OBITUARY: Valeri Lobanovsky
Innovative Ukrainian soccer coach who made champions of Dynamo Kiev and led the Soviet Union to two World Cup finals
Wednesday 15 May 2002 02.57 BST
Valeri Lobanovsky, who has died aged 63 following brain surgery, was, for more than a quarter of a century, one of the world's most influential and innovative football coaches. Though he might have seemed an authoritarian figure at Dynamo Kiev - where he worked both before and after the demise of the Soviet Union - he deprecated any such idea, insisting that football had evolved to a point where no one man could cope with all its aspects, so that he needed a team of experts to assist him. He also managed the Soviet Union team in the 1986 and 1990 World Cup finals.
Born in Kiev, in the then Ukrainian Soviet republic, Lobanovsky turned Dynamo Kiev into a team of remarkable skill and talent, climaxing first when, with a superb display of cultured football, they beat Ferencvaros of Hungary in the 1975 European Cup winners Cup final, the first Soviet team to win a major European competition, and chosen almost en bloc to represent the Soviet Union in the European Championship and World Cups.
Before Ukraine obtained independence, there was bitter rivalry between Dynamo Kiev and their Muscovite opponents. But Lobanovsky rose above such conflicts. "My habit," he said, "is to distance myself from non-sports situations. When I prepared my players for an important match, I never told them that they had to win at all costs because they were playing a Moscow team. If the players will not give of their best in a match of that kind, they can't hope to win."
On the first occasion he took the Soviet Union to the World Cup, stepping in at short notice for the unsuccessful coach Malafaev, Lobanovsky filled the team with his Kiev players, and led them to an honourable tournament in Mexico, where they were, surprisingly, beaten by Belgium.
With perestroika, however, it at last became possible for star Soviet players to go abroad and earn the kind of money they had never dreamed of at home, and Dynamo Kiev lost most of their top men to West German and Italian teams. So, by the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy, Lobanovsky, though still in charge at Kiev, had to bring his former players from far and wide. No longer did he have them under his intense control, and the Soviet team had a disappointing tournament.
After this anticlimax, and to some surprise, he then went off to seek his fortune in the Middle East, initially managing the Arab Emirates team. "It was a new challenge," he insisted, "a chance to have a different professional experience, to open up new horizons." But he was sacked in 1994, and moved on to the undistinguished Kuwait team, where, as he admitted, the unpaid players could not even be guaranteed to turn up for training or to play.
Two years later, with eight months still to run on his contract, Lobanovsky was dismissed again, with his team of assistants. Sheik Ahmed Al Fahd wanted to keep him, pointing out that Kuwait still had a chance of qualifying for the Asian Nations Cup. But the ruling commission was implacable, asserting that "Lobanovsky has turned the players into robots. He has killed both entertainment and creativity."
So, in January 1997, older, richer and plumper, Lobanovsky went back at last to Kiev, a club now Ukrainian rather than Soviet, and in deep crisis. Charged by Uefa, the European ruling body, with a crude attempt to bribe the Spanish referee Laez Nieto, they had been thrown out of European competition (though the club was subsequently amnestied). Violent incidents had beset officials, and the team was struggling to assert itself.
Lobanovsky quickly showed he had lost none of his old touch. When it was said to him that the team had fallen on hard times, he replied that every side had its ups and downs. "But Dynamo lives; it has its traditions, its good foundations, and the potential to set off again to conquer the summits. It also has the will."
Things improved with astounding speed. True to his beliefs, Lobanovsky assembled a team of assistants. Michael Ochemko had a leading administrative role - his father, when manager of Dynamo Kiev, had launched Lobanovsky on his own career as a coach. The two of them travelled extensively.
The days of Oleg Blokhin and the 1970s team were remote, as were the days of Mikhailichenko, Belanov and Zavarov. But now there were new stars, such as the attackers Rebrov and Shevchenko. With Lobanovsky to inspire them, this Dynamo Kiev team bade fair to equal its famous predecessors. By the European Champions Cup of 1997-78, Kiev were not merely champions of Ukraine, but competed strongly against Europe's best, twice humiliating Barcelona.
For Lobanovsky, modern football meant speed and power, and players' technique needed to be of the highest quality. He rejected the term total football, as applied to the brilliant Dutch and West German teams of the mid-1970s, and said that he would never expect, say, a centre-forward to perform the role of a defender, or vice versa. When these players found themselves in such a different position, however, they should be capable of mastering it.
A voracious student of football magazines, match videos and scientific studies, Lobanovsky believed that psychology was as important as the physical side of the game. "I don't just speak of the sporting aspect of things," he declared. "I'm equally inspired by scientific theories, which enable me to plan the training sessions, or by philosophical ideas, which allow me to organise the group of which I have charge. Every manager in the world says that the most difficult thing of all is the leadership of men. They are right, but do they know that reading philosophical works can help us?"
For Lobanovsky, "The time of absolute power and authoritarian decisions seems to me to have gone, and I know that acting on this basis, I can question myself more and, above all, renew my ideas."
In February 1998, he was appointed manager of the Ukrainian national team, in succession to his protegé, Jozef Scabo.
· Valeri Lobanovsky, football coach, born 1939; died May 13 2002
Commenti
Posta un commento