When COVID-19 came along to wreck everything that had gone before, and open a portal into a new world that is still only at the very beginning of its formation, football was one of the earliest casualties. The last game I was physically at was on 7 March, when Montrose, on a long, impressive, gravity-defying run towards the Scottish League One play-offs, beat Stranraer 4-1 at Links Park. I had planned to take in a Highland League fixture at Lossiemouth on the 14th, but the games were are cancelled barely 24 hours before kick-off- part of the slow moving collapse of the Before Times life that we all still yearn for.
In the early days of "lockdown" football simply vanished into limbo. Links Park has been shuttered with everyone from tea ladies to playing staff put on furlough, as the club's board grapple with the huge existential problems lockdown poses for football. Fundraising pages were set up to help. Folk on social media chafed that football fans had the gall to still care about football in times of an unprecedented global emergency. Quickly it became apparent that this wouldn't be a brief hiatus- I don't expect to be back in a football ground until 2021/22, and have grave doubts that season 20/21 will happen at all at lower levels in Scotland. The economics of closed-doors football simply don't work at our level.
What then to do? The football fan was presented with two choices back in late March; trawl youtube and media channels for highlights of long forgotten matches from 25 years ago (I've no desire to re-visit one of the worst days on my football supporting life at Euro 96, thanks) or try desperately to find something to watch. And, at that point, the Which Belarusian Premier League Team Should You Support? online survey popped up in my twitter feed.
Before mid-March I could of course have named BATE, Belarus' serial champions, Dinamo Minsk and maybe, if I was locked in a dark cellar and tasered repeatedly, Shaktyor Soligorsk. I knew who Aleksandar Hleb was, having read a sobering article many years ago about how brutally his father made him train as a youngster, as well as having noticed him vaguely at Arsenal. I can remember Mark Hughes' Wales being humiliated in Minsk in their red kappa kits. That was about the sum total of my knowledge of the game in the country.
Fast forward two months and I'm watching four out of six games every weekend on the excellent youtube channel of the Belarus Football Federation, and am airily familiar with most teams and their better players. It's been great for discovering the geography of what often seems to be a historically invisible country, and some of it's eye-wateringly tragic history.
As will be obvious from the type of games that this blog once covered, i have an aversion to big, dominant teams, so i was never going to end up following BATE who have won the league an astonishing thirteen times since independence, and were (shockingly) unseated by Dynamo Brest last year. Brest, with a Czech-Scottish duo in the dugout, swaggered to last year's title, but since then have suffered rather from Blackburn Rovers syndrome. The coaches have gone, so have many of the title winning squad, and a maverick owner seems more intent on spending money and effort building up Rukh Brest, who he also owns (confused? never mind, they seem to do things differently in Brest). This season's Dynamo are already a pale imitation of last season's champions and no one is taking them very seriously anymore.
Other popular teams with UK fans have been Neman Grodno, who have an extraordinary shirt featuring diagonal green stripes on chrome yellow; it looks like a cross between a boiled sweet and a pillar at the now demolished Hacienda nightclub in Manchester. Grodno are a bit like Wales in the 1990s, built around one player; the lavishly gifted Armenian international Gegham Kadymyan. But somehow I wasn't persuaded by the charms of Neman and wanted to follow a team nearer to the capital.
Slutsk quickly attracted a worldwide fanbase of those who lament that Carry On! films are no longer politically correct. The fact that the town's pronunciation (Slee-ootsk) ruins the, er, "funny", matters little to those considering parting with £70 to cut about in a football top with I AM A SLUT written in player-name font on the back.
There's a lot of strange flat-pack clubs too, as sides in the Belarusian league seem to have butterfly lives. FC Minsk- founded in 2006- and Isloch- a year later, are examples of these; they seem like vehicles for businessmen to indulge their passtimes. Isloch have a charming accordion-playing mascot and one of the league's more exciting forwards in the Guinean Momo Yansane. But they seem a little bought of the peg from IKEA and may disappear as quickly as they have appeared. Clubs such as Torpedo BelAZ of Zhodino and Belshina from Bobruisk have their roots in local factories; Torpedo's owners produce gigantic Soviet-designed mining trucks that seem to be the size of whole apartment blocks, whilst Belshina make tyres. I didn't ever really think about Slavia from Mozyr, Shaktyor or the village outfits, Gorodeya and Smolevichi.
