Artem Chobanian
Eastern European football invades the Western European giants’ territory from time to time, and disproves their invincibility. The recent UEFA Cup and the Champions League results have shown how much the clubs of the former USSR republics have progressed. BATE managed to draw against Juventus home and away, and CSKA Moscow smashed their opponents in the UEFA Cup group stage scoring 12 goals in four matches. Can Russian and Ukrainian clubs really claim the UEFA Cup for the second successive season?
If Metalist Kharkiv’s performance in the UEFA Cup can be called wonderful and even magical, then Dynamo Kyiv and Shakhtar Donetsk were simply unlucky not to get second place in their Champions League groups.
Of course, Metalist deserved what they got. After last year’s defeat at the hands of English side Everton, the Ukrainian team acquired lots of experience and bought some quality players. After a bleak draw against Hertha Berlin at home nobody was sure Metalist would make it out of the group. Even the Ukrainian and local Kharkiv bookmakers didn’t believe in the club’s chances. Everything changed after the second match against Galatasaray in Istanbul where Metalist won 1-0, and showed their success in the previous round against Besiktas had not been just whim of fortune.
The Kharkiv team then gave no chances to Greeks Olympiacos at home and won that game too 1-0, securing at least second place in the group. In the following matches Metalist will have a difficult lot because they will most likely face strong opponents again. Among the teams that will most probably challenge the Ukrainians are Schalke, Sevilla, Ajax, Paris SG, Stuttgart, Racing Santander, Sampdoria, Aston Villa, Valencia, Zenit and Fiorentina. Do Metalist have a chance against these clubs? Possibly. No matter how well the Ukrainians played and how confident their victories were, such teams as the above mentioned ones would all underestimate them. Now all football pundits are sure Metalist can go further than the last 16 stage, but everything will depend entirely on the players of the team.
Two other Ukrainian clubs that will play in the UEFA Cup are Dynamo Kyiv and Shakhtar Donetsk. In a recent interview the president of Dynamo, Ihor Surkis, stated that his team would get to the final of the competition if they played the way their coach Yuri Semin asked them to. Semin has proved he is a genius coach after his brilliant tactics which comprised young footballers as the core of the team and only some of the experienced ones supporting them. Young talents showed how much they were willing to play and win despite the caliber of their opponents. The games in the Champions League group stage showed how good the team was.
Of course, there’s a disease that has affected both Dynamo and Shakhtar in European competition: they cannot keep a clean sheet during the last five to seven minutes of the game. That became a disaster and Dynamo spoilt a very good Champions League campaign with the two goals conceded to Arsenal and Porto. What is good in all this is that the players didn’t lose their heads after that and defeated Fenerbahce with the confidence of a team that deserves to play at the highest level. Semin is slowly doing what Arsene Wenger has done at the Gunners: gathering very good young players and trying to make them professionals that will bring fame to the club and glorify their own names. Well, time will show if the youngsters from Dynamo are as good as their counterparts from Arsenal.
Shakhtar Donetsk are the lifelong losers. Even in the times of the Soviet Union the team played wonderfully but showed no great results almost constantly losing to the clubs like Dynamo Kyiv, Spartak Moscow and Torpedo Moscow amongst others. Now, in the new history of the club the team experiences some sort of déjà vu. There’s a saying: history repeats itself. Somehow history decided to repeat itself only with Shakhtar and in some sort of distorted way. No other team has been as unlucky as the club from Donetsk this season. Look what they have: one of the best coaches in the world Mirca Luchescu, 90% of the players that are always summoned to the national squad and almost unlimited financial backing from Rinat Ahmetov, which is very important nowadays.
So what is the team lacking? Nobody knows. It’s some kind of curse or spell that hovers over the club. Recalling the Champions League matches of this season we can say that Shakhtar were better than Sporting Lisbon and Barcelona, but didn’t manage to get at least a point in those games. Why was that? Here, in Ukraine, people cannot find suitable words to describe that bad luck: no epithets can express properly the way Shakhtar supporters feel. Rinat Ahmetov, a billionaire and the owner of the club, stated they have to wait for the damnation to disappear. The recent talks about Mirca Luchescu’s possible dismissal are true – Rinat Ahmetov has said in numerous interviews that the Romanian coach will work until the end of the year and then the club will be looking for a new candidate for the position.
As for Shakhtar’s chances in the UEFA Cup, they are quite high. The Ukrainian side usually play very well against any European team and do not have Dynamo’s Italian/British problem. The only hope here is that the Ukrainian clubs will not have to play against each other.
There are two teams that are without doubt among the major challengers for the UEFA Cup – CSKA Moscow and Zenit Saint Petersburg.
Three years ago CSKA won the trophy defeating Sporting Lisbon brilliantly in the final at their home ground in Portugal. After that the club has not had any serious achievements so far. However, the last (already the last) season of the Russian Premier League showed how powerful the team was and still is. Coach Valeryi Gazzaev managed to guide the team to wins over Deportivo, Feyenoord, Nancy and Lech Poznan in the group stage. When asked about the form of his team, Gazzaev said he had tried to time the peak of his players’ form. CSKA not only performed well in the UEFA Cup but also kept that form going for the end of the Premier League season. The team looked impressive and the players just defeated one club after another.
After the end of the Russian season Gazzaev said that fears of losing form are groundless. The players will have some rest before and after the New Year, but then they will have a tight schedule: training sessions will be in Turkey and then Israel, where the club will compete in the First Channel Cup where the opponents will be the best Ukrainian and Russian clubs. If the team do not suffer burn out, Gazzaev and his squad have a great chance to win the cup.
Zenit St. Petersburg… so many articles have been written about this club all over Europe that it’s almost impossible to add something new. The latest news is that the captain Anatoly Tymoschuk is interested in his transfer to Bayern Munich. Will that be the transfer of the winter? Perhaps so if the bosses of Zenit allow the Ukrainian midfielder to leave.
The first impression of Zenit’s performance in the Champions League was negative. But there’s a simple explanation: the team have been playing a series of extremely difficult matches starting from late February! Firstly, European matches, then the start of the Russian League, after that many players took part in the Euros in the summer, and later the Champions League. No team can bear such a burden! That’s why in the Champions League games Zenit’s players simply looked tired of football. They ran and gave passes, but there was no imagination and creativity in their play. Dick Advocaat, as much as Mirca Luchescu at Shakhtar, was risking his position, but he is safe now. Zenit supporters are sure the club will gain success in the next round, but clubs from the former USSR are not stable in terms of consistency and that’s why the football pundits do not believe the former Russian champions will repeat their triumph of 2008.
What are Spartak Moscow’s chances here? Almost nobody amongst the pundits and supporters believe Spartak will gain something in the next round, if they make it. The club from Moscow need some dramatic changes and even coach Michael Laudrup cannot save the prestige of the team if they leave everything the way it is now.
Ukrainian and Russian bookmakers accept stakes on all six teams: Zenit, CSKA, Spartak, Dynamo, Shakhtar and Metalist. The odds vary, but the majority of Ukrainian bookmakers estimate the chances of CSKA and Dynamo higher than the rest of the clubs with Spartak being the last in the ranking.
Time will show how much the Eastern European clubs are ready to bring the UEFA Cup back to the East.
