhail Gorbachev’s ungainly attempts to disentangle from Afghan occupation, Dushanbe, resourceful for troops, became rather a talented footballing city overnight. In the final three seasons of the Top League, CSKA Pamir Dushanbe competed amongst what remained of the USSR’s disintegrating best, and by virtue of being the only non-Russian side not to withdraw by the Quarter-Finals, reached the last four of the 1991-92 Soviet Cup. In a continent of intimidating contrasts, Tajikistan’s footballers have been quite content to find their niche. The AFC Cup, a Europa League-esque competition for Asia’s ‘developing nations’, has proven solid ground; Istiklol, five-time consecutive Tajik champions, reached two finals, in 2015 and 2017. The same catch twenty-two that befalls several Celtic managers, however, emerges half the world away, in a competition of far less frills. Falling at this year’s group stage, manager Mukhsin Mukhamadiev had to go. The same post-dissolution movement that Mukhamadiev made as a player from Pamir to Lokomotiv Moscow was undertaken by Khakim Fuzailov, a midfielder at the time. Their exposure to professional environments can be overvalued, however, and it is Fuzailov who is stepping into his former team-mate’s shoes at Istiklol after failing with the national team over the previous two years. The expanded Asian Cup format this season presented a great prize for the Tajik FA, with the opportunity to match the result of their Kyrghyz neighbours in a first-time qualification. Defeat to Yemen, now debutants at the event instead, consigned their hopes to history for another four years. There is no reason that it cannot be achieved, but for rivals to make haste while they appear to stand still, Tajik frustration is inevitable. They do not have plenty – the population of Tajikistan have a median national age of just 24.5 years, reflected in the make-up of the national team – but there is much promise to make up for that. If the Tajiks lack establishment, Turkmenistan is drastically short of a workforce at all. Only five million or so citizens abide in the arid state, 70% of the land mass overtaken by the Karakum Desert. Through the landform runs the Karakum Canal, one of the most ecologically ruinous projects the USSR ever commissioned, which since 1954 has contributed significantly to the rapid drying of the Aral Sea on the Uzbek-Kazakh border. In the heart of the desert also sits the Darvaza gas crater, an open-topped basin, 70 metres wide, of flickering methane fumes known to tourists as the ‘Gates of Hell’, once inadvertently created by Soviet oil explorers in the 1950s, and left burning ever since. You can understand why few would want to reside in close proximity. President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, however, is possibly the most curious head of state around. A former dentist, he has tried his hand, as seen on YouTube, to DJing, rapping, guitar serenading and military training, and as President also of the nation’s Olympic Committee, has demonstrated his expertise in horse riding and golf, often found in a fetching velvet-lined tracksuit in national colours. The nation has recruited Jennifer Lopez, Jack Nicklaus and others to reinforce Berdimuhamedow’s message, and its tightly controlled press has been compared only to North Korea. Former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-proclaimed Türkmenbaşy from 1991 until 2006, rebuilt the capital Ashgabat to the Disneyland-type imitation of a democratic society it is today. The city was never great – or even a city – before being built up by Stalin’s USSR, but was struck down in 1948 by a 7.3 magnitude earthquake, with the death and destruction of two-thirds of the city utterly ruinous. Needless to say, sport is also entirely manufactured here, and the hero of the scene is undisputedly Ýazguly Hojageldyýew, returning for his second spell as national team manager after winning five consecutive league titles with FC Altyn Asyr. The 20,000-capacity Ashgabat Stadium houses both, alongside fellow Ýokary Liga sides FC Ashgabat and Ahal, but the 48,000-seater Olympic Stadium is the real jewel in Berdimuhamedow’s crown, and as part of a reported $5 billion Olympic Village hosted the 2017 Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, where Turkmenistan strangely topped the medals table after entering a record number of athletes – for any nation – ever. A very creditable debut in the 2004 Asian Cup did not extend much to continued Turkmen glory, but as they prepare for their second appearance in the coming weeks, hope springs eternal. In that squad, a handful of players in the Russian and Ukrainian professional leagues were present, but in an environment of glamour in the UAE, they will have only winger Ruslan Mingazow, who has journeyed from Riga to the Czech First Division, as some form of star. Japanese legions, minus a fair few World Cup veterans, an Ali Al-Habsi-led Oman and Cúper’s Uzbeks will suffocate them, undoubtedly. But they are there, and are prepared to scrap. It is more than can be said for others, if that is at all to their credit. All five nations are prepared to sacrifice for their own improvement. This is an admirable and direct legacy of their Communist past, and in some cases, their present. They have different interpretations of what it is to be influential, of what values should be prioritised. They have different relationships with President Putin, Premier Xi Jingping and the rest of the outside world – much to do with their concentration of oil at any one time. But 2018 presented all five with an opportunity I don’t believe was, ultimately, granted at even a small level to them. For a World Cup tournament to be hosted in the hearth of their former communal living space, they were conspicuously bereft from attendance. Who can afford those train fares to Moscow these days though, eh? Russia’s vastness is no excuse for the cold shoulder presented alongside much of a 20,000km land border, and if the West has decided to accept Putin’s hospitality, then it is hypocritical to be blasé about the ignorance to the East. The opportunity of a World Cup, watched by billions, will never reach Central Asia directly, so failing to maximise recognition from one in a neighbour who considers you such a cultural deformity is tremendously sad. None of the states will gain PR from reflections upon a successful competition, none will rise in the world rankings, none will benefit from the rise of service sectors in Russia, where without the trade of their oil they would not have reached levels of very modest fortune they have today. Even Kazakhstan, symbiotically European in aspiration, did not profit, and the selection of Ekaterinburg as an Asian venue fooled no one. Life goes on, I suppose. Hardships are dealt out, luck occasionally greets labourers, and the cycle of politics chunters on. Eyes will be averted again, and little will change. What can, until charity ever bestows itself? What’s next then? |
Author - Will HugallLiving in the shadow of the South Downs outside Brighton, I am an ambitious young writer with aspirations of becoming a national sports journalist. Archives
July 2019
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