“Had Tottenham Hotspur arrived in Moldova’s eastern city of Tiraspol for their recent Europa League fixture by road rather than by air they would have been greeted by an almost unique phenomenon in international diplomacy. Travelling from the Moldovan capital Chisinau to the city that homes league champions Sheriff requires visitors to cross perhaps the only international check-point in the world that brings you out in the same country that you thought you were leaving, at least in any legal sense. The Moldovan dispute with breakaway autonomous region Transnistria, sitting between the Dnistria river and the south-western tip of Ukraine, could well be described as Europe’s forgotten conflict – dormant since 1992 when a brief war over sovereignty that defined the immediate post-Soviet period fizzled out into a polite ceasefire.” World Soccer