Kyiv Dynamo 0, Eindhoven PSV 1

Dynamo fans pictured a different vision of their favorite squad parting with Europe’s most important club tournament. Undoubtedly only incorrigible optimists or total idiots could now believe that our Dynamo players will end their tour of Europe with the Cup of Champions. Our side was expected to lose sooner or later but to lose in a fierce and dramatic struggle, after which the winners and losers swap still warm jerseys, and those who have lost feel no scruples about running up to the grandstand and thanking their fans.

Somebody has to lose in soccer: this is the implacable law of sports. Remember how ignominiously the famous Milan stood down in the Champions League last year? But after the defeat, the Italian club returned to the world’s strongest national league, where it struggled for victory in every game until May before the eyes of the millions of fans, including those in Ukraine. When last spring Ukrainian television was stubbornly feeding Ukrainian viewers with Milan and Andriy Shevchenko, who remembered that this team had been knocked out of the Champions League as recently as November? Elimination from the Eurocups is a thing entirely different for Dynamo than for foreign clubs. This elimination snatches the ground from under the feet of Dynamo ideologists who have proclaimed the strategic “priority of Europe,” gradually bringing to naught what has remained of the national championship. It looks as if Dynamo has no place to go back to. Since 1997, each of the Lobanovsky team’s years has been adjusted to the Eurocups. Now the team is most likely to be free of European problems until next July. What are the thirty high-class Dynamo soccer players going to do in the next four or five months? The club management hardly feels inspired by the prospect of encounters with the teams of Mariupol, Poltava, or Kharkiv. This would be good if we had a powerful and interesting championship.

But why did we start with the conclusions? Why not discuss the course of the match lost to PSV? But then, what is there to discuss? Only to state again that Dynamo did not look like a Eurocup competitor should? We have already reached the limit in explaining the Kyivans’ sluggishness and lack of initiative by certain so-called strategic schemes. What we saw in Kyiv was the same Dynamo Anderlecht walked over in Brussels six days before. When, at the end of the first half against PSV, Dynamo did not attack the Dutch goal, they seemed to be happy they had not conceded four goals, as they did in Brussels, and were striving to retain this “gain” until the break. They failed.

Forget the foolish mistake the fullbacks made when the ball was served from a free kick. For there were forty-five minutes to play in the second half, there was the home field with grandstands partially filled with the devoted supporters. Why not carry out the last assault, why not smash the weak defenses of Eindhoven and win? The point is not that the Kyivans were unprepared. The team just ceased to be a team and turned into a group of dexterous players, each of them playing for himself. Was this caused by the complete helplessness of Demetradze on the offensive? Or did the Kyivans expect a gift of fate? We do not know. All we know is that the ball refused to cruise into the Dutch goal by itself, while three shots on the visitors’ goal in ninety minutes are but a travesty of the word attack. Even the instinctive retreat of PSV players to their goal in the last minutes did not become a clarion call for Dynamo to launch an assault. What we only saw were endless random passes and rare westward potshots. I cannot possibly call them goal attempts.

This was the end of it. Lobanovsky’s team continued to recede (in the literal sense of the word) from the positions it had secured in the 1997-99 seasons. It seems to me this was caused not so much by the wrong selection of players and training strategic errors as by the fact that recent successes were gained by the team of Shevchenko and Rebrov, not by Dynamo as such. Moscow television commentator Savik Shuster joked quite aptly on the eve of the Dynamo vs. PSV match that the Kyivans needed a miracle to win, while the miracle plays for Milan. Muscovites take it easier: they have not been listening too attentively to pseudoscientific explanations of Kyiv’s wins and losses since the seventies. Yet, I think we are able to look into our problems even without our Moscow friends. The myth of a strategy, for the sake of which the national championship was disfigured, has not been dispelled but dealt a resounding blow. This well- deserved defeat could do good, forcing our soccer bosses at last to look at their domain from the empty grandstands of Kyiv’s Dynamo or Central Sports Club stadiums during a national championship match rather than from an airplane bound for another Champions League match. There must be a debate (which The Day has tried to provoke more than once) over what our soccer bosses should pay basic attention to in the time now free of foreign junkets. Only after spotting honestly the ailments of our soccer, making the correct diagnosis, and prescribing treatment, will we be able to pin our hopes on a new Champions League, where Ukrainian clubs are sure to turn in a worthy performance against the best teams of Europe. All we can hope for so far is that Dynamo will at least slam the door in Manchester.