Beneath it, Shakhtar Donetsk’s players are going through their paces. It is a light session for those who did not start against Veres Rivne the previous day; that means Arda Turan observes from the side, watching with the director of football, Darijo Srna. A stray ball zips towards them and Srna, after juggling it up, bends it into the goal with a familiar right-footed arc.
But the two men are football legends in their own right and, as they continue to joke before Srna dashes away to take another phone call, the thought occurs that this happy scene could be played out almost anywhere else. Nearby, just beyond the team’s accommodation, a lake shimmers under the emerging sun. It masks the fact that, around dawn, air raid sirens disrupted the peace for everyone in view.
Even here, in Shakhtar’s bucolic spa hotel base 15 minutes outside Lviv, nobody is safe from the threat of Russian rockets and drones. In Rivne, three hours’ drive to the north-east, another alarm had sent the players and staff down to the stadium’s shelter. The second half was delayed by 20 minutes and that, no matter the corner of the country or the vividness of the autumn colours, is a weekly reality.
So is a travel schedule any other Champions League club would recoil at. Shakhtar are about to hit the road yet again, because there remains no chance of playing European games in Ukraine. This season they will host matches in England for the first time, Stamford Bridge the winner in a beauty contest of three venues in the capital.
If the border crossing into Poland is unforgiving, the journey could take anything up to 18 hours. The Guardian has been invited to join their trip to London for Wednesday’s game “at home” to AEK Athens. He has wrought a transformation at Shakhtar since his appointment as head coach in May 2025 and has been reminding anyone who will listen of his semi-final goal against Chelsea in 2014, when an Atlético Madrid side at the peak of their powers produced a classic away performance.
Alisson, one of Shakhtar’s forwards, was unaware of Arda’s heroics and has been made to learn quickly. But there is always a serious point. But we have a dream and inside we have great power.” They will need all of it for the trip.
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