On the road and into a bomb shelter mid-match with Mariupol Women | OneFootball

In the low-lit gloom, Mariupol Women’s players huddle around their phones and try to work out how long the delay will last. “A MiG-31 took off, that’ll be about an hour,” reckons one voice, but nobody can ever know for sure. Ten minutes ago they were holding their own against EMC-Podillya, edging their way towards half-time and the prospect of a creditable away point, when the air-raid siren’s fearful wail sent them straight down the tunnel and back into the minibus. Now they are sitting in the basement of a vocational college 500 metres around the corner, a facility repurposed as an air-raid shelter for the surrounding community during wartime.

A group of young gymnasts occupies the bigger part of the space, using the time to hone its festive routine to a soundtrack of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”. Down the corridor, the home team perch at a set of desks. It makes for a surreal backdrop as Karyna Kulakovskaya and Yana Vynorukova offer instructions to their squad, one by one, before addressing them as a collective.

“They’ve got one player who can affect things, but if you switch her off that’s it,” Vynorukova says. “We’re going to come back fully rested, stretched and prepared, and we’re going to change the game.”

Keeping everyone warmed up and mentally engaged will be crucial if this pause, the third to have affected Mariupol this season, is prolonged. Seven hours ago, at 6am, they had gathered outside a supermarket in Kyiv’s outskirts for the four-hour drive south-west to Vinnytsia. “Imagine you’re seasonal workers going to pick strawberries,” Vynorukova had joked to her half-asleep cohort as they filed into the vehicle. Resources for most Ukrainian Women’s Premier League clubs cannot cover overnight trips even when kick-off is, like this one, at midday. In a worst-case scenario the match will have to be abandoned and everyone will convene another day, perhaps even tomorrow, for the remainder. Neither club can comfortably bear the costs of that.

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Two hours slide by in the underbelly of this Soviet-era building. “Our reality,” grimaces Andriy, the fitness trainer, as he continues to run through exercises. Both sides are now within their rights to call it off, a decision that may be forced upon them if dusk beckons. There are no floodlights at Vinnytsia’s bleak, dilapidated Central City Stadium and the day has been damp, misty, not quite right. The head coach, Kulakovskaya, observes her team’s faces, sees how several are contorting into yawns, and heads upstairs to buy bananas.

Although football teams are obliged to take cover when the alarm sounds, life is often carrying on outside. There has been no repeat of the tragedy in July 2022, when 23 people were killed here in a missile strike, although the region continues to be targeted. Kulakovskaya returns with several bunches at 3.05pm. Four minutes later, phone apps ping and the all-clear calls out. Mariupol haul themselves back up into the fading light and prepare to play.

***

“Where is Mariupol now?” asks Kulakovskaya. “There is no Mariupol in your news any more and it’s offensive. We have to keep this team running to remind people.” It is the day before the game and the two women have just overseen a light training session, necessarily held at 9am because a number of their squad are still at school. They essentially built the club from scratch in 2015, overcoming multiple hurdles to lead it to the top flight and turn it into a respected presence there.

Then they had to do it all over again. Russia’s siege and occupation of Mariupol last year was one of its invasion’s most appalling episodes and its full horror may never be known. Kulakovskaya and Vynorukova lost almost everything except their lives and a vision that had sustained them for almost a decade. They rebuilt the club in Ukraine’s capital after surviving, then escaping, the Russians’ terror.

“I try not to think about it,” says Vynorukova, a Mariupol native who serves as club president. “I prefer not to look back. I lost a lot there and I know humans do not have endless resources to cope. I’m here now and need to build something new. If God took something away from us it’s for a reason, and we need to do something to get it back. So, if I’m now in a situation that I don’t like, I’m just thinking about how to solve it.”

When Russia attacked in February 2022, seven of the team gathered at Vynorukova’s home. They stayed there for three weeks, surviving on food cooked from a bonfire and drinking water taken from a well as amenities were gradually cut off. Eventually, with airstrikes intensifying, the group saw little option but to flee. The journey out to Zaporizhzhia, running the gauntlet of Russian checkpoints whose soldiers were seemingly acting upon whim, took two days. The strain and anguish of that trip are impossible for anyone on the outside to imagine.

Initially Kulakovskaya, Vynorukova and a number of the players took refuge in Bulgaria, but the prospect of football’s revival brought them back to Ukraine in time for its restart last August. Only a handful of the team from Mariupol came with them: some remained abroad; others quit the game; one even returned to Mariupol. The club has risen again, helped by new arrivals from Kyiv and other areas of the country.

