Familiar Faces, New Headlines

Norway's perennial powerhouse club regains top spot; Nation gets new GM

The 2021-22 season of Norway's 'premier league' - the Eliteserien - recently ended with a few ... familiar surprises, if that makes sense. I'll try to explain.

Vålerenga making headlines again

The convincing champions of a season that was both postponed and delayed due to the Covid pandemic, Vålerenga have been a leading club for virtually all of its roughly decade of existence at the top level. Founded in 2008 as an 'East End' club - Oslo, like London, has a traditional divide of a working class east versus a posh west side - Vålerenga began with big ambitions and a clear philosophy of offering young players a chance to develop.

I spoke to Dag Danielsen, currently vice-president and team manager with the club, just after the team's convincing league win. He filled me in on the club history and current plans, as well as helping me pursue the other chess headline, the news that their player and trainer, GM Evgeny Romanov, had switched federations to Norway.

Dag has a distinguished resumé, in chess and wider circles, having been a political journalist and adviser, a member of the Norwegian parliament, the secretary general of the Norwegian Chess Federation (NSF), and a chess organizer, one of the strong background forces behind Norway's first 'ambitious' club.

A bit of history
New clubs traditionally start in the bottom league and need to gain successive promotions to the Eliteserien, and Vålerenga worked its way up from the 4th division in just under the minimum amount of time. Along the way, they crystallized their agenda by recruiting strong GMs like Borki Predojevic and Romanov, who in turn provided the club with an obviously attractive training program.

Funded by a private sponsorship, the club always had a deep roster of strong hired guns to call upon, and facing Vålerenga often meant a surprise encounter with players as varied as Markus Ragger or Julio Granda Zuniga, but the majority of the team was made up of the cream of Norway's emerging youth. I'm sure a lot of clubs, like mine, were disgruntled to lose players to these newcomers - we still miss you Aryan! - but competitors had to face facts: either make things more attractive for local talents, or find other ways to compete.

Genial Bosnian GM Borki Predojevic was an early recruit, and provided an attractive training opportunity for club talent. Photo: Maria Emelianova

New challenges
Just before the pandemic Vålerenga appeared to be losing its grip on the top league, with several youngster-led teams rising up, and then some guy called Magnus Carlsen formed his own club - Offerspill, which vacuumed up most of the nation's talent by offering even more attractive possibilities.

Offerspill only had to work their way up from the second tier - perhaps due to having an active world champion on their team - and the 2021-22 Eliteserien had its highest profile ever, precisely since it occasionally featured appearances from Magnus Carlsen.

Despite having a stacked team at its very best, Offerspill also has a policy of giving a more representative sample of its membership game time, and this led to a few accidents, the most decisive being a league deciding 1-5 thrashing vs. Vålerenga, with Mustafa Yilmaz dispatching 'deserter' Aryan Tari on board one. So, the return of the east enders was the first 'familiar surprise'.

Outrageously civilized
I asked Dag whether there was a bitter rivalry between Vålerenga and Offerspill. His reply was possibly the magnanimity of victors, but actually, probably just Norwegian sociability...

"No. Not at all. I'm very glad that there is competition at the top level in Norwegian chess. Magnus (Carlsen) and Aryan (Tari) and Johan Sebastian (Christiansen) have all been playing for us, so we have a lot of friends there," Dag says.

"They are all ex-Vålerenga players - and you don't have any bad blood about the top half of your team going over to Offerspill?!"

"There is a good cooperation on the personal level," Dag insists. "But not at the club level! I'm very pleased that we have good clubs that compete, that's my point of view."

Rebuilding
But with the huge exodus of young talent, can Vålerenga keep its ambitions high? Dag explains that they have private sponsorship, but that this has taken a hit during the pandemic, and the club has not yet decided whether it will try to mount another challenge for the European Club title.

"We will work with the young guys that we have, we have two very good trainers, and take it from there. If we participate in the ECCC we will have a very strong team that is good enough to fight at the top. We still have (David) Howell and (Nils) Grandelius, as well as the core team in the league," Dag says.

Recently, Vålerenga was a co-organizer of the massive Chess for Ukraine charity drive in Oslo on March 26, which raised about 1 million Norwegian kroner for the cause, but a player transfer was a hot topic in the interim.

Familiar face, surprising federation

The conversion of Evgeny Romanov from the Russian Chess Federation (RCF) to Norway's, a switch that took place rapidly, planned in late February and completed by the end of the long final weekend of the league season in early March, again launched chess into the mainstream news headlines here.

The news first broke after former world champion and Duma member Anatoly Karpov raised the issue in the Russian parliament, and it became a Norwegian story from two different angles. The first, a horrified reaction to increasingly ugly Duma talk about Romanov, and then a tabloid piece that took a fairly hostile approach to Evgeny's move, largely due to his insistence on refraining from discussing politics.

"I would do the same if I were him, I wouldn't give any political statements. He is in an impossible situation back home," Dag argues. "His motive for changing federation is that he wants to go on being a professional chess player. He has very close ties to Norway, he's lived here earlier on, played for Norwegian clubs, he's been training young Norwegian chess players and it's natural for him to stay here."

Many would argue it would have been simpler to just play under a FIDE flag. Attracting the wrath of Russian authorities and shifting to Norway is not an easy business. Though Romanov qualifies as a skilled worker here, and has worked as one before, the cost of living in Norway when your skill is chess is highly problematic - believe me (emigré to Norway Jonathan Tisdall). I decided to check in with him to get a better understanding of his situation and plans, now that his contract training in Turkey has come to an end.

"For now I'm a chess freelancer, who got a chance to continue my chess career and will try to play very good chess under the flag of the Norwegian Chess Federation," Evgeny says.

"According to FIDE transfer regulations I'm not able to represent Norway in official events (Olympiad, title cycle, World Cup etc.) for the next two years. Then we will see, but I promised my friends, students and rising chess guys not to take their place in the national team if they will be close to my level."

For now I'm a chess freelancer, who got a chance to continue my chess career and will try to play very good chess under the flag of the Norwegian Chess Federation.
— GM Evgeny Romanov

In the immediate future, Evgeny plans to play for Vålerenga and will be eligible for the next Norwegian championship. He carries only a Russian passport and his visa limits him to 90 days in Europe, every six months, including travel days.

He is carefully following developments in Russia towards sportsmen who have chosen a similar path to his, but admits to having trouble contemplating a full switch of nationality.

"It is not a simple document for me, this is the connection to my motherland with her centuries-old great culture, connection to people that I love. I can't even imagine that day when I'll have to apply for a Russian visa to visit my family and friends in St. Petersburg..."

A check of evolving coverage of the situation provides perspective, with official outrage towards 'wandering' Russian sportsmen, and with Romanov being a recurring illustration of the problem.

Postscript: There will be more coming to this blogspot! Some interesting news is about to drop as chess activity picks up steam again in Norway, plus an interview or two in the pipeline...