• Українська
  • Русский
  • English
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

REFLECTIONS IN FRONT OF EUROPEAN SOCCER’S CLOSED GATE

7 December, 1999 - 00:00

I have said and written about this more than once. Everybody
would agree, but with a reservation: you mustn’t say so, it is too early;
we’ll talk it over when we qualify for the European championship. Now I
think we can all talk. And it depends on us all whether these talks will
result in long-overdue changes in our soccer or will boil down to the quarrels
among those who lay claim to sharing the national soccer pie. There is
no pie left in fact, so there is a hope that those interested and vested
with power will finally open their eyes and stop looking at our soccer
through glasses passed out by zealous assistants.

What we have is a national sport tragedy. Precisely a tragedy,
for no local successes of individual, even very powerful, clubs can unite
and raise the nation as much as the performance of Ukraine’s team in the
Europe Cup finals, together with the best soccer states, might. Experience
shows almost everybody watches the games of great soccer festivals, such
as the biennial world and European finals. Even those very much removed
from sports and soccer watch on such days the games of Europe’s and the
world’s best teams. Our team will not be among them again, and we will
again feel ourselves a second-rate nation, in which one hates to believe.

HOW WE PLAYED

To disclose the subject better, let us recall Ukraine’s
path in the Euro-2000 qualifiers. At first, there was a sensational victory
over Russia in Kyiv. In the overwhelming euphoria over that, one was reluctant
to take into account the rather accidental nature of the goals our players
scored, the absence of clear superiority in the game, as well as the fact
that at the end of the match we ceded two goals and heard the final whistle
with a sigh of relief (we held out!), rather than with cheers for Ukrainian
attacks. Thanks to the calendar of qualification matches and the unexpected
win of the French in Iceland, the home and away victories over Armenia
and Andorra, respectively, pushed Ukraine to the top of the group. It is
not worth analyzing the way our team played in those two matches, for our
rivals were far from equal to us, as we then thought. But all this happened
later. The qualifiers climaxed in a draw with France in Paris, when Shevchenko
failed to score face-to-face with the goalie. We were reluctant at that
time to take into account that the French side played without Zidane, while
our boys came up with nothing else special. For we were almost champions
of the world!

After this, the Ukrainian performance curve clearly headed
downward, which, as the saying goes, only the blind could not see. First,
there was a lackluster draw with Iceland in Kyiv. The only goal that the
fullback Vashchuk had to score instead of our toothless forwards could
have brought us three points but for the panic in the next minutes which
ended up with the ball rebounding into our goal (alas, a familiar sight).
This was explained then by fatigue after France and a poor pitch. This
year’s first and last match our side won without a penalty versus Andorra
was followed by a draw in Yerevan, where we showed a game shamefully inadequate
for a contender trying to make the European finals. And then all fell silent,
switching public attention to the faults of the Armenian plane which flew
as badly as our side played. Then we did not lose to France at home, which
was declared a success. In that game, our players had only half a chance
to score, while the guests were quite happy with the result.

Ukraine’s latest performance is still fresh in memory.
Nervous helter-skelter running in Iceland, several unrealized opportunities
for the hosts to score, and the rescuing penalty shot left Ukraine a chance.
The ninety minutes of fear in Moscow and the mind-boggling mistake of Russian
goalie Filimonov secured us second place in the group and the opportunity
to challenge the additional place in Benelux in a match with Slovenia.
It was a colorless game in Ljubljana, with the only accurate shot by Shevchenko,
then a scare, and two goals in our net. Then there was the inability to
hit the Slovene goal at least once in the season’s decisive match in Kyiv,
one more rescuing penalty, a hustle, a scare, and our goal was hit. Everything
happened almost under the same scenario: “conservatory, the court, Siberia.”
Will whoever say Ukraine played otherwise please throw at me a ten- times-underrated
ticket for the last Kyiv match versus Slovenia.

WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH SZABO?