That pretty much leaves Energetik-BGU, who are effectively Minsk's university team. The club was founded in 1996 and like almost all Belarusian clubs has been through several name changes. They play in a bold vitamin-supplement orange with purple insets, a colour combination little visited since this Scottish away top from the mid-90s. The badge looks like an egg timer with quill pen and football on it. In terms of size, Energetik seem like Queen's Park in Glasgow or Edinburgh City in our capital. We are a small club, overshadowed by "bigger" city rivals, who don;t even consider us at all, let alone as rivals. The club runs on a shoestring, and is known for developing exciting young players and loanees from other clubs.
Energetik certainly have a maverick and unpredictable groups of players from all around the world; Uzbekistan, Brazil, Cameroon, France, Liberia, Montenegro, as well as locals and Russians. It's a very young team and of course following such an inexperienced squad means wild swings in performance. Mostly Energetik have played much better than anyone expected this season. Having got them in the online survey mentioned above, I was completely sold when the "Students", as we are nicknamed, swatted aside a complacent and out of sorts BATE 3-1 in one of the season's early games, with Uzbek talisman Jasurbek "the Yak" Yakshiboev turning in a remarkable virtuoso performance. The Yak is powerful, quick and has a good touch, but seems very much to be a confidence player, and can struggle to make an impression when it's not his day. Recently he's developed a good understanding with no. 9 Evgeny Yudchits who holds the ball up well. An attempt to pair Yakshiboev with the giant Cameroonian forward Junior Atemeng unfortunately was unsuccessful, before that.
Other players that have stood out so far are the little Liberian midfielder David Tweh, diminutive in size but with a wonderful touch and turn; French wing-back-who-isn't-a-wing-back Jérémy Mawatu, and the captain and defensive midfielder, Aleksey Nosko. Nosko is the kind of player who wouldn't have looked out of place in a Stoke team managed by Tony Pulis; a full throated tackler who would leave a speeding combine harvester the worse for wear after a 100 mph, no backing down, two footed challenge. Goalkeeper Artur Lesko, one of the few experienced players in the team, and super-sub Shakhboz Umarov, a nippy and intelligent utility player who has recently forced his way into the starting line up, complete a cast of characters that it's hard not to warm to.
Energetik finished twelfth last season having been promoted from the second tier the season before, so currently sitting in the top three has been a major over-achievement to date. As well as the win over BATE, there have also been swaggering successes over FC Minsk and a remarkable, narrow 2-1 victory after a punishing siege in Slutsk. There have been a couple of lows, too, notably a dreadful performance in a 0-3 defeat away to Neman, and being on the wrong end of a home defeat to an awful Gorodeya side. Last time out, Energetik comfortably saw off a surprisingly feeble challenge from Dynamo Brest, who were flattered considerably by the final score of 2-1. Bafflingly, Belarusian clubs aren't allowed to play on synthetic pitches in May, for reasons no one has been able to explain, so this was the first of a few home games at Molodechno's rather nice stadium, 45 miles north-west of Minsk. This leaves the club fourth, in advance of today's very important fixture against Isloch, who are three points and two places behind us in the table.
The standard in this league is very variable. The top teams- BATE particularly- could no doubt hold their own against most middle-ranking European clubs. Torpedo and Shaktyor also have a lot of potential for development. But teams at the bottom- notably Smolevichi, a very young side promoted last season- look like they'd struggle in the Cymru Premier. If there's maybe a wider spectrum of ability than there are in other top European leagues, it's been really gratifying to see that most teams are really attack minded and full of heart and running, even if it doesn't always quite work.
Following Energetik has seen the development of a decent on-line community as well with good chat on twitter with other football obsessives who've fallen in with the Belarusian top flight. For those of us who have stuck with the Vysshaya Liga in spite of the blandishments of the ghostly no-fans Budesliga or the slow emergence of other competitions, plans are already being struck for a visit next year for a few games. COVID continues to have appalling and negative consequences for everyone's life, but there are small compensations. Getting to know a league, a country and a people definitely stands as one of the bigger consolations amidst the awful turn that the world has taken in 2020.
Jon Blackwood: @JonBlackwood on Twitter
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