For my main series “Totalitarian football” I’m going to be managing the made up club CSKA Aransk in the made up post-Soviet totalitarian Communist nation of Bordavia. I have covered the creation process in a series called “Creating Club and Country”:
The idea from the beginning was for CSKA Aransk to get invited into the Russian league system, where most of the adventure would take place. I was going to create a Bordavian league, but only the top tier, as a backdrop. However, after a literal hurricane of interest in getting involved in this adventure the idea took a turn into something completely different. Over 60 people have reached out and contributed with ideas for towns and clubs and stories. Bordavia has turned into a mystic but rather grim nation, full of quirks, stories and lore. I fell in love with both the commitment shown by you and the nation of Bordavia, which has lead to the creation process of an entire Bordavian database. This has been a real team effort, which I have enjoyed massively, but it has also meant that I haven’t had much time to write blog posts or record YT videos. Therefore I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, by sharing stories from the nation of Bordavia up until the db release around Christmas.
Today’s story comes from FM LLaMa and tells the story of the latest added town in Bordavia; Sikorski! FM LLaMa has a great YouTube channel where he is currently running a youth only Kettering save series.
Sikorski and the Ding-Ding-Dong
When you’re feeling all right everything is up-tight
Try to sing a song that goes ding-ding-a-dong
There will be no sorrow when you sing tomorrow
And you walk along with your ding-ding-dong
Who could forget the night of 22 nd March, 1975? This was a significant night for Sweden, The Netherlands and in the Soviet state of Bordavia.
The year before, pop-darlings ABBA had stormed to victory in the European Song Contest with their Napoleonic inspired warbling of Waterloo. As was tradition, this meant Sweden would host the 1975 Eurovision event. Many will fondly remember Dutch popstars ‘Teach-In’ wowing the Stockholm audience with their rendition of Ding-A-Dong, thanks largely to the mesmerising performance of lead vocalist Hilda
Felix as she reminded listeners that there will be no sorrow when you sing tomorrow and you walk along with your ding-ding-dong. Poignant lyrics indeed.
What few people outside Bordavia will know is the events that unfolded after the winners were crowned. Gibraltarians are perhaps more fanatical followers of Eurovision than any other nation, seeing it as an opportunity to assert their sense of Britishness. Each year, hundreds of Gibraltar residents make the annual pilgrimage to the Eurovision finals to support the British entry.
1975 was no different and there was a mood of optimism amongst the Gibraltar public as UK music executives had selected Cliff Richard’s backing band The Shadows to represent the nation, performing their rather jaunty hit ‘Let Me Be The One’. 280 fans chartered a flight from Gibraltar to Stockholm to watch the event, but when The Netherlands were declared winners, they returned disconsolately to their plane and instructed the pilot to fly them home as quickly as possible.
A sudden turn of events
Unfortunately, due to treacherous weather the plane flew off course. Electronic failure and a blizzard contributed to impossible conditions for the young pilot and the plane crash landed in Bordavia. Soviet media reported that the plane had exploded on impact, killing all 290 passengers and crew and their families mourned their passing and rued that their bodies were not recoverable due to the severity of the crash.
To the outside world, this was the end of story, but the reality was very different. The pilot of the flight, George Bossano managed to skilfully land the plane in one of the outer Oblasts and despite several injuries, all passengers were able to survive the impact. As the passengers began to flea the crash site in an attempt to summon help, they found that they had crashed in the middle of a vast, government funded research facility that was home to genetically modified chickens. The Bordavian administration, whose scientists, were decades ahead of their Western contemporaries, were funding a programme to breed chickens with emus in an effort to mass produce larger poultry birds that would yield more meat to feed the citizens of Bordavia.
Unfortunately, the scientists had made some miscalculations in their early experiments and the facility was housing mutated killer chickens. Never ones to miss an opportunity, the Bordavian regime were now breeding these killer chickens not as meat, but as potential weapons for the Bordavian army.
When Bordavian army officers arrived at the crash site and discovered the passengers, they were alarmed that civilians had caught site of the killer chickens and reported the situation immediately to their young leader Colonel Ivan. The Colonel knew that returning the passengers and crew to their homeland risked the world being alerted to the scientific advancements of Bordavia and the army of killer chickens they were breeding. His instincts were to make the problem ‘disappear’, as is customary in Bordavia. Instead, Colonel Ivan displayed a rare moment of compassion in his fledgling military career and allowed the passengers to form their own community inside the research facility in exchange for their silence.
The village of Sikorski
The village was fittingly named ‘Sikorski’ in honour of the memorial that stands in Gibraltar to commemorate the passing of a Polish General during World War II in a similar plane crash.
Today, Sikorski is an affluent small town that is home to 7000 people and the disbandment of the government research facility in the mid 90’s meant that the people of Sikorski were allowed to move freely around Bordavia for the first time. Excited to discover a world outside of the small area of land Colonel Ivan had bestowed upon them, many left Sikorski and settled in the capital Aransk, which is now home to more
than 25,000 descendants of Gibraltarian ancestry. As a way of keeping their culture alive, the Gibraltarian people rarely marry outside of their community and always give their children traditional names.
Gibraltarian culture is strong in Bordavia, and this is perhaps most evident in the passionate support enjoyed by the towns football team Anglo Sikorski. The clubs 7000 capacity stadium is a cauldron of noise, particularly when a cup tie provides them with a home fixture against one of the big teams from Aransk.
Addition from Mikaelinho – Sikorski in the database
Anglo Sikorski will start far down the league pyramid and could be the perfect choice for a LLM challenge! It also perfectly explains the occurrence of the occasional Gibraltarian player names. Isn’t that convenient!?
This was the fifth “Tale from Bordavia” and I’d like to thank FM LLaMa for his great contribution. There will be a new one every day leading up to Christmas. I hope you’ll enjoy these little stories and that they will spark an interest large enough to follow my main series “Totalitarian Football” and maybe even try the database when it comes out!?
I stream my “Building Bordavia” creation process on Twitch on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Come hang out and say hi!
I also upload episodes about the creation process to my YouTube channel. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any content!
MikaelinhoFM 