Lobanovsky forever: we remember the great Dynamo player (Jan. 6, 2023)

On January 6, 84 years ago, the legendary Dynamo Kyiv player and mentor Valery Lobanovsky (1939-2002) was born, under whose leadership our players achieved the greatest success in the history of the club.

Valery Lobanovsky

They say that the great ones are better seen from a distance - if so, then every year the figure and significance of Valery Vasilyevich is revealed to us more and more.

He could choose his future profession and, undoubtedly, he would be successful in each. He could have become a manager, just like his father, Vasily Mikhailovich Lobanovsky, worked at the Kyiv Mill, and later Valery's brother, Yevgeny, also ended up in this area. The uncle of the future football player by mother, Alexander Boychenko, was a writer and party leader. The Lobanovsky family had scientists, doctors, teachers.

And he wanted to play football. Valery Lobanovsky, from an intelligent and respected Kyiv family, fell in love with this game irrationally, although in general he was more of a mathematical warehouse of intellect. And as a result, I saw football from the inside, learned to understand all the subtleties of the game.

But what happened to Ukrainian children who survived the war hard times? What kind of entertainment existed? Football, with the central stadium always full and the Dynamo (Kyiv) team, which in fact was more than a team for the Ukrainian SSR, became Lobanovsky's passion and his life's work.

Valery started playing at the Youth Football School, where his first coaches, Nikolai Chaika and Mikhail Korsunsky, believed in the young striker's potential. Their generation is unique. Plus or minus peers, peers - Viktor Kanevsky and Andriy Biba, Valery Lobanovsky, Oleg Bazilevich, Valentin Troyanovsky - amicably entered the main team of Dynamo Kyiv.

We tend to take a lot of things for granted. Where did a whole generation of talented players come from in Kyiv, which had just rebuilt after the terrible military destruction? How did it learn to play in such a way that already in the 60s it became the best in the largest country in the world by territory?

There are answers to these questions, sometimes obvious, and sometimes incomprehensible.

How to understand the wonderful coach Oshenkov, who decided to carry out the painful process of changing generations and bring yesterday's ambitious doubles into the game? He was forced to this by the passage of time, and also by circumstances. Because the youth football school has produced a whole galaxy of young players. And this is the happiness of the coach - to be in time in his place to take advantage of the harvest, which is ripening for a long time.

Oshenkov was not lucky. It was Oleg Alexandrovich who introduced wonderful young people to the main team, but Lobanovsky, Bazilevich, Kanevsky, Biba, Anufrienko began to play already under his successors. Solovyov succeeded, Valery Vasilievich will say very accurately later: “He, of course, was not only an outstanding football player, but also a person: we all, including him, were very lucky that he came to Kyiv - he managed to reveal his talent. Not every good thoughtful coach manages to get into "their" team in order to be realized. Vyacheslav Dmitrievich succeeded in this - I consider him one of my teachers.

It was under this head coach that Dynamo broke the hegemony of Moscow clubs and became the champion of the USSR for the first time in the history of Ukrainian football. 1961, when all trophies were registered in the Ukrainian SSR, was a turning point for the Soviet championship - from now on and forever Ukrainian teams have become trendsetters here. And when Viktor Maslov, the tireless revolutionary of football, put the finishing touches on a wonderful team, a superclub appeared in Kyiv.

Valery Lobanovsky, while still a player, showed that his distinguishing feature is his ability and willingness to learn. Many believed that the swift left winger could play in the ultra-prestigious center forward position. At the time when Lobanovsky played, there was a big controversy in the press, but Viktor Maslov remained of his opinion - and the player left the team, unlike most other then football players, Lobanovsky chose a non-physical specialty. While still a player, he entered the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. He graduated from the Odessa Polytechnic.

Playing mainly as an extreme forward, he played 149 matches for Dynamo, scoring 42 goals. He became the champion and winner of the USSR Cup. He managed to make his debut in the national team, where, even with the then competition, he clearly deserved a better fate. He spent the rest of his career at Chornomorets and Shakhtar, but was already thinking about coaching. Valery Vasilyevich completed the performance of the player at the age of 29.

He and Oleg Bazilevich were not only a team played in attack, but also like-minded people in terms of the prospects for the development of the game. Entering coaching courses, taking on their first teams, we agreed at the first opportunity to join forces and create in tandem. When Lobanovsky, after successes in Dnepr, received an invitation to accept Dynamo Kiev, he called Oleg Petrovich, and he decided to leave Shakhtar Donetsk for the sake of the joint work that they so dreamed of.

