The Ukrainian champions face Barcelona on Tuesday at a time when, as one staff member puts it, ‘nothing is okay really’
Shakhtar players before their Champions League group game away to Barcelona last month. They face the Catalan side again in Hamburg on Tuesday. Photograph: Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty ImagesIt is unseasonably warm but the leaves cloaking Sviatoshyn Olympic Centre are turning the same hue as Shakhtar Donetsk’s orange shirts. The sky is clear and the two training pitches pristine.
Pusic has been Shakhtar’s head coach for only 10 days. His contract was signed in Barcelona, everything finalised just in time to take training the day before the match. There have not been many opportunities for him or his assistant, the former Chelsea player Mario Stanic, to get their message across but the players are receptive. They disliked the direct tactics and disciplinarian approach of his predecessor, Patrick van Leeuwen.
“Last season everyone was exhausted after 12, 13, 14 hours on the bus,” he says. “What I notice now is that they’re mentally prepared: when we arrived in Barcelona I didn’t sense that level of fatigue. They’ve reconciled themselves to the travel time. Shakhtar Donetsk's Heorhiy Sudakov scores his team's goal during their 2-1 Champions League defeat by Barcelona last month. Photograph: Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images
There is no option but to remain peripatetic and cope. Stepanenko speaks of how difficult it was, while he was out of the country a month ago, to hear the stadium of his boyhood club Torpedo Zaporizhzhia had been struck by a missile. Heorhiy Sudakov, the 21‑year‑old playmaker who scored in Barcelona and will almost certainly follow Mykhaylo Mudryk in raising vital transfer money for Shakhtar, recounts the horror of discovering last October that Kyiv had been struck several times.
These clubs met here in the semi‑final of that Uefa Cup campaign in 2009 and, by contrast, nobody could hear themselves think. Dmytro Chyhrynskyi, the veteran defender who returned in August for a third stint at Shakhtar, says: “Back then it was: ‘Wow!’ It was a massive moment for Ukrainian football. Everyone had been buzzing for the entire week before. It was one of the most difficult and intense nights of my career.
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