Estonia’s ‘garrison game’ grows up

THERE aren’t many fans who revere an 8-1 defeat but as the years went by, Estonians looked back with increasing fondness on their match against Latvia in August 1942.

It was June 1992 before Estonia could again play as themselves, drawing 1-1 against Slovenia. It wasn’t just that for half a century, Estonia was not an independent nation, it was that football became seen as a symbol of oppression.

The situation is perhaps not dissimilar to that which saw the commitment to GAA in Ireland. Football — and, to a lesser extent, ice hockey — came to be regarded as the Russian game, representative of an occupying power, so Estonians busied themselves with basketball, cycling and cross-country skiing.

That may be changing in terms of participation but football in Estonia remains a minority spectator sport, particularly at club level.

The A LA Coq Arena will be full to its 10,300 capacity for the visit of Ireland next month, but last season, the average attendance in the Estonian domestic league was 160, 12 fewer than the average for the eighth level of English football and only 10% of the average for the Airtricity Premier Division.

Even the best supported team, Levadia, drew only 289 per game, compared to 3,918 for Shamrock River (Levadia, coincidentally, means Shamrock in Estonian). Basketball, by contrast, regularly attracts crowds of 4,000, while World Cup cross-country skiing events can draw 10,000.

When I was in Tallinn for Estonia’s games against Croatia and England in 2007, there was some buzz about the arrival of David Beckham but the real excitement was centred on a cycle race featuring a team owned by Valeri Karpin, the former Russia (football) international who is of Estonian origin and took up Estonian citizenship in 2003.

Perhaps the comparative lack of interest is only natural. After all, in Kristina Smigun-Vahi and Andrus Veerpalu, Estonia has two double Olympic gold-medallists in skiing, while Tallinn Kalev became Soviet basketball champions in 1991, the final year of pan-Soviet competition. Tallinn Sport, Estonia’s foremost football team, meanwhile, spent most of its time loitering near the bottom of the Soviet third division.

There has been a drive to raise the level of football, beginning in the mid-80s with Roman Ubakivi, a youth coach who believed there was no reason why Estonians should not be able to compete in football, just as Daugava did for Latvia and Zalgirus for Lithuania.

“When I was a little boy, I wanted to create an armed organisation that could release Estonia from Soviet power,” he wrote in his book Vike Jalgpallipiibel. “But I realised that path led to doom, so I decided Estonia had to have its own national team to cheer.”

The power of football had been seen in September 1980, when a game between teams representing Estonian radio and TV provided the platform for Estonia’s largest anti-government demonstration. Riots followed, and two months later 40 local intellectuals signed a letter protesting against the systematic Russification of Estonian society.

Those tensions endure today, as was seen most dramatically in the riots after a memorial to Soviet war dead was removed from a public square in Tallinn and moved to a military cemetery in April 2007. In the early days of an independent Estonian league, a virtual apartheid existed between on the one side Levadia, TVMK and Narva, ethnic Russian clubs, and on the other Flora, Tulevik, Kuressaare and Valga, their Estonian equivalents.

That now has begun to change, mixing is far more common and there is a reasonable argument that football is the area of Estonian society in which integration has been most effective.

It’s far from perfect, but it’s a sign of the relatively amicable relations between the Estonian and Russian clubs that Aivar Pohlak, president of Flora Tallinn, is now in his fifth year as president of the Estonian Football Federation (EJL). Wild-haired, unshaven and a believer that he should not mask his “true smell” behind deodorant, a children’s author and keen bee-keeper, he is irascible and eccentric, but he is also charismatic, and has invested large sums of his own money, and inspired the establishment of football schools across the country.

Football has nothing like the importance in Estonia it has in other nations, but at least it has ceased to be seen as a foreign sport. Qualifying for Euro 2012, of course, would take it to a whole new level.