Euro 2012: Valeriy Lobanovsky, king of Kiev who was before his time

In his official introduction to Euro 2012 Michel Platini, no doubt already welling up with that peculiar strain of doe-eyed corporate potato love that tends to envelop such occasions, described football as “happiness in its purest form”. It is hard to know exactly what to make of this. Perhaps, you wonder hopefully, Platini only said this by accident or as part of a longer sentence full of mocking, sarcastic caveats. Never mind the fact that happiness is never really pure, always nuanced – least of all in football, which has for generations existed as a kind of manfully-borne affliction – even Platini’s choice of cliche feels old fashioned.

The idea of “pure happiness” seems to belong instead to a previous generation; associated more with the Brazil 1970 ideal of football as a foundling art, a form of polyester-jumpsuited self-expression as preached by disco-Jesus late-period Pelé, and destined to be the subject of a clammy John Motson documentary containing the phrase “Ooooohh and it’s football happiness, pure happy football from these Brazilians, a pure happiness of football out there”.

In fact the football on show at Euro 2012 looks very different to this. The best teams seem intent on producing a kind of elite mathematical wrangle, an intricate manoeuvring for space and time within a few expertly cramped zones of influence. There is still plenty of joy but it is most often an ascetic kind of joy, a systemic pleasure in the exercise of fine craft, physical parity separated by an accumulation of technical and tactical gains.

With this in mind it seems apt that England should find themselves pitted in their final two group matches against opponents who have spent this week training at the Valeriy Lobanovsky Stadium in Kiev, a 20-minute walk from the tournament mothership enormodome that is the Olympic Stadium. The players of Sweden and Ukraine will have passed daily the famous statue of Lobanovsky himself, the legendary manager of Dynamo Kyiv, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. http://www.sellsoccerjerseys.com Cast in bronze, Lobanovsky resembles not so much a cult-ish figure of enduring influence as an inspirational chemistry teacher or a quietly avant garde playwright. Leaning forward, cranium bulging, he is presented in the Soviet style, bestriding the world from his humble park bench.

Make no mistake, though. This is not just another heavy-cast monument to deceased cold war ideology. In fact Lobanovsky-ville with its club museum and low-rise modernist stadium, is a throbbingly current footballing G-spot, with a claim on being the cradle not just of how the game is increasingly played and managed, but also of how it is enjoyed and reported. Lobanovsky’s influence has been brought to wider prominence by informed football writing, notably that of Jonathan Wilson of these pages.

The statue itself is already an object of burgeoning pilgrimage for the cerebral footballing hipster, with his swag-bag of numerical certainties, his cosmopolitan lingua franca. Passing it this week I wondered if I should have left, if not a scarf, then perhaps an iPad, a ketchup-stained dressing gown, or a printout of snarkily eloquent Twitter feed.

It is a lovely thing that an effigy of the deeply likeable Lobanovsky should have evolved into a kind of footballing nerd-Jerusalem. To the childhood observer Lobanovsky first appeared as a touchline fixture at successive tournaments, notable for those solid concrete jowls, the worker’s cap – a little Lenin-ish, a little Lennon-ish – and his unblinking stillness. A decorated colonel in the Red Army and also a winger with Dynamo, he managed his hometown team for 21 years while also building the wonderful USSR teams of 1986 and 1988 around an armature of Kyiv players.

More than this Lobanovsky was a pioneer. He addressed football management as a wide-ranging empirical study, seeking informed scientific deduction above the more nebulous folk-football wisdom of his dugout contemporaries. He sent scouts to compile analysis of opponents, he requisitio Juventus Jerseys 2015 ned a computer from Moscow to crunch his own player performance stats, he made gnomic pronouncements (“There is no such thing as a striker, a midfielder, a defender”) and even staged occasional blindfolded five-a-side games to illustrate theatrically the importance of positioning.

And yet it would be wrong to cast Lobanovsky as a “dry” figure, some clanking Soviet chess computer disdainful of human variation and seeking only the perfect piston-powered kicking foot. Lobanovsky was a product of the Soviet 1950s: a time, as in the West, of progress and technological optimism. For Lobanovsky the distillation of eleven competing blobs on a pulsing pre-modern computer grid appears to have also contained thrilling human variables, an applied chemistry to be grasped by study and fine adjustment.

As recently as the early 1990s this all still seemed fairly alien in English football, an example of extreme cultural variety: the Soviet robot-man with his bleep-box and his team of furrowed zealots. No longer though. Lobanovsky has now effectively won. Guardiola, Mourinho, Allardyce: all modern European managers carry his influence. And the protective sheath of numerical analysis is now a primary tool, not just of tactical tinkering, but of player procurement and the image-fluffing management of defeat. Even more decisively, the Lobanovsky notion of a living human science has affected the way people interpret and appreciate football, dovetailing with the sport’s consumption as an ever-present digital entity.

Once the football reporter alone had ready access, his words providing an interpretative primary source for those not present. But these days everybody has access, or believes (incorrectly)

they have equivalent access through the narrow prism of television. And so something more is required to provide an informed and superior opinion: more facts, more homework, more 2-D study. The nerd has not inherited the earth: instead the super-nerd has, with his chiselled-out numerical revel Cheap Germany Soccer Jersey ations, his unarguable drawings, his studied illuminations.

Naturally there is also opposition to the intrusion of this new wave of analyst, chiefly from those for whom understanding football still rests on the raw — and professionally ring-fenced — necessity of immediate emotional experience. And so spectating has never been so fraught with ideological opposition, the notion of how you’re supposed to look at a football match distilled into bedroom egghead versus intuitive travelling hack, and beyond that into a separate dizzying one-upmanship of competing analysis, egghead-on-egghead action conducted within a frictionless virtual wrestling wring.

This is not an absolute divide by any means. Plenty of Lobanovskyites also experience the game in all its diffuse emotional immediacy. And plenty of old-school professional hacks are also interested in tactics and stats. The Guardian’s own Michael Cox of zonalmarking.net is perhaps the most obvious example of the neophyte tactical eminence. There is undoubtedly a challenging degree of certainty in his pronouncements, but it is impossible not to come round to trusting his all-seeing cyborg voice, to recline comfortably against the ballast of that huge body of accumulated knowledge.

At these championships I have already had a conversation with one weathered football hack which started off alone the lines of “Well, that Zonal Marking fellow, I tell you…” and ended up with the rueful admission, “Although, obviously I look at his stuff all the time, actually it’s remarkably useful, very thorough indeed…”

The mass shared digital response will explode into life once more as Group D levels itself out. A barrage of instant analysis will be on hand. Unknowable multitudes will offer killer stats, number-crunched bugbears, a proselytising personal mini-science. Meanwhile for Lobanovsky, Kiev’s Euro 2012 football beano is in its quiet way a hometown coronation, the silent spectre flickering just out of sight, a ghost at his own feast.