Wednesday, June 27

By Nick Ames in Kiev

If Arsenal hadn’t secured a Champions League spot on the final day of last season, they could have been in line for a meeting of Gunners.

Arsenal Kiev enter the 2012/13 Europa League in the third qualifying round, with Liverpool their possible opponents, at perhaps their highest ebb having equalled their best finish in the Ukrainian Premier League and with some exciting new signings on the way.

One such arrival was the reason for a delay to my meeting with Arsenal Kiev press officer Alex Ostapa yesterday afternoon. He had just been interviewing Ghanaian forward Dominic Adiyiah, who the observant among you will recall was the player foiled by Luis Suarez’s famous handball in the World Cup quarter-final against Uruguay two years ago. Adiyiah’s career has meandered since that incident, but a promising loan spell in Kiev last season has led to him setting down roots here.

I’ll write at more length about Arsenal Kiev in a future Arsenal Magazine. My visit was an interesting one, though. For all that the club - effectively formed from the ashes of army outfit CSKA Kiev - is upwardly mobile, it currently rents Dynamo Kiev’s famous old stadium which is now named after legendary coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, the delightfully-located stadium is steeped in the fabulous, inspiring history of its owners. Some of you might even have been there - our Arsenal played Dynamo Kiev there as recently as September 17, 2008. Then, a late William Gallas goal earned the Gunners a 1-1 draw in a Champions League group-stage game.

A few days without much football or travel have left me feeling somewhat bereft after the intensity of the previous two-and-a-half weeks. Having opted not to use my match ticket to Portugal v Spain in Donetsk this evening, I’ll be watching with interest tonight as we see whether Cristiano Ronaldo can nip ex-Gunner Cesc Fabregas’ hopes of a third-successive major final in the bud.

Perhaps I’ll watch the game in Kiev’s fanzone, which occupies the entirety of its main street and central square. The place isn’t exactly in my good books though. My accommodation overlooks it directly and it wasn’t conducive to a good night’s sleep when Kiev came alive for a major dance concert yesterday evening.

I had been gearing up to write that the city’s party spirit seems to have waned with Euro 2012’s slowing-down, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

EURO 2012 BLOG ARCHIVE:

Copyright 2013 The Arsenal Football Club plc. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source 27 Jun 2012