Soccer rivals choose sides in Ukraine upheavals
Admittedly Orwell was never that keen on organised sport and less still on football. In 1945, Moscow Dynamo visited Britain for a series of friendlies that included a bad-tempered match against Arsenal at White Hart Lane, where it was so foggy that no one noticed the Russians had 12 men on the pitch. After the recriminations that followed Orwell observed: “If you want to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at the moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Yugoslavs.”
Tomorrow’s kickabout was due to take place in Kharkiv (or Kharkov, if you’re Russian), which also has a team named Arsenal, but anticipating trouble — and with no sense of irony — the Ukrainian Football Federation decided to switch the venue to Cyprus.
