Translated material
Pros from the minuses
School problem on how to forge defeats into victories
When Lokomotiv shocked the country by losing to Rapid, a team without a single star but working terribly hard, the first press responses were, to put it mildly, derogatory. The emotions are understandable: the champion of the country, whose second club won the UEFA Cup several months ago, must, simply must, get into the group stage of the Champions League - even as a carcass, even as a scarecrow, even without Sychev, even with Lebedenko. Then, having cooled down a little from the anger and somehow survived the humiliation, analysts seemed to agree that an accident occurred in 2005. At least the story with Rapid was almost not compared with the shameful Kosice and Vardar. Okay, the public decided, it doesn’t happen to anyone, we’ll win back in 2006. The way CSKA made up for its previous stupid trips to European Cups last season. The only question is what exactly can and should be done so that you have to recoup less often.This season there was a strange situation from the point of view of logic. CSKA just won the European Cup, scored a ton of rating points, the season before last Lokomotiv successfully made it into the league and advanced from the group there... It seems that domestic football is rising, reaching its peak, but now the Russian champion is “seeded” in the Champions League two hurdles away from the coveted group stage. In the UEFA Cup, Zenit and Krylya Sovetov end up in one of the early qualifying rounds - in the same place as the Belarusian BATE, a weak club, to put it mildly, capable, perhaps, of getting lost in the domestic first league. The higher rounds lack that same rating, that magic wand that can take the club from the crowd of poor people straight into the circle of the pure public.
To be honest, there is little hope that St. Petersburg or Samara residents will go far in Europe. Not even because a half-double of last year’s bronze squad is now on the field for “Wings”, and “Zenit” in recent years in Europe has been remembered for anything, except for its chronic lack of results and, for example, last year’s failure to qualify from the simplest cup competition, which stunned everyone groups. But because the path to the top from the bottom of the bracket is long for these teams, and they were not awarded “seeding” due to the same low rating. Sooner rather than later, they will either stumble upon a really powerful team that will knock them out on a bare bones, or an accident a la Rapid.
CSKA, let us remind you, won its historic victory, entering the second most important European tournament halfway through - in the 1/16 finals - and going from the rags of the league to the riches of the Cup. At that time, the army team did not have many chances for that same accident; there were only a few rounds ahead of the victory over Sporting. The Champions League played the role of a super rating, training CSKA with matches against Chelsea and catapulting the Muscovites into the UEFA Cup just when it was time for the decisive matches.
Nevertheless, the problem of the Russian rating has not gone away. The successes of our individual clubs - both local and epochal - are too small, and the place of domestic football in the European table of ranks is growing extremely slowly. And one of the reasons for this was that our clubs are distributed extremely irrationally across the two European Cups. Here it is appropriate to recall the old logic problem for schoolchildren about two teams of gladiators. Each of them has five people, each gladiator of team “A” fights with one of the fighters of team “B”. It is known that the first gladiator of team “A” is stronger than the leader of team “B”, the second gladiator “A” is stronger than the second fighter from “B”, but weaker than the first gladiator “B”, and so on until the last pair. It is clear that if you bring the fighters together in pairs - the first with the first, the second with the second, etc., then the score of the battle will be 5:0 in favor of “A”. The schoolchildren were required to draw up a scheme in such a way that team “B” would win.
The solution is usually found quickly if you remember the principle “you need to be first in the village, not second in the city.” The weakest, fifth gladiator “B” is pitted against the strongest first fighter “A”, who, naturally, loses. But with the second fighter “A” the first gladiator “B”, superior in power, fights, with the third from “A” - the second from “B”, who is also stronger than the opponent... As a result, the weaker team “B” calmly wins match with a score of 4:1.
For us, everything so far has worked out according to the worst-case scenario. The best, most competitive clubs in the country - CSKA and Loko - qualified for the first gladiator "A", the Champions League, and before each group tournament, experts argued about whether our club could score five points there. The second echelon - be it Zenit, Torpedo or Rubin - went to the UEFA Cup, where the same question was about whether these clubs would make it through a couple of rounds or not (and this is the same modest five points). With such prospects, radically improving the rating is an extremely difficult task. And only when one of the two domestic giants got into the second European Cup last year did rating points and tournament advancement begin.
If we now look at the European tournaments of 2005/06, it may happen that the early departure (or rather, flight) of Lokomotiv to the weaker UEFA Cup is almost a blessing for our football. For the first time since the beginning of the 90s, we have two strong domestic clubs in a tournament that really allows us to gain a significant amount of rating points over the course of a year. This may allow us to finally enter at least one club into the Champions League group in the very near future. Unless, of course, Lokomotiv’s “rapid” disease relapses with the Norwegian Brann.
Draw for the 1st stage of the UEFA Cup. CSKA - Midtjylland (Denmark), Krylia Sovetov - AZ (Holland), Brann (Norway) - Lokomotiv, Zenit - AEK (Greece).