The Interview: Nick Ames
The intrepid writer for The Guardian has written extensively on the Ukraine men's national team and what it has gone through as it prepares for Wednesday's World Cup qualifying playoff at Scotland
The Ukraine men’s national team meets Scotland on Wednesday (2:45 pm ET, ESPN2, TUDN) in a World Cup qualifying playoff, the winner of which will take on Wales this Sunday for a spot in the World Cup (and a date on opening day against the USMNT). Ukraine is a story that transcends sports, of course, and Ames has spent extensive time with the Ukraine team and its players to discuss how they have gotten through Russia’s invasion of their country.
Ames has also written tremendous dispatches from Cameroon during the Africa Cup of Nations and last fall from FC Sheriff in Transnistria.
The entirety of the written interview below is reserved for paid subscribers. As always, you can still get the entire free audio version of my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to go for your pods.
Grant Wahl:
Our guest now is someone who I find myself saying about more than any other writer, "I wish I would've written that story." Nick Ames writes for The Guardian and covers football matches while also writing some of the best feature stories globally about the sport, including recently stories on the Ukraine men's national team, the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon, and FC Sheriff in Transnistria. Nick, it's great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on the show.
Nick Ames:
It's a pleasure, Grant. How are you?
Grant Wahl:
I'm doing great. There's a lot to talk about here, and I want to start with Ukraine, because this podcast is coming out on Monday, two days before Ukraine's game against Scotland in World Cup qualifying. And your stories with the national team of Ukraine, with Dynamo Kiev, with Oleksandr Zinchenko, Darijo Srna, you've done a lot now in recent months. And they're actually in a position where the Ukraine national team, if they beat Scotland, and then if they were to beat Wales, would land in the World Cup playing against the United States on opening day of the tournament. What did you learn spending time with the Ukraine national team recently?
“I spent a couple of days around the [Ukraine team] hotel, watching training, some good chats with the coach, Petrakov, who is a very old-school kind of guy with quite a dry humor as well, sort of plunged into a situation that he'd never ever asked for. And I think he came out with a good line, which was, ‘If we qualify for Qatar, I've lived my life for a reason.’ He sort of sees it as a kind of almost destiny to do this for his country now.” — Nick Ames
Nick Ames:
I learned a lot. It was at their training camp in Slovenia that they've been based at more or less for the last two or three weeks, courtesy of Aleksander Čeferin, the UEFA president, who is of course Slovenian. Beautiful training complex in the foothills of the Alps, really nice. I learned that they really, really want this. I mean, there is a lot of awful, tragic stuff going on back home that I think we all know about very well, and it's easy for them to ask themselves maybe, and for us as media to ask ourselves, is football, is World Cup qualification important? Does it matter on the scale of things? And I was interested in that question, because I've spoken to quite a few Ukrainian players from different levels of a game in previous weeks.
And some of them were along the lines of, we don't want to talk about football at all. Even Oleksandr Zinchenko, who I'd interviewed two or three weeks previously, hadn't really wanted to look ahead to the World Cup games. Now, this squad gathering, when I attended it, it was domestic-based players only, because the players such as Zinchenko, such as Yarmolenko, players like this who are based abroad, obviously haven't finished their seasons yet.
So the squad's composition is changing slightly as we speak now, as those players filter in. But the vibe was totally, we need this, the country needs it, the country needs something to smile about. And it was very interesting listening to Taras Stepanenko, who's one of the senior players on the team, talking about how soldiers on the front line write to him and write to them every single day, saying, "Please give us this. Please give us this bit of hope, this bit of recognition, this thing to smile about while we're all suffering here."
So it is important. And I think also it's important to remember that what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine is erase Ukrainian culture, no more, no less, really. I think I said it in my piece from Slovenia. And I think as you and I both know, Grant, from our travel: What is an international football team, if not an expression, a representation of a culture, of a country's hope, of a country's ambition, of how a country expresses itself and everything around it? So I think that is all tied into what the feeling was in the camp.
