Valeriy Lobanovskyi, the much-loved Dynamo Kyiv soccer player and manager, and the former national coach of both the Soviet team and Ukraine’s national side, has been immortalized with statues, and had streets named in his honor since his death 14 years ago.
Now the sporting legend has been remembered in film, with the release of a 92-minute documentary by director Anton Azarov. The debut offering by Azarov mourns not just the legendary Lobanovskiy, but the times when soccer was something bigger than a game in Ukraine.
The documentary film “Lobanovskyi Forever,” makes wide use of newsreels and footage of Dynamo Kyiv team training, painting a vivid picture of another era, the golden era of Soviet football, when the people of occupied nations found an outlet for repressed patriotism by rooting for local clubs.
Dynamo Kyiv, under the leadership of Lobanovskyi, was a particularly outstanding example.
“This was another epoch,” says poet Yurii Rybchynskyi, a witness of those times, in one scene in the documentary. “The only legal way to express patriotism was football,” he said, noting that people used to come from all corners of the Soviet Union to support Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv.
The documentary includes lots of interviews with former players, colleagues and journalists, testifying to Lobanovskyi’s love of soccer, and the respect he earned as a player and manager. The interviewees include French internationals Michel Platini and Jacques Ferran, along with Artem Frankov, Leonid Kravchuk, Alexey Andronov, Oleg Bazylewicz Jr., Oleg Blokhin, Rinat Dasaev and many others.
Through the footage and interviews, and a narrative that constantly switches from past to present, viewers are given a rare glimpse into the personality of the “rarely smiling” but “extremely concentrated” Lobanovskyi.
“I do not know him, but looking at the way he created the team that was playing against us, I should say he’s a remarkable trainer,” Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer, one of the world’s best professional footballers, once said of the Ukrainian coach.
As one of the fathers of modern soccer, who focused on pushing his team to unprecedented levels of physical performance, understanding the geometry of the pitch when constructing plays and planning strategies for victory, Lobanovskyi’s style has been forever carved into the memories of top world’s coaches.
“Lobanovskyi can be considered one of the greatest football teachers,” said the manager of German club Bayern Munich, Italian Carlo Ancelotti. “There’s always something to learn from such great teachers.”
As a manager, Lobanovskyi led Dynamo Kyiv to victory in the 1975 Cup Winners Cup – the first time a team from the Soviet Union had won a major European trophy. In 1999, again with Dynamo, he reached the semi-finals of the most prestigious European club competition, the Champions’ League.
But apart from winning trophies, and recording impressive statistics in soccer history, Lobanovskyi brought up three generations of football players, raising among others stars like Oleh Blokhin, Andriy Shevchenko, Igor Belanov – all holders of the most prestigious individual annual award in European football, the FIFA Ballon d’Or (Golden Ball).
“(Lobanovskyi) is a phenomenon. He could convey through football to people something just so. He could unite people,” said Andriy Shevchenko, the current coach of Ukraine national football team, who’s still thankful to Lobanovskyi and his training methods, on which he built his own outstanding career. “I’m indebted to Valeriy Vasilyevich for everything.”
Lobanovskyi was inseparable from soccer to the last: preparing a substitution at the end of a match between Dynamo Kyiv and Metalurh Zaporizhzhya in 2002, Lobanovskyi collapsed from a stroke and was taken by ambulance right from the coach’s bench. He passed away at the age of 63.
“To be a coach is much more difficult than to be a player,” Lobanovskyi said during one of his press conferences. “You control the ball on the pitch, but near the track edge, you have to control people.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].
