So… listen to this… when you think of a Ballon D’Or winner, who comes to mind? … there are 47 possible answers… and I’m willing to bet none of you thought of a defender… but really, that isn’t your fault… only 3 defenders ever won it… and many fans will tell you that’s a disgrace… that the defenders should never be forgotten… but the ironic thing is that even in those conversations… Everyone forgets the goalkeepers… Zoff, Khan, Buffon and Neuer… all of them did “the impossible”. .
. yet they were barely even given a chance… so what does a goalkeeper have to do to win the Ballon D’Or? Well… I think you should ask Lev Yashin… because he already did it 61 years ago… In a time where half of Europe was still under the impression that the russian communists “ate babies and worshipped Satan”, Yashin was just such a badass that everyone was forced to become a fan… the guy took 10 Ballon D’Ors nominations, even though the award didn’t even exist up till his 27th birthday… look… some players were ahead of their time, but Yashin?
The guy was a time traveller… he was the first to ever command his team from the back, to start counter attacks on his own, to play the ball to his center backs, rather than smacking it up the pitch… to punch it away, rather than to grab it every time… without him, there would be no “modern goalkeeper”, he invented his own role. . .
back before goalkeepers were even given any protection by the referees, he was already coming out of goal, launching himself at the striker’s feet… he lost consciousness on the pitch like 5 different times, and in one of them he got up and asked the striker if he was okay… to this day, several newspapers claim he has the world record for the most penalties saved, over 150 in total… and if you asked the guy, he’d tell you the secret to have a good match was to “smoke a cigarette to calm your nerves and take a sip of vodka to warm up your muscles”. . .
and in a way he wasn’t wrong… Lev Yashin became addicted to smoking at the age of 13… that was nothing like him… growing up he had been a model student who excelled at everything from hockey, to football, fencing, skiing and especially chess… his biggest dream was to be the next Soviet grandmaster… but while all of that happened, so did the Great Patriotic War, or as it would become known everywhere outside of the USSR… World War II… with every year of his life, the Nazis got closer and closer to the border… and once they reached St Petersburg… that city became a living hell… as I once read in an article: “even the mice starved”. . .
Scared for their lives, the people of Moscow evacuated their city and alongside them, went a 12 year old Lev Yashin, who spent the next 4 years of his life, in a factory, assembling ammunition… In his own words, he “worked himself to the bone, dragging machines through the snow, all for bread and a spare piece of lump sugar”. . .
so, to kill his appetite, he began smoking… and ironically, once the Red Army conquered the eastern front, effectively ending the war… It was at his factory’s own team that he began playing football… though that was far from a happy ending… Don't get me wrong… the years after the war were a golden era for Soviet football… With the English wanting to show their gratitude for their war efforts, they invited Dynamo Moscow to come and tour their country, however, believing they were the greatest football nation on the planet, they tried to set them up against 3rd division sides… but Dynamo didn’t like this, they insisted they would only come if they were allowed to face their top clubs and… almost holding their laughter, the English accept… but a few weeks later, having faced Arsenal, Chelsea, Rangers and Cardiff… Dynamo Moscow flew back home, undefeated… in one swoop, they had put all of Europe on the tips of their toes… but if that team was impressive, little did they know that the biggest talent in the country was back home, with a thousand yard stare… broken… in his own words, after the war, Yashin “felt nothing except emptiness”, he had no desire to play football, no desire to do anything so, soon, he began missing work, and well… it was the Soviet Union, in the eyes of the government, he was now a parasite… To avoid persecution, he joined the army… there, inevitably, he began playing for their football team and though, by 1948… Chernyshev, one of Dynamo’s youth managers, spotted him… and became “almost like a second father” to him… once at the club, already putting in practice a playstyle no one at the time was even capable of imagining, no matter how many times he argued that “the player who holds the number one shirt must be like an artist, a star on the pitch”. . .
they saw him as a lunatic, an idealist… and by the time he was finally given his debut, he ended up conceding precisely as he risked it all by coming off his line, and by the time he made it to the locker room, he heard one of the directors saying “Who the hell is that kid? A wimp? Hell of a goalkeeper you guys found… I don’t ever wanna see him back on the pitch”.
. . and just like that, he was sent back into the reserves, two years went by… and, at the advice of Chernyshev, Yashin gave up football to play hockey… This should have been the end, and maybe for any other keeper, it would have been… but instead, Yashin proceeded to dominate the sport… and a year later, having won the Soviet Cup, as rumours that he could join the national team went around… Yashin shocked everyone by coming back to football, knowing that Dynamo’s legendary goalkeeper Alexander Khomich was about to retire… In a matter of months, he had beaten every other goalkeeper in the race for the starting eleven… by the end of the year, he was in the team of the season for the first of 16 times… to this day, the country’s all time record… and most importantly of all, as the new season started, Mikhail Yakushin took over as their new manager, putting complete faith on Yashin, declaring him as a “dream goalkeeper”, the future of football… Meanwhile, the Soviets had just been knocked out of the 1952 Olympics, their first ever official competition, by none other than their rivals Yugoslavia… upsetting Stalin so much that he banned some players and stripped them of all their medals… giving Yashin, who had just taken his first national title, an open road straight into the national team… quickly restoring their honor, sending them on a run of 7 matches without a defeat… not just holding the mighty Hungary, at the time considered the best team on the planet, to two draws, despite dropping unconscious midway through one of the matches, after a blow to the head… but beating World Champions, West Germany… which, given what had happened in the war, instantly made him a national hero… quoting a 1936 Soviet film: “Hey, goalkeeper, get ready for battle, you’re a watchman by the gate.