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Grant Wahl:
How did your process work on that story? How did you get it arranged? And then you had some very good, it appears, one-on-one access to the coach of the Ukraine national team, to various players. How many days were you there? How did that all work?
Nick Ames:
Yeah, I was there for probably two full days. I was staying in Ljubljana, the capital, but the team hotel was about half an hour away. So I did a lot of, again, what journalists get very used to, waiting in hotel lobbies, waiting for the right people to pop in and out. But Ukraine's press officer, their media officer, Alexander, was basically incredibly helpful. When I first raised it with him about a month before, I said to him and a couple of other people at their FA, "Could we do a day in the life of the squad when they meet?" And they'd never done something like this before. International teams, especially in Europe anyway, don't tend to give that kind of access. So they went away and thought about it, talked about it, and agreed to it.
So I spent a couple of days around the hotel, watching training, some good chats, as you say, with the coach, Petrakov, who is a very old-school kind of guy with quite a dry humor as well, sort of plunged into a situation that he'd never ever asked for. And I think he came out with a good line, which was, "If we qualify for Qatar, I've lived my life for a reason." He sort of sees it as a kind of almost destiny to do this for his country now. And then spoke to quite a few senior players, and one thing that struck me as well is that, while the footballers from Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kiev, the two biggest teams in Ukraine, had been able to leave the country and play friendly matches for charity in the previous few weeks, none of these players have been in an ivory tower for the duration of the invasion.
All of them had, even if it was just in the first two or three weeks, been affected directly, physically, and materially. So for example, I spoke to Sydorchuk, one of the midfielders from Dynamo Kiev, and he was telling me that in the opening week or two of the invasion, him and three or four other Ukraine teammates who live in Kiev were living in his car park beneath his apartment for the opening stages of the invasion. And he showed me photographs of their kids, sleeping in car boots, them and their wives in sleeping bags on the floor. Now people have been through and are going through far, far, far worse than that. But even footballers, even the country's most famous players, have been forced to do things that nobody would want to do and live in ways nobody would want to live.
Grant Wahl:
It's incredible stuff that you got them to share with you. And just even the idea of players showing you photographs from their phone of what they went through, it's such a traumatic experience for so many people, including the people on this team. And I guess I would ask you, how realistic is it to think that Ukraine is going to be ready to play soccer against Scotland with so much on the line? Because obviously Scotland and Wales haven't been to a World Cup in a really long time. They really want to get there. Is it even possible, do you think?
Nick Ames:
It's going to be very, very difficult, if we are honest. I think so. I mean, the fortunate thing is that, if we say that the final incarnation of the squad will be about 50% Dynamo and Shakhtar players and about 50% the players that we know like Yarmolenko and Zinchenko, the foreign-based players, Mykolenko from Everton and players like this. The Dynamo and Shakhtar players have at least been in a football environment, in a hard training environment for a month or so. The players from the Premier League and elsewhere will have been playing competitive football at a very, very high level. We saw Zinchenko set up a vital goal, didn't we? For Rodri, I think it was, to help settle the title on Sunday. But it doesn't change the fact that they're coming in from a bit of a standing start. There have been friendlies against a couple of club sides.
There was a friendly against, I think it was Mönchengladbach a few days after I visited. They played one or two games in Italy as well since against club sides. They'd been hoping to play this week against, I think, DR Congo and another African team. Those plans I think have fallen through. So they're going to have come into the Scotland game with no meaningful match action, because I don't think a friendly against a club side frankly counts, except as a bit of a kick-about to practice your shape and keep your fitness taking over. But there's been no intensity. And I know Petrakov, the coach, was very worried about this when I spoke to him, and he was like, "Look, we're coming in from a standing start." So in that way, the odds are against him, but this is football and the mind can do fascinating things.
And these guys are very, very, very motivated, to an extent that you and I probably can't describe or even articulate. So when they get out there, maybe a bit of rust or lack of match sharpness or whatever, it may well be totally offset by the adrenaline and the feeling of what they're going for, and the motivation they've been receiving from soldiers on the front line. Like I said, what higher motivation could you want than to perpetuate and maintain the culture of your country?
