REFLECTIONS IN FRONT OF EUROPEAN SOCCER’S CLOSED GATE

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.