Ukraine’s soccer season, one of the longest in the world, yielded quite a paradoxical result in the end: having become champions ahead of time, Kyiv’s Dynamo twice suffered defeat at home at the hands of its main rival, Donetsk Shakhtar, in the UEFA Cup and the Ukrainian Cup.
On the one hand, there are no reasons to doubt that Dynamo’s championship is natural. Coached by Yuri Semin, the team has covered the tournament distance with confidence, took a large lead over all the rivals, and simultaneously showed solid performance in the European arena. The fact that Dynamo entered the UEFA Cup semi-finals was the team’s greatest international achievement over the past decade. At the same time, the champions lost to Donetsk Shakhtar in the crucial games for the right to play in the European final, and later in the final of the Ukrainian Cup. In May 2009 Shakhtar proved convincingly that it is Ukraine’s strongest soccer team.
The dramatic duels between our leading soccer teams, in which Shakhtar won in the last minutes of the game, indicate Shakhtar’s strength rather than Dynamo’s weakness. Shakhtar’s coach Mircea Lucescu succeeded in bringing the team to its best condition at a time when it can win the European club trophy.
Shakhtar has been persistently pursuing this aim for a long time. After becoming an equal rival to Dynamo in the late 1990s, the permanent leader of Ukrainian soccer, Shakhtar has been reaching ever higher positions. It should not be forgotten that the Donetsk team began the current season as Ukraine’s champion, the winner of the Ukrainian Champions Cup and Ukraine’s Supercup.
Having focused on achieving international success since last autumn, Shakhtar has blown the first half of the championship tournament. But the victory over Dynamo in late November proved that there is no crisis in the team. The powerful spring acceleration enabled the players of Shakhtar to make nearly a complete comeback and enter the previously unheard-of level — the final of the UEFA Cup.
On April 30 everything was still up in the air. The leadership at the beginning of the semi-final duel in the UEFA Cup belonged to Dynamo: the Kyivites took the lead at home after the first half, and it seemed that they were able to develop their success. The missed goal at the end of the game in Kyiv could seem accidental, but Shakhtar strongly stepped up its performance and prevented Dynamo from taking over the initiative.
What was the cause behind the Donetsk squad’s advantage? Above all, it was the well-balanced lineup: in all three games against Dynamo the outcome of the game was decided by players who substituted the starters. In the games of the UEFA Cup Brazilian Willian made two efficient passes, and in the semi-final of the Ukrainian Premier League the victorious goal was scored by Polish Mariusz Lewandowski.
As it turned out, Dynamo had no player to step up the team’s production. Having chosen the tactics of a stable starting lineup, the Kyivites’ coach Yuri Semin succeeded in getting his team going, and it secured victories. But when in the spring the main players started to drop out of the lineup because of injuries, he did not manage to find good substitutes. Defender Pape Diakhat was the first one who went down with an injury, followed by defender Taras Mykhalyk and forward Artem Kravets. Injured Oleh Husev and Carlos Corr a were unable to reach their prior level of performance.
One cannot blame Dynamo’s players who have remained in the lineup: they put in all they had to win the games. But their efforts were not enough. It was already in the UEFA Cup quarter-final in a game against Paris Saint-Germain that their tired legs began to tell. It is not accidental that immediately after the victory over PSG, Dynamo suffered a defeat in Kryvy Rih from the local team Kryvbas.
The gold in the Ukrainian Premier League that Dynamo has won after a year-long break cannot but please its admirers, all the more so that the first place in the championship has automatically made the team a participant of the UEFA Champions League in the next season. At the same time, international success is a top priority for the club’s management. The fact that another Ukrainian team prevented Dynamo from making the next step toward European success leads to certain conclusions.
One of the conclusions is that the team’s rivals in Ukraine’s championship were not weaker than its opponents in the UEFA Cup. Dynamo’s difficult games in the UEFA round of 16 against Kharkiv’s Metalist and the recent defeat from Shakhtar indicate, in particular, that it is even more honorable to take the lead over these teams in our long championship tournament.
Let us congratulate Dynamo with winning the title of Ukraine’s champions and Shakhar with reaching the final of the UEFA Cup. We will wait for the final game of the Ukrainian Cup between Shakhtar and Vorskla. Our soccer has a worthy champion, and it, in its turn, has no-less-worthy rivals.