So, look, they're up against two good sides full of players who are... Well, hopefully two good sides if they beat Scotland, full of players who play in the UK mainly, are very fast tempo, whose seasons are just finishing now. You would say they’re the underdogs, even if man for man they've got outstanding players. But strange things happen, especially in situations like this. That's a very long way of saying, I don't know. I think all bets are off.
Grant Wahl:
Do you do these interviews in English or some other language when you do your national team interviews with the Ukrainians?
Nick Ames:
So I speak some Russian, although it's sort of high school Russian, so not at all fluent, but it comes in useful. So in this instance it was a bit of a mixture of the two. And also the press officer was occasionally giving a bit of clarity and translation help too. So it was a fusion of two or three different things, to be honest, but being able to understand a bit of Russian and definitely saying my question in Russian does help.
Grant Wahl:
How do you try to approach your job? Because you're very busy covering soccer games, but you're also finding ways to travel and do these very compelling feature stories.
Nick Ames:
Yeah. There's two strands to it, as you say, because for me, I live in North London. I cover a lot of Premier League football especially, particularly Arsenal seems to be the beat I end up on mostly, which as we know is rarely dull, and certainly the top four run-in while doing a lot of these other stories on Ukraine, for example, has been quite a lot of juggling. But you have your regular kind of schedule. And then between that, what I'm often trying to do, to be honest, is look out for the next international date and find out what is happening, look for an angle. Is it a game? Is it a country that's got an unusual story that might be worth covering? Is there some geopolitical clash where we can explain the politics or something wider through the football, which I think is something that football can do, and is something that I try and base a lot of my work on.
Is there a story that would get a bit of air time over the international date that might not during the regular season? So that's definitely something that I look out for, but to be honest, with the Ukraine stories recently in particular, it is such a big story and such an important story and so important that these stories, I think, are told in whichever way, whether it's by sports media, whether it's by news media, whether it's by any other kind of journalist, that I've been quite happy to. And fortunately, my editors have been quite happy to let me go out and pursue these stories, even if it means missing a big EPL game.
Grant Wahl:
At the Africa Cup of Nations, you traveled 500 miles on an off-day in the tournament to visit a UN camp. Could you explain what that story was about?
Nick Ames:
Yeah, of course. So this was the Minawao refugee camp, right in the far north of Cameroon, which is quite near to the Nigerian border. Now that's where the insurgent Boko Haram group have been causing terror for years and years, especially over in Nigeria. So there've been a lot of people fleeing over the border and many refugee camps set up in the north of Cameroon to keep these people safe. Obviously these are displaced people. They're not living in great conditions, but they've fled their home villages, often in Nigeria, because people were being murdered, massacred, killed. Very, very sad. And I have a contact at the UN refugee department and I happened to be over in Cameroon at the time, and he said to me, "Well, you should come up and look at this because there's a girls football team that have been formed of girls from their early teens to late teens doing some fantastic work, playing some fantastic stuff in really poor conditions, but really showing incredible spirit. Why don't you come up and see them?"
So I did, and it was quite humbling. It was a squad of girls with hardly any meaningful kit or shoes or anything like that, which we've been trying to put right hopefully. I've had a lot of offers since from people to help with that, which is one of the great things about journalism. People can read your piece and then hopefully you can try and make a difference. And I just heard their stories. And the main message in that from people was, "We play football to help us forget what has happened to us." In the past football is a kind of mental displacement, a kind of way of doing something constructive, a way to make yourself feel good, a way not to be haunted by the terrible things that these young girls have seen. And they were coached by a very lovely gentleman who was so good with them and had been through his own hurdles. So it was really inspiring to meet them, tell their story and hopefully organize some way for them to be equipped better going forward.
Grant Wahl:
How do you find out about a story like that? And without giving away your secrets, how do you go about finding good stories in general?
Nick Ames:
It's just sometimes luck. It is just sometimes, I mean, as you know yourself, in this job you have to be open to talking to people, talking to anyone, to making contacts and then checking in on them and not forgetting them and just sort of making sure you know as many people as possible. And in this particular case, it was a French guy who I met in Gabon at the Cup of Nations in it must have been 2017, and he was a freelance journalist then, but he happened to get a job working for the UN in Yaoundé in Cameroon.