“We looked at young, promising players who we could pass our knowledge to and give everything we have,” Vynorukova says. “The name of Mariupol is important for me and Karyna, but 80% of our team is new. They are young and that’s not what brings them into the team. They see the atmosphere, the professionalism, the opportunities, the things they can learn. But for the two of us, of course, it’s a fundamental idea to keep Mariupol alive in this way.”

Kulakovskaya recalls how, when they first registered the club nine years ago, having departed the corruption-hit Illichivka Mariupol, the local authorities handed them sodden Euro 2012-branded balls and 10 used, smelly shirts. They were dealt a better hand upon starting up in Kyiv, donated training kit and equipment by fellow clubs. It gave them a basis from which to begin last season, in which they finished ninth of 12, but their financial viability owes in huge part to the initiative and business nous of Vynorukova.

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“We tell the girls football eventually comes to an end and you’ll need something else,” she says. Vynorukova was forced to retire from playing after a collision with a goalkeeper. She owned a cafe in Mariupol and came up with the idea of starting a company that could fund the club, which had been denied municipal funding. “Vlasne Vurobnotstvo” was born, producing dumplings and other pre-made foodstuffs that are sold to distributors and suppliers. The business has been set up again in Kyiv, staffed by players who take turns to work in its small premises and augment their minimal football income, and they hope it will be able to again cover the club’s costs by this time next year.

“The majority work there,” says Vynorukova, who also opened a beauty salon in Mariupol and arranged for players to take courses in massage and manicure, subsequently employing them. “It’s not obligatory, we just tell them we need help and nobody says no. They’re paid for it and we keep to a schedule so that nobody is working too much.” Mariupol have made a deal for support from the men’s club, Oleksandriya, that will help until they break even. “But all of our team’s goals depend on how much the business earns,” she says.

There is a toughness, a savviness, to Vynorukova and Kulakovskaya. In the financially straitened world of women’s football they have found their own solutions to problems, compounded by war, that no top-tier men’s club will encounter. That extends to the rehabilitation of Anya, a player who recently sustained a potentially career-ending meniscus injury. They have launched a crowdfunder to ensure the substantial costs, only partly insured for, are covered.

Beneath their ambition and relentless tempo, though, lie the memories. “Of course there are things I regret,” Vynorukova says. “And one of them is that I didn’t get to say goodbye to the sea.”

***

The teams jump out of their minibuses and run for the pitch. All parties have agreed to see things through. Nobody on either side can remember being involved in a suspension this long but, two hours and 41 minutes after they were called inside, play restarts deep inside Mariupol’s half. It is starting to rain heavily: Vynorukova drapes herself in a blanket and her substitute goalkeeper Veronika Soroka, tiny in 15-year-old stature but deft and assured in the previous day’s training, follows suit. There is no break for half-time bar a change of ends.

In the 78th minute Mariupol’s staff and substitutes erupt on to the turf, which by now resembles a ploughed field. A moment of genuine quality from Polina Polukhina has broken the deadlock: her deft free-kick gives Sofiya Barabash in the EMC-Podillya goal scant chance. Polukhina is Mariupol’s captain and one of those present who have shared her coaches’ experience. After escaping Mariupol, her clubmates lost contact with her for a month. She left later and the relief was immense when, after a two-week journey, she met up with them in Bulgaria. Her teenaged colleagues could have nobody better to drag them through the enveloping storm.

A first win of the season is tantalisingly close and it would resonate particularly with Kulakovskaya, who was born in Vinnytsia and is being watched from the stands by her mother. Within three minutes, though, the Ukraine youth international Olena Martiniuk scores to secure an outcome that reflects the afternoon’s broken-up proceedings and seems fair given the upheaval everyone has undergone. EMC-Podillya have done well to keep the show running.

Having re-established her club, Kulakovskaya wants Mariupol to reach for the stars. “Before the war this was considered a top club, and a top club that we made ourselves,” she says. “Now we have to do it again. This year I’ll accept a dip but, next year, if players aren’t physically or emotionally in shape I won’t allow it. If it weren’t for the occupation I think we could already have become champions because we were working according to our plan. Now perhaps we’ll have to wait for another decade.”

The final whistle blows at 4.20pm, a little before sunset; by the time Mariupol are back in Kyiv, their matchday will have lasted more than 15 hours. Perhaps, on the road back, it would be tempting to imagine a time when the club can play in its own city once again. “As soon as Mariupol is liberated Karyna and I will give the girls a week off and go back there, even if it’s mid-season.” Vynorukova says. “I dream of going to see my mum, who is still there. But in terms of the club, it’s not the most important thing. It would be good to start an academy and play certain games there but our business is here now and it would mean doing everything all over again, for a third time. It would be difficult to move back and tell all these players to restart their lives.”

It is a question for another, brighter time. For now, the small bus transporting Mariupol’s players back through the autumn evening also carries an essential message of hope and resilience.