The life-story of Aleksey Cherednik is pretty much a micro-study of Soviet geopolitics. His 1960 birthplace of Stalinabad, the capital of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, was renamed Dushanbe in 1961, under Nikita Khrushchev’s program of de-Stalinization. Having joined his home-town club of Pamir Dushanbe as a teenager in 1979, he left in 1983 for Ukraine, one of the Soviet Republics in which the hold of the USSR was increasingly threatened in the late 1980s, as nationalist sentiments were encouraged by Mikhail Gorbachev’s twin policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).

In August 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, Alexsey, who is styled Oleksiy Cherednyk in Ukraine, came to Southampton with his club, FC Dnepro, the first former -Soviet club to go professional in 1989, for a pre-season friendly. 

A gold medallist in the 1988 Seoul Olympics and a Soviet international, Aleksey, who was working his way back to fitness, came on as a second-half substitute.

He caught the eye of Chris Nicholl and a transfer fee of £300,000 persuaded Dnepro to allow him to become the first former Soviet player to appear in the English First Division. That had to wait for a few Reserves appearances, after which Aleksey replaced Jason Dodd for the last seven games of the 1989-90 season. He retained possession for the first six games of the next campaign, but as he struggled to adapt to the English style, not only did he lose the competition but he eventually lost out to Barry Horne, converted to right-back.

When Nicholl was replaced by Ian Branfoot and Jeff Kenna emerged to challenge Dodd, there was no way back from Cherednik, who saw out the remainder of his contract in the Reserves. Returning to Ukraine, he appeared a few times for each of three clubs before moving into management. Then, after scouting briefly for Dnipro – as the club was now called in an independent Ukraine – he went to scout for FC Shakhtar Donetsk, whose Donbas stadium hosted two of England’s group-stage matches in the Euro 2012 tournament. Shakhtar, who have dominated their domestic league for the past decade, were UEFA Cup-winners in 2009. It has been Aleksey’s task since 2001 to keep them supplied with the best raw talent available.