Despite not being in their home since 2014, Shakhtar haven't given up competing, winning and pushing for better. Steve Bardens - AMA/Getty Images LONDON -- Take a step back and revel in the absurdity for a minute. Shakhtar Donetsk, a Ukrainian team from the Russian-speaking part of the country, are playing a Greek team, AEK Athens, in London, at Chelsea's Stamford Bridge. Technically, it's a "home game," but that concept has become rather meaningless.
Shakhtar haven't played at their home, the Donbas Arena, since May 2014, some 650 weeks ago. They turn up wherever someone will host them: Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv for Ukrainian league games; Warsaw, Hamburg, Gelsenkirchen, Krakow, Ljubljana and now London for matches in European competition. Why? Because their opponents can't (or won't) travel to Ukraine, where none of the civilian airports are open, air raid sirens go off a dozen times a day, and where drones and bombs can't be trusted to distinguish between a military captain and the captain of a soccer team.
It's pretty obvious that in those circumstances, you're more than a club -- you're a symbol of defiance, an attempt to maintain some sort of normality in the face of a war that has taken more than half a million lives and displaced tens of millions more.