“Everyone get on the bus!” shouts Viatcheslav Rol, covering with his voice the explosions that sound in the distance. Little soccer players between nine and eleven years old obey, pressed together on a freezing November morning.
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The Krystal Kherson club, from Kherson, leaves that day the city in southern Ukraine that day after day is bombed by the Russian army. The players’ destination is Nicolaiev, 70 kilometers away, to participate in a tournament.
“Training helps them,” explains Viatcheslav, the 67-year-old trainer. “They forget the bombs,” continues this man, who trains the twenty young women.
Kherson was occupied by the Russian army for eight months. Liberated on November 11, 2022 by Ukrainian forcesthe city only experienced a brief respite as it suffers attacks every day that cause deaths and injuries.
“Herson! I dream of you every night!”: on the bus, the team sings one of their songs, while crossing a landscape of devastated streets.
In the midst of the bustle, Igor Psourtev, the club’s assistant coach, remembers the occupation.
“I went door to door looking for young people, the city was empty, I was desperate,” explains this affable 60-year-old man. But “when she saw me, her eyes lit up,” the coach continues, pointing to a player he calls “Messi in a skirt.”
At half-time in a match, in Nicolaiev, another player dries her sweat with her blue and phosphor green t-shirt. Dana is eleven years old and very tall. She says that at first she didn’t like football but that the war made her change.
“I followed my friend who was practicing. It was so I wouldn’t be trapped,” she says. Today, the girl “dreams” of being a professional. Dana and her family now live in Odessa, since a “missile (fell) next to our house.”
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“I was very afraid, my father covered me with his body,” continues Dana, who continues playing for Jersón “because it is my city.”. In fact, he does not miss a single training session, despite the 220 kilometers that separate the two cities and the bombs that continue to fall.
On the playing field in Nicoaliev, with the players already dressed to play, everyone sings the national anthem with their hands over their hearts. Viatcheslav takes the floor to motivate his team before the game: “I see in front of me girls who remained strong during the occupation and the bombings and who nothing has stopped them from playing football.”
Afterwards there is a minute of silence for the victims of the war, while in the distance the top floor of a devastated building can be seen. The atmosphere is tense, since the team captain has lost her father at the front.
After the opening whistle, Lioudmyla Kramarenko, Dana’s mother, cheers as if it were a World Cup final. “Come on, Kherson!”
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Go home happy
“Dana had nightmares, I had to sleep with her during the attacks,” he explains. When the family was still living under the bombs in Kherson, the little girl “came home happy from training, I saw that it was important to her.”
On the synthetic grass of the Nicolaiev field, Viatcheslav, the coach, shouts at Dana: “Stop behaving like a princess! You’re not on the beach, this is football!”
At the end of the game, Vitacheslav takes down the Ukrainian flags from the fences surrounding the field and remembers: “I hid them in my house during the occupation.”
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He says he was contacted by the Russian secret services, the FSB, to train a team for them. “I rejected it. The girls thought they were going to shoot me. But they didn’t do anything to me, I played the role of a senile old man,” he explains.
At the end of the tournament, the Kherson girls finish third out of six participants. “Herson is still standing!” concludes the coach. And the players walk smiling and with their eyes lit up towards the bus that will return them to their bombed city.
AFP
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