Lobanovsky forever: remembering the great Dynamo player

On 6 January, 85 years ago, the legendary player and coach of Dynamo Kyiv Valeriy Lobanovsky (1939-2002) was born, under whose leadership our players achieved the greatest success in the club's history.

They say that you can see the great ones better from a distance - if so, then every year we see more and more of Valery Vasilyevich's personality and significance.

He could have chosen his future profession and would undoubtedly have been successful in any of them. He could have gone into management, like his father, Vasyl Lobanovskyi, who worked at the Kyiv Mill Plant, and Valerii's brother, Yevhen, later found himself in this industry. The future footballer's maternal uncle, Oleksandr Boichenko, was a writer and party activist. The Lobanovsky family had scientists, doctors, and teachers.

And he wanted to play football. Valerii Lobanovskyi, from an intelligent and respected family in Kyiv, fell in love with the game irrationally, although he was generally more of a mathematical mind. And as a result, he got to know football from the inside, learned to understand all the intricacies of the game.

But what did Ukrainian children who lived through the war have to do? What kind of entertainment was available? Football, with its always-filled central stadium and the Dynamo Kyiv team, which was actually more than a team for the Ukrainian SSR, became Lobanovsky's passion and his life's work.

Valerii started playing at the Football School for Youth, where his first coaches, Mykola Chaika and Mykhailo Korsunskyi, believed in the young striker's promise. Their generation is unique. They are all the same age, the same age - Viktor Kanevskyi and Andrii Biba, Valerii Lobanovskyi, Oleh Bazylevych, Valentyn Troianovskyi - and they have become part of the main team of Dynamo Kyiv.

We used to take a lot of things for granted. Where did a whole generation of talented players come from in Kyiv, which had just been rebuilt after the terrible war destruction? How did they learn to play in such a way that in the 1960s they became the best in the world's largest country?

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

How do we understand the wonderful coach Oshchenkov, who decided to carry out a painful process of generational change and introduce yesterday's ambitious understudies into the game? He was forced to do so by the passage of time and also by circumstances. Because the youth football school has produced a whole galaxy of young players. And it is a coach's happiness to be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of a harvest that takes a long time to ripen.

Ozhenkov was not so lucky. It was Oleh Oleksandrovych who introduced excellent youngsters to the main squad, but Lobanovskyi, Bazylevych, Kanevskyi, Biba, Anufrienko played under his successors. Solovyov was lucky, as Valerii Vasylovych would say very aptly later: "He was undoubtedly not only an outstanding footballer, but also a person: we were all very lucky, including him, that he came to Kyiv - he managed to reveal his talent here. Not every good, thoughtful coach manages to get into "his" team to fulfil himself. Vyacheslav Dmytrovych succeeded - 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. The year 1961, when all trophies were registered in the Ukrainian SSR, was a turning point for the Soviet championship - from then on, and forever, Ukrainian teams became trendsetters here. And when Viktor Maslov, a tireless football revolutionary, put the finishing touches on a great team, a superclub appeared in Kyiv.

Valeriy Lobanovskiy showed when he was still a player that his defining feature was his ability and willingness to learn. Many people believed that the fast left winger could play the highly prestigious position of centre forward. At the time when Lobanovskyi played, there was a big debate in the press about this, but Viktor Maslov remained of the same opinion - and the player left the team. While still a player, he entered the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. He graduated from Odesa Polytechnic.

Playing mainly as a winger, he played 149 matches for Dynamo, scoring 42 goals. He became a champion and winner of the USSR Cup. He managed to make his debut in the national team, where, even with the competition of the time, he clearly deserved a better fate. He spent the rest of his career at Chornomorets and Shakhtar, but was already thinking about coaching. Valerii finished his playing career at the age of 29.

He and Oleh Bazylevych were not only a well-coordinated attacking unit, but also like-minded in terms of the game's development prospects. When they were enrolling in coaching courses and taking over their first teams, they agreed to join forces and create in tandem at the first opportunity. When Lobanovskyi, after his success at Dnipro, received an invitation to take over at Dynamo Kyiv, he called Oleh Petrovych, and the latter decided to leave Shakhtar Donetsk for the sake of the joint work they had dreamed of.

Innovative coaches were strikingly different from the coaching establishment of the time. They were "white crows" and were not afraid to be so. Thanks to Mykhailo Oshemkov, who was a fine connoisseur of foreign languages, they obtained video recordings of foreign matches and collected all the information from the foreign football press. That's why they were modern. The football of Lobanovskyi and Bazylevych was advanced even against the European background. The total football that prevailed in Germany or the Netherlands was actually developing in the USSR at the same time. And this was under the Iron Curtain! This is a real feat of the Dynamo Kyiv coaching staff.