So when I went out to Yaoundé for the tournament this year, I got in touch with him and he just so happened to tell me what was happening up in the far north. So that's not the most interesting or glamorous story, but it sort of shows you that you can get these things through people you met a few years ago, just sort of having a chance conversation or chance reunion with them, and it's all about building up your network and just making connections, but also meaningful friendships, right? Because there's so much that you can learn every day from the people that you visit and the people that you meet in all corners of the world.
Grant Wahl:
I should tell our listeners that you helped me a lot when I went to Transnistria to do a story on FC Sheriff last October. You were one of the few English-speaking journalists who went there before that, and you connected me with a few people, helped provide some great advice, which I really do appreciate. What was your experience reporting your story on Sheriff?
Nick Ames:
Oh, as you saw yourself, it's a highly unusual place. Transnistria is a slice of the former USSR, if you like, inside modern-day Europe. It kind of felt to me, Tiraspol, a bit like a provincial Russian city would now. Very hard to get good cell reception. The money was very, very difficult to change. There was a lot of old Soviet ephemera everywhere, and there were people as well who found it hard to define who they are, where they're from. I remember speaking to a big, big Sheriff fan called Rodion, who features quite prominently in the article that I did. And he said, I don't know how to answer the question, "Where are you from? If a Western English American person asked me, because it's so complicated and I don't even know."
And I've got quite a good friend from Tiraspol as well, and she said that she reconciled in her head, and this was before the invasion by Russia of Ukraine, but she reconciled that she was a third Moldovan, a third Russian, a third Ukrainian, because if she says she's Transnistrian, what is Transnistria to a lot of people? It's not a recognized republic. So there's a lot tied up in that. And then the football experience, of course, it is a gleaming stadium and a gleaming training ground in a quite bizarre situation where you've got petrol pumps and supermarkets with Sheriff branding. You've got a Sheriff radio station. Everything in the country has got the hand of this company Sheriff, which also owns the football club behind it.
And I mean, we could go into this in quite a lot of depth. It's fairly nefarious in many ways. It's kind of a company running a sort of quasi state, running a football team. It's fascinating. And obviously the team did very well in the Champions League as well. And the game that I went to they beat Shakhtar. And then a couple weeks later in the big one at the Bernabéu they beat Real Madrid, which I guess Real might be laughing at by the time this pod goes out, if they've beaten Liverpool, but back then it was a very different time.
Grant Wahl:
It's pretty incredible it’s still the same season that the Sheriff won at Real Madrid, because not many teams can say that this season. What are some of the most far-flung locations you've been to reporting stories in your career?
Nick Ames:
I would say, I mean, if we're looking at African ones, I think Equatorial Guinea was a very interesting one in 2015, because Equatorial Guinea is a country that as a tourist you just can't go to. It's a tiny little oil country lodged between Gabon and Cameroon that somehow found itself stepping in at the last minute to host an AFCON. And I think it was Morocco pulled out at the time, and someone always pulls out or tries to pull out at the last minute. And that was a fascinating place to be because you felt that you were somewhere that people just cannot go, or almost sort of the North Korea of Africa. And there was a couple of incidents, for example, at the semifinal when there was a bit of a revolt in the stands and police choppers flying over your head and that kind of thing. And it felt very, very dystopian. So that's one of the strangest places that I've been to for sure.
And then I mean, even in Europe, not so much strange places maybe, but strange situations. For example, I don't know whether any listeners will remember the drone game between Serbia and Albania in 2014.
Grant Wahl:
Yes.
Nick Ames:
In the Euro 2016 qualifiers. And I just happened to be there that day. I think I was the only kind of English journalist in that stadium. And I'll never forget the way it totally went off that night and the pressure and the stress, but also the buzz of reporting on that all night afterwards. So you just end up in such a wide variety of places reporting on such a range of stories. But with that Serbia v. Albania story, for example, you can go to the game and have an idea that, "Oh, I've got a geopolitical contest here. There's so much history behind it," but you can never know what's going to happen and what you're going to be ending up with a couple of hours later.