Innovative coaches were strikingly different from the then coaching establishment. They were "white crows" and were not afraid to be. Through a connoisseur of foreign languages, Mikhail Oshemkov, they received videos of foreign matches, collected all the information from the foreign football press. Therefore, they were modern. The football of Lobanovsky and Bazilevich was advanced even against the European background. The total football that reigned in Germany or the Netherlands was actually developing simultaneously in the USSR. And this is under the condition of the "Iron Curtain"! This is a real feat of the Dynamo (Kyiv) coaching staff.

Since the late autumn of 1973, when they were entrusted with the hardest work in Ukraine, the tandem team paved the way for European success. Dynamo won home trophies, then - the first from the Soviet Union - won the Cup Winners' Cup and the European Super Cup. Oleg Blokhin, as the embodiment of Dynamo football, won the Golden Ball from France Football. It was the moment of the highest rise and authority of Lobanovsky and Bazilevich. They were ready to be entrusted with the national team, justified by them, as ideologists, the reform of the championship with the transition to the “autumn-spring” scheme even received an experimental implementation. Alas, behind the petty current results, the bureaucracy did not see the depth of the idea of great football thinkers. They were ahead of thought by many years - in Ukraine this was understood only after a decade and a half, in some other post-Soviet republics - after almost four ...

Lobanovsky faced retrograde and pettiness of the environment. His successes - the bronze medals of the 1976 Montreal Olympics and the quarter-finals of Euro 76 - were crushed by enemies to failure. And the departure from the quarterfinals of the Champions Cup was used to attempt a "small-town coup", as a result of which the tandem broke up and the rapid development of a football project with a great future was somewhat slowed down.

But the greatness of Lobanovsky is that he thought, analyzed and did not stiffen. "Backstage games" made him stronger. After 11 years, he brought the “star team” into the championship orbit. Football, which was demonstrated by the teams of Dynamo Kyiv and the USSR national team in the second half of the 80s, was called exemplary and ahead of time even by foreign experts. But not some local...

Vice-champions of Europe in 1988, Soviet football players of that generation were the first to be released abroad. The high brand of Soviet football, for which Dynamo Kiev worked, allowed many to try their hand at the West. Someone took advantage of it, someone did not - that's a different matter. And what a pity that Valery Lobanovsky himself did not get such a chance. And there were options: Juventus considered the possibility of acquiring not only Zavarov, but also Mikhailichenko and Protasov, provided that Valery Vasilyevich was the head coach. The Italian Inter, the West German Hamburg, the Spanish Valladolid were interested in Lobanovsky. But the circumstances were such that he did not receive a worthy invitation at that time.

“I wanted to work exclusively with national teams, and such an offer came only from the Emirates. Therefore, I didn’t have to choose, ”VVL later explained. In 1990, he led the UAE national team, and later worked with the national team of Kuwait. But it so happened that in the Emirates, the famous European coach faced the unpreparedness of local players for professionalism, and in Kuwait he faced an insurmountable circumstance - the outbreak of war, when, as you know, there was no time for football anymore. Nevertheless, Valery Vasilievich and his team have bronze medals of the 1994 Asian Games. And already a few years after his departure, the system laid down gave a result - and these two teams met at the highest continental level in matches between themselves.

They tried to return him to Ukraine more than once, but the coach, bound by contractual obligations, was able to return only on November 20, 1996. He found a team with a good selection of players, which could not realize its full potential and flew out of the European Cups from modest rivals - but already in the next year, these guys in the game for the national team defended an honorable draw with the current European champions - the Germans, and also smashed Barcelona .

And today there is a clear conviction that the semi-final of the Champions League was not the limit of the possibilities of the third "star team", just as the performance in the playoffs was not the limit of the then Ukrainian national team. Lobanovsky passed away at the age of 63. This is the time when coaches produce the most mature, most stable results. We can only guess what Valery Vasilyevich's Dynamo would be like with legionnaires, with a competitive domestic championship, with a championship path in European cups...

But one thing is clear even now, years later - he was really ahead of his time, and football went exactly the evolutionary path as he expected. “Only a thinking, analyzing football player is able to be successful in modern football. And the coach must constantly learn - and his views must evolve in sync with the changes that occur as a result of the daily challenges that football poses for the coach "...

Valery Lobanovsky-player

1960 - silver medalist of the USSR championship

1961 - champion of the USSR

1964 - USSR Cup winner

Valery Lobanovsky-coach

1973 - silver medalist of the USSR championship

1974 - champion of the USSR

1974 - USSR Cup winner

1975 - champion of the USSR

1975 - Winner of the European Cup Winners' Cup

1975 - European Super Cup winner

1976 - silver medalist of the USSR championship