While the story as never impressed the course of events on T-shirts of the players, the reputation of Valerij Lobanovs'kyj grew to the point of provoking real pilgrimages to study in his Kiev, by the Western coaches and they would not have changed the way of understanding the game of football.
Legend has it that among the brave students in the mid-eighties, there were two coaches of the teams then emerging in the Italian second division, Arrigo Sacchi, coach of Parma (and soon to AC Milan), Francesco Scoglio and coach of Messina (and soon to Genoa: everyone has their own destiny).
Now, I know this is off topic but I think this story has always made the arrival of Toto and Peppino a Milano in "Totò, Peppino and Malafemmina" (C. Mastrocinque, 1956). I always thought rock and knit in two bags (which also rhyme), in a cold polar-like, surreal to write a letter in Russian colonel Lobanovs'kyj macaroni, because his wisdom made them aware of the tactic.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Valery Lobanovs'kyj spent six years between the UAE and Kuwait, just to be able addossare some accusation of betrayal or failure to base money. Back to Dynamo Kiev in 1997, and Europe remembers his impassive face a double challenge with Barcelona in the group stage of Champions League between Ukraine and Catalonia, seven to zero for the Dynamo Kiev.
In Kiev, the small rooms on the shields Serhij Stanislavovyč Rebrov, Barcelona, \u200b\u200bAndrij Shevchenko Mykolajovyč, with a memorable hat-trick. Videos available on youtube in , you can admire the statues of exultation Lobanovs'kyj, completely immobile except for an imperceptible movement of the eyebrow, similar to that of Carletto Ancelotti when, in the last Champions League first knockout round, denied Kalou to a penalty for offside as vast as a Klose.
Andrij Shevchenko was for the equivalent of Lobanovs'kyj Blochin in the nineties: fast, technical, basic, polite. From that memorable baptism, the young dolphin Master often has enchanted audiences in European football, with its elegant dancer aware of the need to be plugged into a dance, never arrogant as a soloist (a year later, Shevchenko was top scorer in the Champions League with eight goals, while Rebrov stopped at seven, but not enough to Dynamo, which was eliminated in the semi-finals by Bayern Monaco).
After this brief overview of the Russian football incomplete (still improperly referring to the ancient geographical) one wonders what depends on the unsteadiness of the performance of teams ex-Soviet, which makes them (and always has made) capable at the same time performance case and strap amateur. This succession of sublime and ridiculous, perhaps even more surprising because we do not stop to consider the Russian football as something exotic, like a futbol bailado numb from the cold, which can barely penetrate the mechanisms. Wanting
forward a hypothesis, it could be a space problem. Both the splendors that the miseries of Russian football seems to stem from a special relationship with their living space, everything in the soul unbalanced in favor of the latter, with its vastness, its rigor, its impenetrable silence. What for the players was a western metro, for the Russians was a mile, in the field and in the heart. When they could force their capacity in the rectangle to organize the immense, visible also in literature, gave the impression of dragging the other teams in their infinite territories, which were and are the only ones capable of running. The times when the miracle could not seem to trip over their lack of proportion, to pass the ball to the void, or rather the ghost of who should have been but was not there, because no one was and could be found in small, too huge bowl of the playing field.
As in the 1988 final of Europe, where Russia, coached by Lobanovs'kyj after ridiculed Italy in the semifinals, suddenly vanished in front of Holland all'arrembante Gullit and Van Basten (his overtime goal of the two to zero). The face of the great Valerij even then did not betray any emotion. Certainly knew, however, that quell'Olanda playing football that he had invented many years earlier, in its laboratories windswept.
Arturo