Momentous events were unfolding so thick and fast in Andriy Shevchenko’s life as last year drew to a close that it was hardly surprising he was suffering from insomnia.
As well as the usual concerns of being a striker at one of the world’s most celebrated clubs, he became a father for the first time, moved out of central Milan to a new home on the banks of Lake Como and found his inner calm destabilised by the political division engulfing his homeland Ukraine. There was barely room to take in the news that he had been crowned European footballer of the year.
Shevchenko was flabbergasted. Such an individual honour was, he reckons, always off his radar. For all his assets, he did not expect such acclaim ahead of players who grace the finals of World Cups and European Championships; players whose caps are feathered internationally as well as domestically.
”I thought it would be a serious handicap that, compared to others, I’ve never played in the finals of a major tournament with Ukraine,” he says.
But football’s world order has been shaken. Favourites have keeled over early at the past two showpiece events and last year Shevchenko watched from afar as Europe’s most illustrious names — Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry, Francesco Totti, Raul — sullied their reputations while Greece marched on at Euro 2004.
By the age of 28, ”Sheva” has amassed an outstanding hoard of personal and team honours, but he is desperate not to become pigeon-holed with George Best and George Weah as one of those truly great players never to have appeared in the finals of a World Cup.
”I dream of success with Ukraine,” he says. ”If it doesn’t come, my career will have been no great shakes.”
At the halfway stage in qualifying, Ukraine are tearing away at the top of a fiendishly difficult group that includes Greece, Turkey and Denmark.
Coach Oleg Blokhin underlines just how inspirational Shevchenko is to his young team, saying: ”Andriy is our locomotive. We don’t have players of the calibre of Kaka, Cafu and [Paolo] Maldini to play alongside him, but he carries the team up.”
And his coach at Milan, Carlo Ancelotti, sums up his ability in three simple sentences: ”Shevchenko is the best attacker in Europe. He has a great deal of consistency and he just keeps scoring — which in Italian football is very difficult. He is a complete player, someone who can do everything on a football field.”
Shevchenko missed the first leg of the Champions League last 16 match against Manchester United at Old Trafford — where he scored the winning penalty to give Milan the trophy in 2003 — because of injury. His cheekbone and eye socket were fractured in an accidental clash of heads with a Cagliari defender the weekend before the first leg, but he might return — wearing a mask — for Tuesday night’s game at the San Siro.
Back home in the Ukraine, Sheva fever is rife. At his old school, they have locked up his old desk, such is the clamour to sit at it. Whenever he scores for Milan, the kids begin lessons by boasting to each other. ”They say things like, ‘My father played football with him once’ or ‘My father grazed the geese with him.’ New myths arise constantly,” explains one of the teachers in Dvirkivshchyna, the village where Shevchenko was born and raised.
His grandmother ensured that he had every chance of a decent life by maintaining the local tradition of cutting some of his hair when he was a baby to bury under a pear tree. Legend has it that the ritual encourages curly hair and good fortune. It seems to have worked.
While young Shevchenko was growing up, he bore witness to two seismic events in the former Soviet Union’s history. When he was nine a nuclear reactor exploded at nearby Chernobyl, and when he was 14, Ukraine declared independence. Both influenced his philosophy.
In the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, local children were evacuated to the Crimea for three months during the clean-up operation. Shevchenko recalls it as a confusing time.
”No one said anything,” he once said. ”We just knew that something terrible had happened. No one really told us anything for about three years and I couldn’t stop thinking about the small village next to Chernobyl where the people had to leave in the middle of the night, not even being able to pack a single suitcase.
”If my goals and victories can help the world remember Chernobyl and bring a smile to the face of the people still suffering then I dedicate all my success to them.”
And the political climate as Ukraine sought independence? ”Above all, it was difficult for kids my age to choose what to do because of the uncertainty,” he says. ”Thankfully, football found me.”
More specifically, Alexander Shpakov, Dynamo Kiev’s youth coach, saw him playing in a school tournament. Shpakov had to be creative to persuade Shevchenko’s father, Mykola — an officer in the Soviet army — and mother, Lyubov, to let him join their academy.
”His father imagined for him a future in the military,” the coach recalls. ”I told him Dynamo would be good for him and would toughen him and help him in his military career.”
Mykola nurtured his son with affection and discipline. ”I never used the strap,” he said once. ”You’ll achieve nothing beating the child, but you must be strict. Only with the combination of strictness and love will you get a good result.”
A similar blend was central to the methods that made Kiev’s legendary coach Valery Lobanovsky such a success. Daily contact with one of football’s most distinguished masters moulded the young Shevchenko into a player of devastating efficiency. When he was named European footballer of the year this season, the striker enthused to France Football magazine about his mentor’s approach.
”Lobanovsky made a big impression on me,” Shevchenko said. ”He was continually explaining to a player the need to play first and foremost for his team. He insisted an attacker must also be able to create things, and to defend, not just score goals. His way was affectionate but also very tough and his hardness was a way of pushing me. Lobanovsky told me I could be a great player, but he stressed that I needed to work harder and harder every day. He was a great beacon of inspiration to me.”
By the time Shevchenko was 20, Lobanovsky nicknamed his protégé ”The White Ronaldo” before adding that his boy was a more complete player than the Brazilian. The White Ronaldo proved that he could upstage the best of them with a hat-trick at the Nou Camp as Dynamo whipped Barcelona 4-0 in the Champions League in 1997.
The men from Kiev went on to reach the semifinals two seasons later, by which time Shevchenko had his pick of Madrid, Manchester and Milan. Having fallen for the Italians on a visit to the San Siro when he was 14, he was happy to reignite the love affair as a 23-year-old.
In Dynamo colours he had gathered five league championships, three cups, 60 goals in 117 league matches and 20 in 28 Champions League games, but the £16-million transfer invited scepticism in Ukraine and Italy. It had not been uncommon for players from that part of the world to flounder in the West, but Sheva adjusted sufficiently to be top scorer in Serie A in his first season in 1999.
Milan’s fitness science expert, Jean Pierre Meersseman, said: ”Andriy is a phenomenon. He is perfect in all the tests, in power, speed and acceleration sequences. Mentally, he has an extraordinary capacity for concentration and analysis.”
Shevchenko is adored by the rossoneri because, when Milan are in trouble, he is there to rescue them. His goals are not just decorative, but decisive. And he is unusual among strikers in that, according to research in the Italian press, the goals he scores are fairly evenly split between right foot, left foot and head.
No player better epitomises the frontiers crossed between eastern and western Europe in modern football than Shevchenko. Having conquered Italy with his Lobanovsky-inspired attacking play, he has also taken a touch of Milan to Ukraine by opening two Armani boutiques in Kiev.
In his new home, a picturesque 19th-century villa overlooking Lake Como, there cannot be much more room on the mantelpiece, but he would not be Lobanovsky’s star student if he did not continue the quest for more glory at full speed ahead.
Typically, after his decisive penalty in the 2003 Champions League final against Juventus, he asked his employers if he could take the trophy back to Kiev to display under the gaze of the statue of Lobanovsky outside Dynamo’s stadium.
”From my first years as a professional I learnt to have the will to win things. If you win one thing, you have to prove to people that you are good enough to win it again and that has always been the case for me. As Lobanovsky always said, it’s hard to get to the summit, but even harder to stay there.” — Â