Translated material
System "Gus-elections"
Today, the popularly beloved Gus flies to Moscow to begin preparing the Russian national team for two World Cup qualifying matches with Azerbaijan and Liechtenstein, in which, to tell the truth, even without coaches we are obliged to take all six points. He arrives after the first defeat with Chelsea and the interviews that preceded it with the British press, where Hiddink for the first time cautiously admitted the possibility that he would remain coaching the London club after the end of the current season. Moreover, this assumption should have greatly alarmed our fans. Gus recalled that in his contract with the Russian Football Union until mid-2010 (the end of the final part of the World Cup in South Africa) there is a clause according to which the head coach can resign early: if the team does not reach this very final part. This option is, of course, possible. But the mentality of our football players, in principle, does not allow defeatist sentiments to be expressed by the coach, even hypothetically. This is where the danger lies.
Guus Hiddink is not going to leave our team yet; his entire staff has been working exclusively with the main team of the country, and is still doing so. But the pressure on Hiddink at Chelsea, the club whose owner Roman Abramovich paid Hus's salary as national team coach and is simply friends with him, is growing. After the controversial dismissal of Jose Mourinho, the London club has been unable to find a coach who would match the owner’s ambitions for two seasons now.
Gus has a very difficult choice. To be honest, winning the World Championship with the Russian team is almost impossible. And taking not the strongest teams, say, to the semi-finals or quarter-finals of world championships is not very interesting for Hiddink - he has already done this. Before the crisis, working as a coach for the Russian national team was very financially attractive for Gus, who was close to the end of his coaching career due to his age. But an invitation to Chelsea to be a permanent head coach, and not a temporary one, as now, until June 2009, from a financial point of view, will obviously be no worse. At the same time, with Chelsea, Hiddink theoretically has a chance to win the English championship (perhaps the strongest national championship now) and the Champions League. That is, to win trophies that this great coach does not yet have.
So, no matter how offensive it may be to us, for Hiddink coaching Chelsea is objectively more interesting than the Russian national team. Especially considering that he generally stated his desire to end his coaching career after the 2010 World Cup. If Gus reaches the end of his contract with the Russian national team and does not remain at Chelsea, he will most likely leave football. And with Chelsea, given his personal relationship with Abramovich, Hiddink receives obvious motivation for several years of further coaching work - at least for the sake of winning the same Champions League.
There is also a more “seditious” thought: the RFU now makes sense to think about Hiddink’s successor in the national team and about preserving the atmosphere and style of work that he brought. After all, even if there had not been a coaching crisis at Chelsea, Hiddink would still have left the post of coach of our team in just over a year. Therefore, from the point of view of the national team’s strategic interests, any decision by Hiddink regarding Chelsea does not change anything significantly. But if the Chelsea management and the RFU management want the best for their teams, they should do everything possible to minimize the moral pressure on Hiddink.
...The great actress Faina Ranevskaya, when her interlocutor complained to her that he had seen Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” in the original with his own eyes and that she did not make any impression on him, replied: “Baby, this woman has impressed so many men that she herself can choose who she impresses.” Roman Abramovich and Vitaly Mutko should have treated the choice of Guus Hiddink in much the same way. With his results and attitude to business, he deserves that we calmly and without hidden anger accept any of his decisions.