Is it easy to play against someone like yourself? This question has arisen for the second time this year. It did for the first time in February-March, when our everlasting champion played a Champions League match versus the everlasting champion of Norway. The Dynamo-Rosenborg game ended then in our favor, with the Ukrainians gaining superiority calmly and confidently with minimal effort. Perhaps this was the reason why there was no special fear before the Norway-Ukraine world championship qualifier. We saw this Norwegian squad at the Euro-2000, where even the mindless goal the Spanish themselves organized did not help the Scandinavians at least get out of the group.
Arguments about Norway’s leading soccer players on foreign squads is no longer convincing: our transferred stars are by no means in Mariupol. The way the Norwegians played made a stable impression: they are diligent, well-disciplined, mobile, and primitive. The Norwegian champion, Rosenborg, and the national team achieve success, painstakingly repeating the same moves and literally forcing their rivals to make mistakes in their favor. We play the same way, so Ukraine could expect at least a draw in Oslo.
Today’s national team of Ukraine, in fact a modified copy of Kyiv Dynamo, repeats, step by step, all the movements of its parent. In the international game of this fall, Dynamo prefers to sit out in defense in the first half and then, in the second half, tries to outrun the tired rivals. The national team does the same. In the case of Norway, Valery Lobanovsky’s new tactic, even in the absence of Lobanovsky himself, worked at its best. Having calmly rebuffed all Norwegian attacks in the first half, our boys gained considerable superiority in the second half by launching counterattacks. What they almost failed to do in Yerevan they displayed wonderfully in Oslo.
This is why our national team was marking time in the first half, leaving us complacent. However, no one knows what would have happened if the hosts had seized at least one of half a dozen goal chances created by our fullbacks. But the goal was guarded by Shovkovsky, the goalkeeper we have begun to forget about after last year’s unjust criticism. Our guard not only made many a save and repelled all shots, but also managed to instill calmness and confidence in our squad. The Ukrainian fullbacks were not nervous, as they were in Yerevan or Kyiv against the Poles, but played smoothly, allowing Solskjaer, who sits on the Manchester United substitution bench almost all the time, to run and jump to his heart’s content. It is Solskjaer and Flo, the Norwegian substitute in he second half, who were referred to as attacking stars capable of scoring and leading their side to victory. Solskjaer and Flo maybe stars all right, but when Andriy Shevchenko is on the pitch, only one player can be called a star.
Shevchenko seemed to do his duty, i.e., to score the winning goal somewhat nonchalantly as if he were a grownup uncle who came out into the school yard to show the youngsters how to shoot at the goal. Of course, it was not in fact so. Shevchenko, together with other Ukrainians, was moving intelligently across the pitch, robbing his rivals of the ball, making passes: in a word, he worked the way he was supposed to. But there is no denying he hit his goal on the first attempt, as befits a true master! While, on the opposite side, Solskjaer was training Shovkovsky, our grand master of attack only made two barely visible motions, leaving the whole Norwegian defense line, including the goalie, no option but to applaud to Shevchenko’s virtuosity.
We have not yet properly appreciated Shevchenko’s score of Italian goals. Each goal in Italy is an exploit for a forward because only soccer geniuses, few and far between, can regularly do so there. We should not feel embarrassed and must admit that Ukraine’s national team has a soccer genius whose talent and mastery is in no way inferior and in some ways even superior to that of famous soccer idols. Not a single country of Europe now has a forward like Shevchenko, and precisely this gives Ukraine a chance to go at long last through the elimination tournament and to show the soccer world of 2002 our superstar in all his splendor. There is no doubt that the next few years of the European and, hence, world soccer will pass under the sign of Andriy Shevchenko.
There are soccer stars who stand no chance of winning anything as part of their national teams. Not all were lucky enough to be born a Brazilian, German, Frenchman, or Italian and regularly contest world and European cups. Today, we can put the question precisely like this: is Ukraine worthy of its soccer leader and will the team and the prominent player be able to help each other? Shevchenko can lead Ukraine into the world championship finals, while Ukraine can give Shevchenko a chance to go down in soccer history and stand in one line with such players as Pele, Mueller, Maradona, and Zidane. All these players were world champions: you cannot enter the list of the very best without this title.
The reader is certain to say that I am laying it on thick, that no sooner had Shevchenko scored four goals against the Poles, Armenians, and Norwegians did I tip him as a world champion. But what has scored the much-praised English dandy Beckham over these four days? Did he help his national team overcome the Germans and Finns? Shevchenko still has plenty of time ahead of him to advertise sartorial finery for big money. His chance lies now in Ukrainian national team, which has been playing its latest games, for some reason, in Europe’s longest shorts. Is this a fashion or just superstition? We should not laugh at soccer players’ superstitions. Andriy Shevchenko’s chance is also our chance. The grand master level chess game, drawn up for our team by Lobanovsky, with the queen in the person of Shevchenko, ended in a convincing checkmate for the team of Norway, previously tipped as the main favorite in our group. Now the Poles are the favorites (they stumbled over Wales last Wednesday with a score 0 to 0). But Shevchenko had already scored against the Poles, while we could do well not to repeat mindless mistakes in the defense line.
Should we not thank the team of Ukraine for the good mood in which our soccer aficionados will spend the winter? Let us analyze now the numerous shortcomings in the performance of our main team. The coaches, who saw everything themselves, have the time to do this. New Champions League fixtures are on the way to our leading clubs. Then we can turn our eyes on the national championship again. A country that has given the soccer world Andriy Shevchenko should not content itself with such a poor championship. But all this will occur later. And today, our congratulations and gratitude go to the national team of Ukraine for inspiring us with a hope to see good soccer and victories to boot.
