Ukraine’s football restarts with flags, a message from Zelenskiy but no crowd

Early on Tuesday morning, Igor Jovicevic had been jolted from sleep by the air raid alarm. He was far from alone in that and it brought home, in a way that disconcerted him, the jarring contrast with what he was about to face. “You wake up and hear it: siren, siren,” the Shakhtar Donetsk head coach said. “And then you think you’re playing later in the day, coaching the match, wanting to think about tactical aspects. We’re playing football and at the same time we’re fighting to be free men.”

The first game of the 2022-23 season had just passed with little incident, whether in a footballing sense or the one that really mattered. Shakhtar should not normally be held to a goalless home draw by Metalist 1925, but this was no everyday encounter. The real victory here would be in showing that Ukrainian football could thrive again as a symbol of a country’s resistance and regrowth; this was a promising start and, at least on any level discernible to those present, no recourse to the new campaign’s exhaustive security protocols had been required. There will now be justified confidence that a once unthinkable feat can be pulled off.

Football has come back to provide joy and hope but it must always know what it is representing. After the players had walked out, the stands of this 70,000-capacity stadium empty save for club officials and about 30 journalists, they turned as one towards the big screen and faced their president. They watched, each draped in the national colours on Ukraine’s flag celebration day, as Volodymyr Zelenskiy addressed them via a recorded message. “Two colours that we all love,” he said. “We care about them and will never allow any other colours on our land. We are always ready to defend our blue and yellow