Translated material
Oleg Blokhin: the battle for “Moscow”
To be honest, it initially seemed to me that Oleg Blokhin’s mentality as a coach was, in principle, not suitable for the current Russian championship. On the one hand, he worked quite a lot in club football in Greece, a country that may not have an outstanding national championship, but certainly not much inferior in level of organization and the game itself to the Russian one. On the other hand, it seems to me that it is impossible to call Blokhin a coach of a new European formation (like, for example, the younger Rashid Rakhimov or Oleg Protasov: in him lives a bizarre mixture of Soviet coaching principles, his own bright, out-of-the-ordinary personality, and a certain European experience. And he has been training for long enough to be considered a mentor of the new wave.
With the Ukrainian national team, Oleg Blokhin achieved a truly remarkable result: it is unlikely that this team will be able to reach the quarterfinals of the World Cup again in the foreseeable future. The reason for this success, in addition to the personal merits of coach Blokhin, lies in his football career: whatever one may say, Blokhin is the greatest Ukrainian football player of all time, and only Andrei Shevchenko can compare with him in terms of the scale of what he has done on the football field. The players of the Ukrainian national team were influenced not only by the rigidity or specific tactical guidelines of Blokhin himself and his coaching staff, but also, above all, by the charisma of a living legend and personal example.
In the Moscow football club, which was coached by Leonid Slutsky, a young, relatively soft specialist of the new European wave, the arrival of the tough Blokhin could be perceived as a return almost to Soviet coaching principles. In addition, for Moscow football players, especially foreign players, the charisma of Blokhin the football player does not exist. Moreover, in the Ukrainian national team, coach Oleg Blokhin was a king and god, determining the entire development strategy of the team, and in the Moscow football club he was just another hired specialist. And the very atmosphere in and around this club (when the owner of a team with scandals divides his main business, this is clearly not the best time for sports projects), the discrepancy between the budget and ambitions, and the lack of professional management only aggravated the situation.
But paradoxically, working at FC Moscow may turn out to be perhaps the most important challenge in Oleg Blokhin’s coaching career. At least no less important than his work with the Ukrainian national team. Of course, he has every right to leave this still very strange FC Moscow at any time, or he may be fired: after all, the team clearly failed at the start of the championship, albeit for completely objective reasons. But if the new managers and owner have a desire to bet on Oleg Blokhin as a coach who, through many years of work, can create a great team on the basis of a young club with almost no fans, no name, no history, if Blokhin himself agrees to make an attempt to become for “Moscow” someone like Sir Alex Fergusson for Manchester United or Arsene Wenger for Arsenal, it could be a very interesting experience.
World-class coaches have already worked in the Russian Championship, although with varying degrees of success (Dick Advocaat, by and large, has already paid for his stay at Zenit St. Petersburg, and, for example, Nevio Scala could not do anything with Moscow Spartak). There is already experience in the appearance of coaches who became the history of the club precisely in the Russian championships - these are undoubtedly Oleg Romantsev for Spartak, Yuri Semin for Lokomotiv, Valery Gazzaev for CSKA. But we have never had a coach who created the history of an unknown team almost from scratch. It is precisely this attempt that seems to be the only meaning of Oleg Blokhin’s tenure as head coach of FC Moscow.