Tragedy struck in 1979, when the team was flying to play an away game in the Soviet Top League. Their plane collided with another mid-air over the Ukraine and all team members perished.
During the 2018 World Cup, it's timely to remember this remarkable team and how the memory still impacts Uzbeks and Uzbek football. This article, written by Chris Rickleton, is republished with permission from Eurasianet.
The spirit of 1979
Nobody has done more to keep the memory of that doomed team alive than 75-year-old Alla Tadzetdinova. Her then husband-to-be, Igdai Tadzetdinov, was club captain when, at the age of 17, she went to watch a training session with a football-crazy friend.
The courtship lasted a matter of months before the pair married. A daughter arrived two years later. By the time of Tadzetdinov’s death in the skies above Dniprodzerzhynsk, he had become the club’s irrepressible first team coach. The family got 300 rubles, roughly equivalent to around two months’ worth of an average monthly salary, in compensation from the government.
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| The monument to the Pakhtakor team in the village Kurilovka, Ukraine. It was established in 2009 at the initiative of Alla Tadzetdinova to honour the 30th anniversary of the tragedy. |
Whenever she makes an appearance at the ground that has dominated her entire adult life, club dignitaries flock to pay homage.
Isakov, who has become increasingly reticent to speak publicly about the tragedy, refused several interview requests from Eurasianet until Tadzetdinova intervened and summoned him to the stadium.
“If he is hiding somewhere, we will find him. If he has crawled into a bottle, we will pull him out,” she promised.
The strong bonds connecting the duo and Vladimir Safarov, holdovers from a more intimate, Soviet-era Tashkent, were plain to see.
But for all Tadzetdinova’s force of personality, she is still consumed by the tragedy.
She has over the years made countless visits to the area of eastern Ukraine where debris from the fallout was first found nearly four decades ago. A memorial to the dead now marks the spot.
Lacking access to government documents on the tragedy, she has steadfastly refused to believe the official narrative of a mid-air collision.
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| Pakhtakor FC players share a joyous moment in the 1970s |
In 2010, she even went on an oddball Ukrainian TV program called Battle of the Psychics in an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery. Later, the producer of the show sent her a letter claiming to have been in contact with an anonymous eyewitness who had seen the plane explode in mid-air and “come to understand” it had been shot out of the sky by a missile.
But the account offered in the letter, which Eurasianet has seen, is far from convincing.
The pain of the decades past is compounded by the fact that the club Tadzetdinova's husband gave his life to is no longer top dog in the domestic game.
Uzbek football as a whole has regressed significantly since Pakhtakor’s heyday, even as player salaries have soared.
“The other day I was watching the players from Lokomotiv Tashkent collect their championship medals. It is a great pain for me whenever Pakhtakor finishes second or third,” she told Eurasianet. “Then I saw the players’ wives. You should have seen their clothes and jewelry. We were just ordinary, poor people.”
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| Today's Pakhtakor FC logo |
Despite the emergence of other teams in Uzbekistan, Tadzetdinova is convinced Pakhtakor remains the “people’s club.”
“Playing for us is not like playing for some other clubs,” she said.
“You see, when our young guys go out onto the field, the spirit of that team from 1979 flies out there with them.”
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