From the late autumn of 1973, when they were entrusted with the most difficult job in Ukraine, the tandem team paved the way for European success. "Dynamo won domestic trophies, then became the first team from the Soviet Union to win the European Cup and Super Cup. Oleh Blokhin, as the embodiment of Dynamo football, won the Ballon d'Or from France Football. It was the moment of Lobanovskyi and Bazylevych's highest rise and authority. They were ready to be entrusted with the national team, the reform of the championship with the transition to the autumn-spring scheme was even experimentally implemented. It is a pity that the officials did not see the depths of the great football thinkers' plan behind the petty current results. And they were many years ahead of the curve - in Ukraine, this was realised only after a decade and a half, in other post-Soviet republics - after almost four

Lobanovsky faced retrogression and pettiness of his surroundings. His successes - bronze medals at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 and the quarter-finals of Euro 76 - were crushed by his enemies into failures. And the elimination from the quarter-finals of the Champions Cup was used to attempt a "small-town coup", which resulted in the tandem's break-up and slowed down the rapid development of a football project with a great future.

But the greatness of Lobanovsky is that he thought, analysed and did not stand still. "Undercover games" made him stronger. In 11 years, he brought a "star team" into the championship orbit. Even foreign experts called the football played by Dynamo Kyiv and the USSR national team in the second half of the 1980s exemplary and ahead of its time. But not some locals...

Vice-champions of Europe in 1988, Soviet footballers of that generation were the first to be released abroad. The high standard of Soviet football, for which Dynamo Kyiv worked, allowed many to try their hand at the West. Who took advantage of it and who didn't is another 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. Italian Inter, West German Hamburg and Spanish Valladolid were also interested in Lobanovskyi. But the circumstances were such that he did not receive an invitation worthy of himself at that time.

"I wanted to work exclusively with national teams, and such an offer came only from the Emirates. So I had no choice," VVL later explained. In 1990, he took charge of the UAE national team and later worked with the Kuwaiti national team. But it so happened that in the Emirates, the famous European coach faced the unreadiness of local players to become professional, and in Kuwait he was faced with an insurmountable circumstance - the outbreak of war, when, as you know, there was no time for football. Nevertheless, Valery Vasilyevich and his team won bronze medals at the 1994 Asian Games. And a few years after his departure, the system he had laid down worked - and the two national teams met in matches at the highest continental level.

They tried to bring him back to Ukraine more than once, but the coach, bound by contractual obligations, was able to return only on 20 November 1996. He found a team with a good selection of players, which could not realise its full potential and was eliminated from European competitions by modest opponents - but the following year, these guys defended an honourable draw with the current European champions, the Germans, and also defeated Barcelona.

And today, there is a clear conviction that the Champions League semi-finals were not the limit of the third "star team", just as the play-offs were not the limit of the then Ukrainian national team. Lobanovskyi 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 Valerii Lobanovskyi's Dynamo would have been like with legionnaires, with a more competitive domestic championship, with a championship path in European competitions...

But one thing is clear even now, years later - he was really ahead of his time, and football has followed the evolutionary path he envisaged. "Only a thinking, analysing player can be successful in modern football. And a 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 to a coach."

Valerii Lobanovskyi - player

1960 - silver medallist of the USSR Championship

1961 - USSR champion

1964 - winner of the USSR Cup

Valerii Lobanovskyi - coach

1973 - silver medallist of the USSR Championship
1974 - USSR champion
1974 - winner of the USSR Cup
1975 - USSR champion
1975 - winner of the European Cup Winners' Cup
1975 - winner of the European Super Cup
1976 - silver medallist of the USSR Championship
1976 - bronze medallist of the Olympic Games
1977 - USSR champion
1978 - silver medallist of the USSR Championship
1978 - winner of the USSR Cup
1979 - bronze medallist of the USSR Championship
1980 - USSR champion
1981 - USSR champion
1982 - silver medallist of the USSR Championship
1982 - winner of the USSR Cup
1985 - USSR champion
1985 - 1986 - USSR Cup winner
1986 - USSR champion
1986 - European Cup Winners' Cup winner
1987 - USSR Cup winner
1988 - USSR Championship silver medallist
1988 - Vicechampion of the European Championship
1989 - bronze medallist of the USSR Championship
1990 - champion of the USSR
1990 - winner of the USSR Cup
1997 - champion of Ukraine
1998 - champion of Ukraine
1998 - winner of the Cup of Ukraine
1999 - champion of of Ukraine
1999 - winner of the Ukrainian Cup
2000 - champion of Ukraine
2000 - winner of the Ukrainian Cup
2001 - champion of Ukraine
2002 - silver medallist of the Ukrainian Championship

The second titled coach in the history of world football. The most titled football coach of the 20th century.