Dynamo’s prospects after its 1 to 2 defeat by PSV Eindhoven
You quickly take good things for granted. While three years ago Kyiv Dynamo fans simply hoped for their club to make a good showing in a Champions League match versus the Dutch PSV and were pleasantly surprised with the win on the road, today’s minimal-score defeat at the hands of the same rivals in the same tournament at the same stadium is treated as a mishap and cause for discontent. Those who saw both games will confirm that the Dutch Eindhoven fielded practically a new squad, while the Kyivans brought over the downgraded version of the team, which three years ago began Dynamo’s climb to the European peaks.
The PSV that the Kyivans eliminated in the 1997 fall group tournament was sold as early as the next spring, with half the Eindhoven players beaten by our boys now playing in the well-known and rich clubs of the soccer’s big five. Dynamo has instead kept intact the skeleton of that team, having sold only three players. Gone are the three best: Shevchenko, Luzhny, and Rebrov, the players who enabled the skeleton remaining to play modern high-speed soccer. But no new flesh has so far grown on the Dynamo bones left. We already touched on this problem after the first-leg match versus Crvena Zvezda, comparing the Kyiv squad to an orchestra without a conductor. We made it then. The role of forwards was taken by Kaladze and Belkevych, who had recovered just in time, which helped the team to muddle through the Belgrade minefield. We all expected Dynamo to “run fast” at last in the fall. Indeed, the team ran much faster, but this had no effect on the quality of their play.
I am not going to dwell on the key points of the deservedly lost Eindhoven match, leaving this job to the professionals who count left and right kick shots, who will soon be counting the number of steps and breaths each player takes. These calculations will do good to no one but coaches. Everybody saw the game and the absence of true forwards in Dynamo. Shatskikh and Demetradze are good enough to kick goals against run-of-the-mill Ukrainian teams whose fullbacks are thinking not so much about soccer as about their back pay. But when a true, even Ukrainian, rival comes out on the pitch, the role of strikers is assumed by Dynamo halfbacks. It should be admitted right now that the club has failed to find a worthy replacement for the unique and inimitable Shevchenko and Rebrov. A team is not a computer, where one microchip can be painlessly replaced by another at the user’s discretion. We can also make even a more radical conclusion: the few international successes Dynamo has achieved over the past three years were the result of not so much the renowned Lobanovsky system as of the presence at that moment of really great forwards whose accurate shots in fact won the victories young Dynamo fans are so proud of. It will be recalled that throughout the almost thirty-year stint of coaching the current Dynamo mentor has won two resounding victories (the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1975 and 1986) owing to the unique Blokhin, after whose departure the Kyivans never managed to win anything on the international arena.
Last Wednesday, the two sides seemed to have switched roles in Eindhoven Stadium: the young Dutch players, so far almost unknown in Europe, took a step forward and confidently beat a team that has won international prestige in the past few years but then gradually got out of shape. The first-string Kyiv players, who were not sold abroad one by one, seem to be tired of going through the same door. Former Dynamo player Nikiforov, who once refused to sit on the bench in Kyiv and has played in several European clubs over the past ten years, looked younger and more fervent on the pitch than the young Kyivans who continue to hang around in the Koncha-Zaspa training base. PSV is Nikiforov’s own team today. But only today, perhaps tomorrow, but very unlikely the day after tomorrow. Meanwhile, the leading Ukrainian club’s incredibly long substitution bench resembles a refuge for those soccer players who have lost all prospects and keep playing for Dynamo-2 for reasons known only to themselves. Dynamo’s second string differs greatly from that of the eighties, when such players as Kanchelskis, Onopko, Nikiforov, and other would-be international celebrities were trying hard to make their way onto the first string. Nobody is now pushing Demetradze or Shatskikh from below to make them fight to be on the first string. The Dynamo junior school, which the ambitious club owners once promised to turn into a powerhouse of talents, does not function so far. Meanwhile, some foreigners of dubious ability from other post-Soviet states are being hastily invited to the club. At the end of the Eindhoven game, Dynamo displayed forwards Serebrennikov, recruited from Russia last year, and Kuzmichev, also invited from there just now. And what about our own reserves?
A final sore point is that our meritorious and wise coach has been having health problems this past year. Would it not be natural in purely human terms if the coach were allowed to relax a little and take a course of treatment? World experience knows no examples of a top-class team being coached by telephone, even if it is mobile. It is no accident that the most severe punishment for a coach abroad is a ban on sitting on his team’s substitution bench during the match. Who actually guides Dynamo in the crucial moments of decisive matches, when somebody must make instant decisions and assume personal responsibility? Mykhailychenko, Puzach, Demyanenko or somebody else from the long list of Dynamo coaches that each time surprises foreign journalists? All these assistants of Lobanovsky manage to smoke a pack of cigarettes during a match. But the prospects for our leading soccer club still remain hidden behind the resultant smoke screen.
Undoubtedly, Dynamo’s lackluster play, especially of its defense line, is symptomatic, not accidental. PSV picked up in Eindhoven what Karpaty left out in Lviv last summer. What will our game versus Manchester United bring?
