Third year with no victories
Dynamo Kyiv vs. Sporting Lisbon: 1:2
Before the second match of the Champions League’s group tournament, when Dynamo Kyiv was to play Sporting Lisbon, I tried to recall when Ukraine’s main champion soccer team had last won in this tournament: it was in the Group Stage of the Champions League in 2004-05. In November 2004, on the snow-covered field of the Olympic Stadium, Dynamo beat Italy’s Roma, then an obvious outsider. Three years have passed, in which time Ukraine has had a new president, two parliaments, and three governments, but Dynamo Kyiv did not score any victories in the league. There were hopes that our team would beat Sporting, a far from spectacular soccer club in Europe, just a Portuguese one. Dynamo didn’t.
Dynamo lost the previous Champions League game against Roma (0:2) when the team was coached by Demianenko. This time, in the match with Sporting, Dynamo’s coach was Joseph Szabo, placed at the team’s helm for the fifth time. As a rule, a change of coach results in a team’s better performance. This was what was hoped would happen with Dynamo, apparently in vain.
The very first minutes of the game with the guests from Portugal showed that the home team was unable to take the initiative, nothing remotely like storming the opponent’s goal from the outset, as should be the case with a strong team. As for pressing, which for years has been Dynamo’s calling card, Sporting proved to be much better at this, forcing the Dynamo players to make mistakes. The head-on tactic chosen by both teams offered enough access to their nets. In such cases only the team with better players wins.
Sporting’s mastery turned out to be greater. The Portuguese scored two goals and secured a victory in the first half of the game. Dynamo kept making mistakes in both defense and attack. Symbolically, in this Champions League game, Dynamo Kyiv’s first and only goal was scored by fullback Vashchuk, whose performance had soccer fans clutching their heads in despair. We never saw accurate strikes from Dynamo’s line of attack, although Shatsky, Milevsky, Diogo Rincon, and Kleber had good opportunities to do just that.
Our team could have scored goals because two weeks prior to this match, when it was playing in Rome, the team didn’t have a chance. But I have already mentioned that a higher level of mastery wins in the kind of game we saw on Tuesday. A professional level is what helps a soccer team win a game, not good luck. You can blame your failure on bad luck just once. Dynamo Kyiv has suffered failures for three years in a row, so this is not bad luck but a trend.
Unless we recognize this now, we will have to wait a long time to see international victories from Dynamo. It may also happen that there won’t be anyone left to score these victories. Perhaps for the first time in the past couple of years a game of the major soccer tournament failed to attract real interest in Kyiv. There are steadily decreasing numbers of people who still believe that Dynamo Kyiv will become a victorious team. To be honest, there never were any Dynamo fans that would go to the stadium to watch their team’s failures. This is probably our mentality: we salute victors and scorn losers.
Dynamo Kyiv will play the next Champions League game against Manchester United. Will its fans be willing to watch it at the stadium, considering that our team has a slim chance and that watching the Manchester stars beating Dynamo will not be particularly enjoyable?
Do we have a choice? Apparently not. Either Dynamo starts winning or it will join the group of middling teams that break through every year to the Champions to be painfully beaten by truly high-class teams.
Dynamo vs. Sporting: 1:2. Goals scored by Vashchuk (28), Tonel (14), Polga (38). Team standings in Group F after the second round:
