Tuesday, April 19, 2022
The Maybe Men, Part 6
Italy were generally favoured to win their semi-final against the USSR at the 1988 Nations Cup. The Italian team had undergone rejuvenation since their limp exit from the 1986 World Cup, with a number of fine young players, mostly from AC Milan, joining the starting eleven. They would enjoy the vast majority of the support in Stuttgart, they had defeated the Soviets 4-1 earlier in the year, and they would have been buoyed too by the news that the Soviets' talismanic striker, Igor Belanov, would miss the game after suffering an injury against England in their final group match.
Only a few minutes into the game, there came another bad blow for the Soviets. Oleg Kuznetsov, the defensive brigadier whom Valery Lobanovskyi had always considered the side's natural leader, picked up a soft yellow card from the fussy, inconsistent Belgian referee, Alexis Ponnet. It was Kuznetsov's second caution of the tournament, and he would now be out of their next game.
It says something for Kuznetsov's character that he turned in one of his finest performances in what was to be his last game of the tournament. Maladyets Kuznetsov, the Russian commentator frequently cried during the game. Bravo, Kuznetsov. And the praise was not undeserved.
It was this game, perhaps more than any other, that demonstrated how Lobanovskyi's methods worked at their best. Facing a technically superior team, he relied on his tactic of flooding the midfield to reduce the space available to the creative players in the opposition. Kuznetsov, tackling furiously and venturing frequently into midfield to stop Italian attacks before they started, was the key figure, but the entire team contributed.
Up front, the Soviets offered less than they had in previous games. Oleg Protasov, Belanov's replacement in the lone striker role, was far less mobile, and the tight marking of Riccardo Ferri meant that he found the going very hard in the first half. Alexander Zavarov, too, was having an unusually quiet night. At the other end, the young Gianluca Vialli missed two good chances in the first half, and appeared to be out of sorts.
The Soviet tackling was not always legal, and a struggling Vladimir Bessonov also received a yellow card for a clumsy challenge on the half-hour. Lobanovskyi took the shrewd decision to withdraw his usual right-back in favour of the more robust Anatoly Demianenko. Just before half-time, the reflexes of Rinat Dasaev rescued the Soviets again, when he made an excellent save from Giuseppe Giannini's header.
At half-time, the Italian manager Azeglio Vicini took the decision to replace Vialli's strike partner, Roberto Mancini, with the veteran Sandro Altobelli. It seemed more logical for the misfiring Vialli to have been withdrawn, but Vicini was always loyal to the Sampdoria striker, even starting him in the World Cup semi-final two years later in place of a firing Roberto Baggio.
The attrition continued for a while, with neither side looking likely to break through. But on the hour, the Soviets scored an unexpected goal, and fittingly it was Kuznetsov who started the move, winning the ball at the base of midfield and advancing to the edge of the box. The ball broke for the right-sided midfielder Gennady Litovchenko, who beat Walter Zenga smartly after his initial shot had been blocked.
The Italians were taken aback, and conceded another just two minutes later. Zavarov, finally coming to life, drew two defenders to him on the left before sliding the ball across to Protasov in the middle, who had for once escaped the attentions of Ferri. He finished confidently with his left foot.
And that, in short, was that. The Italians, tired and short of ideas, never looked like getting back into the game, with a wild shot over the bar from Vialli on 80 minutes all they had to offer in the closing stages. The USSR had reached the final.
There they would meet the Dutch again, who had grown as the tournament had progressed, with van Basten now in peak form. They had gained some revenge for the 1974 World Cup final by beating West Germany in the semis thanks to a moderately dubious penalty; with Kuznetsov out, they looked like the favourites for the final.
Without Kuznetsov, Lobanovskyi made the decision to sacrifice one of his midfielders, Sergey Aleinikov, to a man-marking job on van Basten. It's tempting to think that "Loba" chose the outsider, the Dynamo Minsk man, for this task, to allow his Kyiv charges to continue their practised co-ordination further upfield.
The Soviets started the game well, but failed to create many good chances; this time Belanov was fit to start, but he was below his usual effectiveness. The Dutch worked their way slowly into the game, and just after the half-hour, they went ahead. Following another excellent save by Dasaev from Ruud Gullit's free kick, the Soviets rushed out when the subsequent corner was cleared...apart from the unfortunate Aleinikov, who was playing van Basten onside. Erwin Koeman's cross reached the tall striker, he headed back across goal, and Gullit powered a header past Dasaev.
Just after half-time came van Basten's famous volley, one of the most spectacular goals ever seen in the final of a major competition. In truth, however, his cross-shot from Arnold Muhren's innocuous cross was something of a fluke. And it was an incident after that goal which was truly decisive in the encounter.
The Soviets were initially spurred into action by van Basten's goal, and Belanov hit the post following a free kick only a couple of minutes afterwards. Then, in a moment of utter madness, the Dutch keeper Hans van Breukelen chased after Sergey Gotsmanov, who was attempting to retrieve a ball heading over the by-line, well away from goal. van Breukelen clumsily upended him: penalty.
It looked like a perfect, unexpected chance for the USSR to get back into the game. Belanov took the kick, fired low to his left...and van Breukelen saved. There was just one problem: he was a mile off his line when the kick was taken. The penalty should, of course, have been retaken. But it wasn't: the "save" was allowed to stand.
After two such close calls, one of them a manifest injustice, our old friend avos' began to affect the Soviets. To say that they lay down and died after the penalty would be almost an understatement. The Dutch simply frolicked in the final minutes; the Milan colleagues Gullit and van Basten began to combine with ease and elegance, and the Soviets seemed utterly despondent. None more so than Zavarov, every inch a "mood" player.
2-0 it inevitably finished. The absence of Kuznetsov had been keenly felt, but not perhaps as keenly as the sense that it just wasn't to be their day.
Up next: the great Soviet exodus, and the last, tragic hurrah - the 1990 World Cup in Italy.
