3 Cheers for DD’s

By: Darcy | October 3rd, 2008

Mind outta the gutter fellows.

Hello and welcome to FC Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk’s shiny new blog on the offside. My name is Darcy, and I’d like to invite you to let me be your guide on what is becoming an increasingly depressing season for the club, in which you might frequently hear words such as “lost”, “94th minute penalty” and my personal favorite, “rebuilding”.

Brief history of the club: Originally founded in 1918 as FK Petrovets before subsequently going through 13.5 name changes, and winning Soviet League titles in 1983 and ’88 before becoming a founding member of the Ukrainian Premier League in 1992 with the name FK Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. Since then we’ve done extremely little, the highlights being three Ukrainian Cup Finals, all of which were lost to the mine dwelling folk at Shakhtar Donetsk, as well as a narrow, narrow defeat in the 04/05 Uefa Cup round of 32 against Partizan Belgrade.

That’s all I’ll say about that, as I don’t wish to bore you, but if you are interested in finding out more go to Wikipedia or Dnipro’s official site (It’s Russian google translated into English if you’re wondering about the ridiculous disregard of conventions grammatical.)

More recently we’ve managed to set what I assume is a record for futility in Europe, having been eliminated from European competition on the good ole away goals rule three years running.

Last season we managed a stellar first half of the season, leading the league table going into the lengthy winter break, but then a disastrous second half (after Shakhtar poached one of our stars I might add) resulted in a fourth place finish. So all things considered, big things were expected this year.

Not really happening though. 9 games into the season we’re mid table. Not only that, but we were bounced from the Uefa cup by a team who played their previous season in the Swiss second tier, and are currently on course to go back down at the end of this season. This resulted in the resignation(firing) of our manager Oleh Protasov (we still don’t have a replacement by the way).The only real bright spots in this season have been our spanking new stadium, and the fact that we’re still beating Shakhtar in the league, who are underachieving even more than we are, domestically at least. And now that I’m here, FC Dnipro is beating their asses on the blogging front as well.

And thats all I really have to say right now, so I’ll leave you with this slightly aged video which should only be played on mute, or on full blast if you’re a deaf person with a grudge against your room mates. Toodles.