Eastern European football shouldn't, at this stage of the season, be facing a last stand, but given that it is, there is something appropriate about the fact that its sole remaining representative in European competition is Shakhtar Donetsk. Dynamo Kiev, the Moscows CSKA and Spartak, and Steaua and Dinamo Bucharest have all fallen, but Shakhtar endure and, remarkably, are favourites to beat the reigning champions Sevilla and progress to the quarter-finals of the Uefa Cup tonight.
No club is so emblematic of the changes sweeping the east as Shakhtar. In Soviet times, they were very much a workers' club, based in the industrial heartland of the Donbas. The name 'Shakhtar' itself means 'miner', and even the kit - orange shirts and black shorts - is supposed to represent the experience of miners leaving the dark of the pit for the bright of the day. They always played second fiddle to Dynamo, and success was limited to three Cup victories, but fans seemed almost to revel in that. Glorying in mediocrity is not a wholly British trait.
Shakhtar regularly won the shield awarded for the best-supported club in the USSR, and developed a self-image of earthiness and integrity, more passionate and somehow more worthy than the bloodless aesthetes of Kiev, with Valeriy Lobanovskyi and his statistics, computers and success. That was always a grossly romanticised version of reality, of course, and since independence the situation has radically altered, yet the old modes of thought remain.
A couple of years ago, Serhiy Polkhovskyi, Dynamo's urbane vice-president, described Shakhtar as being like Eugène de Rastignac, the character from Balzac's Père Goriot noted for his thrusting ambition. When I mentioned that to Mark Levytksy, his opposite number at Shakhtar, he caught the allusion immediately, but in the same breath dismissed it as just the kind of nonsense you could expect from the intellectuals at Dynamo. "Let them read Balzac," he snorted. "We will concentrate on football."
Even the most blindly loyal Shakhtar fan, though, can not pretend that they are the still the poor relations bravely battling Kiev's hegemony. For them, everything changed during a game against Tavriya Simferapol in October 1995 when their president Oleksandr Bragin (or Alik the Greek, to give him his underworld nickname) was killed in a bomb attack. "I saw a TV reporter running away and asked him what was going on," recalls Levytsky, who was commentating on the game. "He told me not to go into the VIP lodge because it was too terrible to look at. Then I saw Ravil Safiullin who was the brother of Bragin's wife and at the time was Shakhtar's vice-president. We went into the lodge together. There were bits of bodies everywhere. Then Safiullin saw a severed arm, and recognised that the watch around the wrist was the president's, and that was when we knew he was dead."
Bragin's No2, Rinat Akhmetov, was lucky, missing the attack after being held up in traffic on his way to the game. Akhmetov took over the presidency a year later, and is now the richest man in Ukraine, running a chain of metallurgical and mining concerns. He has also, according to Shakhtar's affable Romanian coach, Mircea Lucescu, "fallen in love with football" investing extraordinary amounts in players and Shakhtar's training base, which features not merely all the requisite pitches, gymnasiums and medical paraphernalia, but also an aviary and a fishing lake.
Shakhtar are now a club with the financial backing to sign the likes of Julius Aghahowa, Matuzalem, Fernandinho, Jádson and Luiz Adriano. They may not be able to attract the first rank of South Americans and Africans, but they have become an attractive stepping-stone to western Europe for promising Brazilians and Nigerians, as well as being able to pay wages high enough to tempt Romanians, Croatians and Serbians from their domestic leagues. Their transformation from people's club to oligarch's plaything complete, they won the league in 2002, 2005 and 2006.
Over the last few months, though, there has been a sense, if not of decline, then certainly of Shakhtar's rise being checked. Although they remained unbeaten at home, their Champions League campaign never got going after a 4-0 defeat to Roma and they ended up theird in their group. Domestically, they have conceded just six goals in 18 games - a remarkable statistic given Lucescu's reputation for gung-ho exuberance - but trail Dynamo by two points.
The sales of Aghahowa to Wigan and their captain Anatoliy Tymoshchuk to Zenit St Petersburg - albeit for an extraordinary total of £14m - suggest a club in transition. They have also shed goalkeepers, Jan Lastuvka joining Fulham on loan, and Stipe Pletikosa last week finally ending Spartak's seemingly endless quest for a shot-stopper. Losing two internationals is not quite as cavalier as it may seem, though, for both had, anyway, spent the first half of the season in the shadow of the remarkable 21-year-old keeper Bohdan Shust, himself now a fixture in the Ukraine squad.
If disillusionment was beginning to gnaw at their fans, though, it was dispelled by last week's result Uefa Cup result in Spain, a 2-2 draw against Sevilla who, at the time, were joint top of La Liga. It would have been even better, too, if it hadn't been for an 88th-minute penalty from Enzo Maresca. Lucecsu, never slow to spy conspiracy, insisted it had been given "under the influence of the crowd", and called on Shakhtar fans to produce a similar atmosphere in Donetsk. On that front, he should have no fears.
Nor, in truth, do Sevilla look as intimidating as they did even a fortnight ago. They lost to lowly Gimnastic in the league on Sunday - Shakhtar, despite resting six regulars, beat Metalist Kharkiv 1-0 - and the Spaniards will be without defender David Castedo, midfielders Jesus Navas and Renato and the Russian forward Andrei Kerzhakov.
And if Shakhtar can get beyond the second-best team in Spain, who is left in the Uefa Cup for them to fear? Werder Bremen, perhaps, or Tottenham, but neither loom large enough to prevent Shakhtar dreaming of Glasgow. It grates with Ukrainians that for all the USSR's reliance on their players and for Dynamo's success in the 90s, it was a Russian team, CSKA, who became the first post-Soviet side to lift a European trophy. Shakhtar may be the east's last hope, but in Ukraine they are beginning to believe their drought could be coming to an end.