The national team coach has for the second time stuck out
his neck, back, and other connected parts for public chastisement and is
taking lying down everything the indignant fans say about him. This seems
the reason why Mr. Szabo has been retained in his ambiguous post of “senior
coach,” with Valery Lobanovsky as the “chief coach of all select teams.”
This strange hierarchy, in case of victory, would elevate all to the crests
of glory and popular love, but, in case of a defeat, kept none other than
Szabo at the receiving end. It once worked two years ago, when we let the
team of Croatia go through to the World Cup finals in the same situation.
Instead of making a profound and honest analysis of the defeat, it was
decided to put all the blame on referee Pedersen who hardly even knows
about it. Now our sharks of the word-processor are waiting for the order
to pounce and tear to shreds Jozsef Szabo, once an excellent halfback,
with their scathing criticism. Suffice it to remember Kolotov, the junior
team’s coach, whose shortcomings suddenly became an eye-opener to our soccer
connoisseurs one fine Icelandic day. I am not going to hint who opens the
eyes and loosens the tongues. I would rather admit there has been almost
no normal attention to and sound criticism of our main team the way there
is in any other country, during the qualifiers. Nobody paid attention to
Kyiv’s demonstrative rejection of Anatoly Byshovets who became the trainer
of a whole group of national team candidates. As a result, the Donetsk
players, already fitting in with the national squad lineup, began to be
ignored. I cannot but recall our first qualification campaign for Euro-1996,
when a dispute between the coaches and soccer federation bureaucrats cost
Ukraine a chance to get into the finals. Now, too, we have seen the same
struggle of ambitions or God knows what. Jozsef Szabo worked the only way
a coach, who had never trained anybody in earnest, could work. It is better
not to remember Szabo’s experience in Kyiv Dynamo. The respected coach
had shown no marked achievements before that. Could the Soccer Federation
leaders not have known it? As long as Ukraine was completely represented
by Dynamo, the national team could be run by anybody: the main thing was
not to spoil something. But when the question arose of forming a true national
team, it became difficult to see any logic in Szabo’s actions.

ABOUT WHAT LOBANOVSKY KEEPS SILENT

The soccer public at large was surprised in a way, when,
after a defeat inflicted by the Croats in 1997, a logical decision was
not made to hand the national team over to Valery Lobanovsky, on whom our
soccer rhetoricians had been doing their best to lavish as much praise
as possible for three solid years. The best coach of all times and nations
east of Chop (nobody seemed to have said this about him before), Valery
Lobanovsky did not take then a seemingly natural step, thus leaving Ukraine’s
national team in Jozsef Szabo’s impulsive hands. Did the Dynamo coach really
not want to try again to scale the European or world peaks he had already
approached between 1986 and 1990, when he headed the USSR team? The answer
to this question should be sought in the same 1990, when Lobanovsky had
his and at the same time not his players under his supervision in Italy.
It turned out that to run a team, keeping it in the golden cage of Koncha-
Zaspa, and to glean one from various countries, are two entirely different
things. As soon as in one month of playing for a Juventus-level team our
player becomes an entirely different personality requiring an entirely
different approach. The Russians had already stepped on the same rake a
few years before we did, when their stars started moving around the world.
Frustrated and having achieved no result, our northern cousins got back
to the Ukrainian experience and now prefer to form the national team on
the basis of Moscow’s Spartak, rather than glean players from the remote
provinces. Being only too well aware of this, Lobanovsky decided not to
search for the proverbial second bird in the bush, contenting himself with
rather his nice Dynamo bird in the hand. Even today, Lobanovsky’s team
is already a variation of the old USSR national team. And this is by no
means good. Having scraped all Ukraine’s soccer reserves, emasculated the
national championship, and canceled, in their own interests, the cup winners’
competition, Dynamo has set its eyes on the Soviet Union’s formerly boundless
expanses. Have our soccer leaders really forgotten that as recently as
ten years ago it was Ukrainian soccer players who replenished the teams
on the Soviet territory, just as Serbs and Croats are replenishing European
soccer teams now? The post-Soviet soccer theater will exhaust its reserves
even faster than the Ukrainian one. What then? Was it not humiliating to
watch the Slovene players of run-of-the-mill Austrian clubs demonstrate
soccer- playing skills to the players of our once powerful soccer state?
We also have an example from neighboring Hungary and Poland, whose teams
once were among the best in the world. They did not think about future,
either. So where is the once formidable Hungary now? Thus Valery Lobanovsky
did a right and wise thing, when he refused the proposal to train the national
team, which was undoubtedly offered him. If only he could keep Dynamo afloat!

DYNAMO AND UKRAINE

“We say Dynamo and mean Ukraine; we say Ukraine and mean
Dynamo,” proletarian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky could have said, had he lived
to see the time of our soccer prosperity. The idea of a single superclub,
reduced to absurdity, begins to strike out at its authors. We hear from
Dynamo apologists many parallels drawn with Milan, Barcelona, Manchester
United, and other European clubs. Let us leave aside the little-known financial
details and look at the widely-publicized facts relating to the games.
On the Saturday before last, Barcelona lost in Valencia and, following
Real, was knocked out of the top three. Milan is on tenterhooks, while
the superstar-studded Inter, with Ronaldo and Vieri, has been lost altogether
in the mid-charts. Also far from calm are leading Manchester United and
Bayern. All the clubs mentioned and not are strong precisely because they
can afford to lose, having worthy rivals at home. In this country, the
whole soccer organism is subordinated to the interest of just one team,
which is not allowed to lose. Even the national team is in fact one of
the numerous subdivisions of the Dynamo empire. Was the seventy years of
building socialism in one isolated country not enough? Those who favor
a superclub against the backdrop of the decline of soccer in other cities
should understand the absurdity of this in less than seventy years. Each
next national championship crippled to please Dynamo will be bring us closer
to the final catastrophe, when all our teams will be knocked out of European
tournaments each year as early as in August-September, the national team
will be unable to overcome at least once the not so high qualification
barrier, and soccer teams in the regions devoid of powerful steel mills
will be doomed to gradual extinction. Unless we have competition in the
national championship and a rhythmic calendar with games in the warm season
of the year, all reasoning about any kind of progress is nothing but empty
talk. As to the national team, it should be the peak of the soccer pyramid
independent of other teams, with its own budget, base, and leadership.
This is the way it is done all over the world.

