Four hours of playtime proved insufficient for Kyiv Dynamo players to score at least one goal in their Champions League home matches this year. The scoreless draws in the starting game versus Crvena Zvezda and the next one against Manchester United could not but raise preoccupation. There was still no result even though the club seemed to be training to schedule and the championship of Ukraine had been suspended for almost a month to allow our boys to play in the Eurocups.
Dynamo promised to win the home match against their group’s weakest team, Brussels’ Anderlecht. Indeed, if Manchester United, almost beaten by our side, had scored five goals against the Belgians at home, so it seemed quite realistic to score at least one goal in Kyiv.
For one reason or another, the Ukrainian capital’s Olympic Stadium grandstands were barely one-third full. It turned out that the organizers somewhat overestimated Kyivans’ devotion to their home team. With due account of all the affection for our champion, very few could afford to pay sixty hryvnias for a central-sector ticket. Which is better — a half-empty stadium and expensive tickets or a chock-full stadium and cheap tickets? Obviously, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but this time spectators and organizers had somewhat different ideas of where that golden mean might be. And, taking into account Dynamo’s tactics in its most recent international matches, tickets can be sold separately for the first (incidentally, the first half of the game vs. Anderlecht in fact answered the Kyivans’ coach, Puzach, why so few tickets were sold for this match — Ed.) and second halves.
We saw for the second time in one week the Kyiv team deliberately playing at a slow pace in the first half. This may be done to make sure that the squad will keep up its physical advantage to the end of the game. Moreover, the Belgians played their fourth game in ten days, while for our boys it was only the second. In addition, the visitors’ leaders, Staelens and Koller, are by no means rugged enough to maintain a high pace of the game throughout all ninety minutes. To build confidence, Dynamo played on the fans’ nerves for another forty five minutes. The overall scoreless period of the Kyivans’ Champions League home matches was going on for four hours. Khatskevych, who has been lately venturing to shoot at the goal, was missing from the pitch, while our forwards seemed somehow stiff.
After Dynamo had put in Laslo Bodnar in the second half, he began to play in a characteristic style of Luzhny, which contributed to dangerous moments near the weary visitors’ goal. While in the first half the Kyivans showed a slack pace in response to the Belgians’ attempts to mark time, now our halfbacks were clearly outdoing their rivals. All they had to do was to hit the Anderlecht goal area, which our players only managed to do once (!) from a free kick.
Valery Lobanovsky’s propensity to turning center forwards into defense line players helped the team this time. Andriy Husyn, formerly the striker in Lviv’s Karpaty and a Kyiv bench warmer, did what all our forwards had failed to do in four hours on end: the score became 1 to 0!
Everybody saw the Kyivans’ final triumph in the match versus Anderlecht. This inspires the hope that the goals kicked in the last minutes practically without any hindrance will help our forwards regain confidence and come up to the expectations of the coaches who believe in the abilities of Maksym Shatskykh and especially Heorhy Demetradze. Nonetheless, Dynamo’s unexpected rise to second place in the group after the third round should not dazzle anyone: they are still to play two not-so-easy away matches and a home game versus PSV which beat Manchester United in Eindhoven 3 to 1, in quite real terms. It is too early as well to write off Anderlecht as a loser. Let us remember the first half of the Kyiv game, when the Belgians were short of a few centimeters to open the score.
We do not know if fast and forceful play in two, not one, halves is in the plans of our Dynamo coaches. For we can only hope for a Champions League success if we play the way we did in the second half of the matches versus Manchester United and Anderlecht. This will in turn attract spectators to Kyiv’s Olympic Stadium.