Grant Wahl:
Couple questions more here with Nick Ames. Really appreciate your time. What is your sense of doing stories ahead of the Qatar World Cup on that tournament?
Nick Ames:
Yeah, it's a tricky one, isn't it? Because we have to look at the intrinsic footballing aspect of it and also the human rights aspect that we cannot escape. And I know that in our Guardian coverage, that's going to feature prominently in all strands of what we do. We do have some excellent journalists who focus mainly on that. So I think for me, in the run-up, I may do one or two specifically Qatar-related things, maybe something human rights based, but I would also look at the purely football aspect, try and do a few deep dives into one or two of the teams of a few interesting players or stories or managers or interesting contextual factors that you can maybe go to a place and have a look behind.
But I think we all have to report responsibly on it. I think the human rights factor clouds this World Cup in a way that we cannot ignore. It's also a football tournament, and on one level we treat it like that. But I think they both go together here. So I think that's going to be at the forefront of everyone's mind when they're writing about this tournament, even as a straight match report.
Grant Wahl:
I would also say that The Guardian has done tremendous reporting on human rights in Qatar, including in connection to the World Cup. Pete Pattison has done just so many gold standard stories over the last decade that I would suggest folks check out the stories that he's done as well. What's kind of your career story before the Guardian? How did you get into this business?
Nick Ames:
When people say, "Oh, can you give me some advice on how you got to The Guardian?" For example, I just say, "Don't listen to me." But I think most people would kind of say that paths in this industry are far more haphazard, I think, than a lot of people expect. But for me, I left university, worked for a little bit on my local newspaper in Ipswich, UK. I'm a big Ipswich Town fan, by the way, and not doing too well these days. So I worked there for a little bit, worked for a small news agency in London. And then long story short, I quit and got a job at Arsenal Football Club on their club media.
This was in the late 2000s. So it was a time just before club media was more about social media. You were still kind of able to do big interviews and that kind of thing. And it was around the time when Wenger was at Arsenal. They had captains like Fabregas and Van Persie and Gallas. And you got to sit down and do some quite interesting stuff with some quite interesting players at quite a lot of length as well, working for the match-day program and the club magazine, which sadly I don't think exists anymore. So that was a great grounding for me in being around the football environment, being in an environment where you were comfortable around players, doing long interviews, that kind of thing.
Now in the end, and this is not a slight on club media at all, for me, it was a bit restrictive. I was going off and doing the occasional freelance bit here and there, but I wanted to be seeing a wider view on things from the outside. So after a few years there, I went freelance and did a lot of work for ESPNFC and also for The Guardian, both of whom were very, very good and generous and open-minded in backing a lot of the ideas I wanted to do. And also one or two of the things we've spoken about already actually, like the AFCONs, the Serbia-Albania game and things like this. So I was fortunate that way. And then I've been on the staff of The Guardian for the last couple of years.
Grant Wahl:
And you mentioned this, I always ask people if they have any advice for young people who want to do what you do, sounds like maybe not?
Nick Ames:
Oh, no, I've got advice. I just wouldn't say that I've had a clear pathway toward here. Do you know what I mean? It's not been planned out, "Do this, do this, do this." But in terms of advice, be open, be inquisitive, talk to people, ask people things, and always think that a person that you're talking to has got something that you can learn from, definitely. And don't be afraid to take a punt sometimes. If you see a trip that you want to do, and if you've got the means to do it, which is not always easy, especially for young people.
If you see a trip that you want to do, a club that you want to visit, something like that, a country that you want to go to where you see a story that you think no one's covered, try and do it. And try to write to some editors about it, tell people that you're out there, show people that you are someone who is active and looking for new angles and new stories and wants to get out there and get moving. I just think be an open book, which I think is important.
Grant Wahl:
Nick Ames is a writer for The Guardian. You should check out all of his stories, including on the Ukraine national team, as it heads into World Cup qualifying. Nick, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Nick Ames:
It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