PATRIOTISM

Please accept my sincere apologies for lofty words usually
avoided in sportswriting. Today I can use them. Today, we are standing
by the sickbed of Ukrainian soccer languishing with an incurable disease.
We kept shameful silence in the early nineties, when our best soccer players
would become “Russians,” keeping intact their Kyiv or Odesa domicile registrations.
We used to say something like: “a fish looks for deeper waters.” We are
pleased to accept into Ukrainian ranks some second-rate Russian players,
with the first-rate ones playing for the Russia’s national team. We tacitly
agree with those who consider Ukraine not a state but a temporary aberration,
allowing players to debate over which country it is best to play for. In
a normal country, such discussions are impossible in principle. We can
name over ten world- class soccer stars who proudly played for the teams
of a small and unpromising Wales, Venezuela, Finland, etc. The best forward
of the English Premier League, York, will play for Trinidad and Tobago
without even thinking of taking British citizenship. Can you remember the
Bulgarian Stoichkov, Danish Laudrups, and the Mexican Sanchez drawing,
by their own efforts, their national teams to world heights? Where is our
soccer dignity? All our soccer players and coaches know the Ukrainian language
very well but are too shy (!) to speak it. The only national sport newspaper
is also published in the language of a neighboring state. You might ask
whether it matters. It does, for a Ukrainian must play in the national
team for his country, not for money. The squabbles and conflicts, typical
of some clubs, are out of the question in the national team. This is our
main team, the only hope of a depressed nation to revive its national dignity.
I have to agree with official soccer ideologists that soccer is going to
long remain the only way in which we can challenge foreign countries.

We are again in the backyard of European soccer. There
are two ways out: either to the blind alley of sycophancy, where each defends
his own personal interests, or to honest admission of the mistaken way
we have chosen and a joint search for chances to revive our soccer. We
can and must argue and object. We now have plenty of time.

INCIDENTALLY

Prime Minister, A.K.A. head of the Ukrainian Soccer Federation,
Valery Pustovoitenko said on November 25 that national team chief coach
Jozsef Szabo would “without fail” resign.

Szabo, whom President Leonid Kuchma decorated with the
Order of Merit less than a month ago, after the draw with Russia, remained
unperturbed by Pustovoitenko’s harsh statement. “My contract is valid until
December 31, so let us wait and see,” the Internet newspaper Sport segodnia
(http://www.sports.ru) reports, quoting Reuters. “It is not very polite
at my age to stoop to verbal clashes with whomever it may be. So I prefer
not to comment.”

The newspaper Sovietsky sport quotes president of
Russia’s Rotor team Vladimir Goriunov as gently hinting that the Ukrainian
Soccer Federation has suggested that the national team of Ukraine be headed
by Yevhen Kucherevsky who led Dnipropetrovsk’s Dnipro to the gold in the
1988 USSR championship. Sport segodnia notes that Volodymyr Muntian,
the famous halfback of Dynamo Kyiv in the sixties and seventies, has quit
the post of the coach of Cherkasy FC, one of the League One leaders. “Word
has it that this resignation is connected with the latest cadre shuffle
in Ukraine’s national team,” was the newspaper’s version.

Meanwhile, this country’s main club, Kyiv Dynamo, is reinforcing
its attack line and last-ditch defenses. A five-year contract has been
signed with a talented 20-year-old Marian Marushchak, the Lviv FC goalie,
who visited Ajax last fall for trial games. In addition, next season our
club will also recruit Georgy Demetradze, 23, a forward on the national
team of Georgia and Vladikavkaz’s Alaniya. “The contract has not yet been
signed, but all the details have been in fact agreed on,” Yevhen Kotelnykov,
one of the Ukrainian club’s managers, told Reuters. “Demetradze is to put
his signature under the contract in a matter of one or two days.” The sale
of Demetradze, who has scored 21 goals in the current championship of Russia,
was an obligatory condition the Alaniya management set the team’s former
chief coach Valery Gazzayev, Sport segodnia reports. According to
the newspaper, Gazzayev was in this way to pay off the $4.5-million debt
Alaniya has ran up. The newspaper Fakty claims that Alaniya valued
Demetradze at $10 million.

Rubric: