Dynamo: defending the honour of Kiev Andy Dougan Fourth Estate, 254pp, £14.99 ISBN 1841153184

Andy Dougan's account of a game of football in occupied Kiev in 1942 changes its form with a frequency of which a chameleon would be proud: a touch of history, military stratagem, reportage, narrative lyricism (of a kind), fiction and sports journalism. The result is an odd compilation of the good, the bad and the rank. Dougan's fictional writing is in the best traditions of the contemporary English-language novel: dull and predictable. His history of Kiev and Ukraine is so brief that it can only have been taken from a website. As a journalist, he has, however, managed to find a story that has an inevitable capacity to move and disturb.

Perhaps it would take a Pasternak or Dostoevsky to do justice to a story set against the inconceivable extremism and despair that characterised the war in the east. On the other hand, with material such as this, the so-called "Death Match" between Kiev footballers and the Luftwaffe, it is hard to go wrong. This is its skeleton: during the occupation of Kiev, a Moravian Czech and sports lover, Iosif Kordik, runs a major bakery. Having told the German authorities that he was born in Austria, he is classified as a Volksdeutsche. He employs a number of sportsmen, not only offering them limited shelter and food, but also saving them from deportation. His enthusiasm gives rise to a mini football league, in which his team, FC Start - comprising players from Dynamo Kiev who have been fighting the Nazis - excel. They defeat fellow Ukrainian, Romanian and Hungarian teams, as well as a German military unit. They become folk heroes. The Germans abandon their policy of non-intervention and arrange a match between their finest, Flakelf (principally a Luftwaffe team), and FC Start - who win 5-1.

A rematch is organised three days later. Before the game, Start are warned by a senior Gestapo officer about what the consequences might be if they were to win. They ignore him, winning 5-3, despite a hostile crowd and a referee who offers no protection from foul play. A few days after the match, the players are interrogated for 20 days. The rest are deported to a notorious labour camp. As the Red Army advances on occupied Kiev, four of them are shot, among many others. When Kiev is retaken in November 1943, a population that numbered 400,000 at the start of the war has been reduced to 80,000.

While Dougan has pieced together various details, his description of some events can be viewed only with scepticism. The migration of fiction into history usually has ridiculous effects. This book is no exception - which is a pity. It is also a pity that Dougan spends so little time in the present. When Dynamo Kiev play Bayern Munich and other German opposition teams in the Champions League, is there, for example, a sinister undercurrent?

A three-metre-high monument stands outside the Dynamo stadium in memory of the players who were killed after the "Death Match". Does this have an impact on the present Dynamo players? A trip down to White Hart Lane to interview the former Dynamo striker Sergei Rebrov might have provided the answer. Or better, a trip to Kiev to see the great coach Valery Lobanovsky, the solemn, bear-like figure who masterminded the fast, counter-attacking sides of Dynamo Kiev and the Soviet Union. It was he who said that FC Start were "defending the honour of Kiev". Such a sense of symbolism would surely be lost on most players in Europe, whose only commitment seems to be to defending the glory of the western pay packet.

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