Madison videographer Bill Roach documents the spirit of Ukraine
There was a curfew at 11 that evening in Kyiv, so the bar showing the June 1 semifinal Planet Cup playoff recreation in Glasgow in between Ukraine and Scotland mentioned people today could keep until eventually early morning. Sleeping luggage ended up encouraged.
Monthly bill Roach got to the bar in time to get camera footage of the celebration when Ukraine scored its to start with goal. “That was neat,” Roach says.
Before, Roach and the ESPN crew he was doing the job with have been at an condominium in Kyiv with numerous Ukrainian soccer admirers, one a soldier, home on go away from the front.
An air raid siren sounded. No person sought shelter. The game’s 9:45 p.m. get started was imminent.
Roach went from the apartment to the bar, then back to his hotel just just before curfew.
“That hotel was a thing,” Roach claimed. “Full of spooky wanting men.” Reporters, safety, mercenaries — who knew?
In any case, the hotel did not get the channel the sport was on.
“We listened to the second fifty percent of the recreation on a radio station by way of a cellular phone,” Roach claimed. “I felt like I was in Earth War II.”
He was not, but it was a war zone, all the exact.
Soon immediately after Russian invaded Ukraine in February, a veteran ESPN producer achieved out to Roach about the probability of documenting the Ukrainian soccer team’s bid for a 2022 Globe Cup berth.
Roach — no relation to Madison Journal columnist John Roach — is a Janesville indigenous who has lived in Madison because coming to the College of Wisconsin–Madison in 1978. He worked 14 several years as a news photographer with WISC-Tv and has been associated with ESPN, as a contract digital camera operator and freelancer, considering the fact that 1995. He has also produced documentaries, which includes 1 on Noticed Cow beer.
The ESPN projects Roach has labored on have received numerous awards, such as the 2018 Athletics Emmy for Superb Journalism for “The Dictator’s Workforce,” a piece about the politicization of the Syrian countrywide soccer staff.
In accordance to Roach, ESPN was uncertain about greenlighting the Ukraine soccer story. Previous month, even so, the journalist who would report it, the immensely proficient Wright Thompson, convinced the community of its value.
Ukraine desired two playoff wins in early June, against Scotland and Wales, to qualify for the 2022 Globe Cup. In May, Roach and the ESPN crew flew to Europe and spent a week with the Ukrainian staff whilst they played heat-up game titles.
They returned to the United States for a few days, then flew to Krakow, Poland. The idea was to be in Ukraine whilst the playoff recreation was taking place in Scotland (a next ESPN crew would be in Glasgow covering the game by itself).

Russian tank outdoors Kyiv (Courtesy of Bill Roach)
It was a four-hour generate from Krakow to the Ukraine border, and at the time within the nation, Roach uncovered it to be “very Wisconsin. Extremely rural. Big inexperienced fields. But there would be gun positions together the street with sandbags designed.”
He ongoing: “When we received on the outskirts of Kyiv is when we started off observing buildings that were being bombed out. There was a Russian tank on the aspect of the road, blown up, that they hadn’t moved but.”
Roach has found considerably in his globetrotting job. I at the time spoke to him at a time when in the span of 18 months he’d done tales on five diverse continents. His recent journey to Ukraine was his 3rd go to to the place.
“Bill is the ideal in the globe at this,” Wright Thompson informed me, when we spoke by telephone final week. “He is fearless.”
On the day of the evening game against Scotland, Thompson, Roach, and the rest of the crew — which incorporated an interpreter — went to Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv where by, in accordance to the New York Situations, Russian paratroopers executed at minimum 8 Ukrainians in March.
“They ended up indiscriminately taking pictures civilians along the highway,” Roach suggests. “We interviewed one particular of the men in the neighborhood our interpreter experienced observed. I didn’t fairly recognize what was going on. He was standing next to this shallow, dug out, sandy area in the woods. It turned out to be a mass grave. They had moved [the corpses] to a good burial but their wrapped-up baggage of clothing were nevertheless at the grave website.”
That night, back at the resort, the ESPN crew listened on the radio to stop of the Ukraine-Scotland game.
Ukraine won, 3-1, and would play Wales in a couple days for a World Cup berth.
Wright Thompson went up to his resort area and labored by way of the night time on a piece that would submit the up coming working day.
He described the scene before that evening at the condominium when the Ukrainian nationwide anthem performed, “The staff on the area in Scotland sang and the fellas in this space sang together with them, loudly, unembarrassed, fingers above hearts.”
I requested Roach if he felt the soccer team’s playoff operate was a big deal in Ukraine.
“I would say it was a enormous offer,” he claims. “The war has introduced the place alongside one another. There’s a delight and solidarity.”
Alas, Ukraine’s Earth Cup aspiration ended in Wales, with a 1- defeat on June 5. Roach was back in Madison by that time and watched the video game on television.
“That goalie,” he states ruefully of the Wales netminder, “was fairly very good.”
But the tale may not be completed. The ESPN crew a short while ago realized there may well be a likelihood to job interview Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, necessitating a return excursion.
Regardless of whether or not that comes about, the Ukraine soccer tale now resides with so many other folks in Roach’s memory. He is modest about that. The stories are not summoned without prompting.
When he’s not touring, Roach is effective as a night time watchman at a pheasant farm in little Basco, south of Madison, poking his head in the barns to make absolutely sure items are Okay. He suggests it’s a way for him to retain anything actual.
Nevertheless, I requested, the sites he’s been, the points he’s noticed — he will have to consider about them occasionally and marvel.
“Pretty wonderful,” he states, following a moment. “It actually is.”
Doug Moe is a Madison writer and a previous editor of Madison Journal. Study his site, “Doug Moe’s Madison,” at madisonmagazine.com/dougmoe.
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