Goal that missed the target
When the players of Kyiv’s Dynamo beat Portugal’s Porto in a visiting game of the Champions League, few people stressed that the Ukrainian team fired a single shot into the net of the hosts of the field, which struck the target. Their victory meant that they were the strongest—it was comfortable to think so. On February 18, when in a UEFA Cup game Dynamo played against Spain’s Valencia in Kyiv, the same thing happened: the visiting team fired a shot into the hosts’ net and scored a goal.
Here I will stop drawing analogies and will recall in a more detailed way the game that opened the official soccer season of 2009 in Ukraine. The fact that Valencia is one of the leading teams of the strong Spanish championship league was known before the draw, which pitted it against Dynamo. The leaders of the Ukrainian championship had to prepare well for the game with Valencia and so they spent the entire winter training session with this goal in mind. Instead, the Spanish team was all the while playing in their national championship, where it had not been very successful. But Dynamo should not have expected that Valencia’s problems would help them win. A team in which each second player is a champion of Europe will always be a dangerous force.
Shortly before the game it became known that the coaches of Dynamo had to replace some of the players on the regular squad due to traumas and Oleksandr Aliev’s disqualification, which followed the Champions League. As a result, the right fullback Betao was moved to the center whereas the left fullback Andrii Nesmachny took his place in the right. Tiberiu Ghioane and the team’s rookie Serhii Kravchenko were made responsible for the flanks, not in their usual positions. The rest of the players were in their usual positions, including Artem Milevsky, who was supposed to be the main forward.
Out of Valencia’s whole regular lineup only David Villa, the best forward of the club and Spain’s national team, quite predictably, was not among the starters. The coaches spared their forward in order to let him out in the last minutes of the game. Under these conditions another champion of Europe, David Silva, was to be the main threat to the net of the host team.
Two episodes early into the game largely determined its outcome. Initially, Artem Kravets stole the ball from Valencia’s fullbacks, faced Valencia’s goalkeeper one-to-one, but missed. Shortly after this, according to an unwritten football rule, a dangerous moment occurred near Dynamo’s net: Silva used a sequence of mistakes of the fullbacks, and pushed the ball into Stanislav Bohush’s net after a free kick from the flank. This happened eight minutes into the game, and Silva’s shot was the only strike into Dynamo’s goal.
After taking an unexpected lead, Valencia lined up in defense, defending its net in a professional way. Under such circumstances, Dynamo could hardly succeed in positional attacks. The guests stopped the Kyivites’ attacks without any difficulty, at times keeping them on their half of the field. But even in this kind of game Dynamo players managed to create several opportunities to strike, but Milevsky missed twice from favorable positions, while his other shots were not especially dangerous.
In the second half of the game, Florin Cernat went into the field on Dynamo’s side. The veteran of the team, who has not been regarded as a serious force for two years, proved that he is quite able to strengthen the play. First, Cernat struck a dangerous blow upon the net, nearly scoring a goal, and then he made a penalty kick so masterfully that Valencia’s fullback Albiol had to strike the ball in his team’s net.
Nobody knows how the events would have unfolded, had not Milevsky earned a second warning from the referee, which meant his dismissal from the field. After Dynamo was left without its chief scorer, it was unable to attack as sharply as before. Besides, Villa appeared on the field on the guests’ side. Playing in minority, the team had to take care of defense rather than try to score a goal. At the end of The Day the result of the game was 1:1, so the winner of the duel will be determined in Thursday’s game in Valencia.
Now let us return to analogies. In autumn, after Dynamo defeated Porto in a visiting match thanks to a single strike, it started the game at home with confidence, and even took the lead. But, as they say, turnabout is fair play and the Portuguese team snatched victory in the final seconds of the game, leaving Dynamo outside the Champions League. After Dynamo was so clearly unfortunate on its own field, good luck will probably attend it in a week, hopefully. Some luck would definitely come in handy when two equally strong teams, like Dynamo and Valencia, are playing.
