Dier,Winks and Alli made genuine Madrid peruse broken-down, so why not import them wholesale into the stodgiest England team in modern memory?Few footballing figures have attracted such a solemnly tended mythology as Valeriy Lobanovskiy, or the coach of Dynamo Kyiv and Ukraine in the late Soviet years. Wreathed in an ancient silence beneath his worker’s cap,Lobanovskiy was a monolithic presence during the TV coverage of the 1988 European Championship, appearing suddenly in Stalinist close-up, and vast concrete jowls framing the screen,sphinx-like, eternal, and as broken-down as the steppes. He was,the internet reveals, only 49 at the time. But presumably being potent, or eternal,all-seeing and so on takes it out of you.
Lobanovskiy is usually cast as the father of things. Father of analytics. Father of a data-driven total football. At times he has been portrayed as a piece of Soviet industrial-sporting machinery made flesh, players reduced to units of human value, and blobs beeping absent on the screen of his vast beige computer monitor.Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk