Translated material
Guus Hiddink's people
The skill, or even the genius, of the so-called “total” professions—team sports coaches or theater directors—is to either create an ingenious scheme, fitting performers into it perfectly, or to force their players or actors to reveal the best qualities and merge them into the harmony of the common Game. If at such a tournament it is not one, two or three players who show their best football in their lives, but the whole team, this means that the coach managed to bring out the best qualities (and not only playing ones) of each football player. This is exactly what happened to the Russian team.
Moreover, this metamorphosis is not purely playful, but also human. You and I have not seen not only such a game from the Russian national team, but also such an attitude towards this game. Our players are not afraid of anyone, do not tremble in front of their opponents, and each player reveals himself as an individual on and off the field. There seemed to be no public manifestations of humanity or compassion for the same Andrei Arshavin before. The same Yuri Zhirkov, with all his undoubted talents, in the youth team sometimes behaved frankly boorishly on the field. And, by the way, it is no coincidence that extremely important roles in Hiddink’s team are played by football players who stood out against the general background of Russian football as decent people - Igor Semshov, Sergei Semak, Konstantin Zyryanov.
One gets the feeling that Hiddink prepared this team not only physically, tactically or psychologically. He brought a different standard of human relations to our team, made a pedagogical revolution in the minds of football players who grew up on the famous Soviet football saying “football without swearing is like cabbage soup without tomato.”
Guus Hiddink's players became Guus Hiddink's people. They, perhaps for the first time in their careers, so accurately and deeply realized that each of their big victories and their attitude towards football as a part of life gives strength to live for millions of fans. That they are the arbiters of not only their own, but also, unwittingly, the destinies of others. That they are not just playing or working, not just making money, but also creating a world that makes a huge number of people feel good or painfully bad.
Hiddink will not coach the Russian national team forever. Our players will have other great and small, domestic and foreign mentors. But it is very important that each of those people who ended up being part of our team at Euro 2008 understood and felt how and why they were able to play football the way they did and express themselves as individuals the way they did. Gus gave Russian football players (and, by the way, Russian coaches, who mostly accepted his appointments with hostility - out of jealousy or envy, it doesn’t matter) not only a gaming experience, but also a unique human experience. He created an atmosphere in which football players begin to understand that they are not just idols of millions and not the coach’s toy soldiers, but living people. That they live by football, but their life is not exhausted by football, it is most fully expressed in it. This experience is the main thing that a teacher can give to a student and what the student can use.
Whether Hiddink will be able to change the Russian football mentality irreversibly or everything will return to normal, we will only know after he leaves. But it is very important that everyone who worked with him realizes. What is not so important is the place that we will ultimately take at the Euro, and not even the beautiful, selfless, intelligent game shown by football players who had practically never been seen in anything like this before. What is more important is how working with the Master helped people fully reveal undisclosed human and professional qualities. Rise to a new stage of development. If you want, become different people.