Imagine that behind you, the frontline lies in wait”. . .
Yashin was the personification of the Iron Curtain… and this was merely the beginning… By 1956, the Soviets had made their back into the Olympic games, and with Yashin decided to right the wrongs of those who came before him, not only did he make sure to defeat Yugoslavia, but he beat them in the final, to take the gold medal… instantly rising to 5th place, as France Football presented the world with the first edition of the Ballon D’Or… and though the following year would fly by, as Yashin was repeatedly hospitalized as he struggled with a stomach ulcer that wife blame on the malnutrition brought to him by the war… he still managed to come back to the pitch for the first World Cup qualifiers in the history of his country… and by 1958, even if his team had been severely weakened, with their captain Igor Netto injured and 3 of his teammates, including their star man Eduard Streltsov, ending up in prison forcing a massive scandal that led many to believe they had been set up by the government who had accused them of “collusion with western imperialists”. . .
well… now, they were in the world cup… and with that same government having just launched the famous Sputnik satellite into space… the tournament would be broadcasted for the whole wide world to watch… so Yashin had to try his hardest to make sure another humiliation wasn’t under way… From the first two matches against Austria and England, with Yashin saving a penalty and once again insisting on playing through a game after being knocked out by another blow to the head, the spotlight was already his… but if that was getting some newspapers to call this one of the all time greatest goalkeeping performances, then… he went up against Pelé’s Brazil… and… to put it in the perspective, even after a 2 nil defeat, all that anyone could talk about was Yashin… because to quote them: “had it not been for him, the score would have become a rout”. . .
Add another great game to hold off England in the play offs… and even if by the quarters they’d already be out… now the vision of a man standing between the posts, with his hat down by his brow, wearing an all black outfit, had become the stuff of legends… he was no longer just Yashin, for everyone around Europe, he was known as “the black spider”. . .
. and he was coming back to haunt them… very, very soon… After taking what was already his 4th league title, if there was any doubt that Yashin was levels above his competition, only a few months after the World Cup, the Soviets had to face England again… this time without him… and the result was a 5 nil defeat, to this day, the worst in their history… thankfully for them, however, by the qualifiers for the first ever edition of the Euros, Yahsin was already back and not only did he help them defeat Hungary once again to make it into the tournament, but there… they demolished Czechoslovakia to force their way into the final, and man… fate would have it that waiting for them there, again, was Yugoslavia… and clearly Yashin wasn’t satisfied with whatever revenge he may have gotten in the Olympics, because this time, he made one save after the other, forcing the game into extra time… where he was finally able to make the USSR the first ever European Champions… From this moment onwards, there wasn’t a soul who doubted Yashin’s status as one of the game’s all time greats… he was already placing 5th on the Ballon D’Or… he even had Real Madrid, who had just won 5 European Cups in a row, trying to sign him… but he insisted that “Madrid sounds good, but I feel sorry for those who play far from the homeland… I am all for Dynamo”. .
. not to mention that, being already 31, he’d start hinting at retirement, claiming that the next World Cup would be his last… but well… that was before he saw what happened there… Even though in the year up to the tournament, Yashin would be sidelined repeatedly as his stomach problems got worse and worse… watching from a hospital bed as Dynamo fell down to the bottom half of the table without him… he once again managed to drag himself onto the pitch to help the USSR through the decisive qualifying matches… miraculously, only narrowly missed out on the Ballon D’Or podium, at the end of the year, and so… from the public’s perspective, it was almost like nothing happened… By the time the World Cup started, with the tensions of the Cold War reaching all time highs, as the public sat helplessly watching what, at the time, seemed like an incoming nuclear apocalypse… it cannot be overstated how much more was on the line at this tournament… but even though, after a mandatory opening match win against Yugoslavia, the newspapers would be writing that “whoever wants to break through the Soviet defense must attack not in pairs, but in threes, or even better, in sixes… since the “Octopus” Yashin with his huge stretching arms… seems invincible”. .
. then, having already conceded an embarrassing goal against Colombia, the only one to this day to come directly from a corner kick… he went up against Chile in the quarter finals and 9 minutes in, once again, he was hit in the head… dropping unconscious for over a minute and a half… Coming back into a match after getting knocked out for a couple seconds is already out of this world, but no one, not even Yashin should’ve stayed on the pitch after that… even his teammates were quoted saying that “it was a miracle he survived that game at all”. .
. and so, the consequences were simple… he let in one soft goal after the other… his performance that day was so uncharacteristically poor, that Eladio Rojas who scored the winner… went up to Yashin and hugged him in disbelief, clearly realizing that something was wrong… however, back home, with the global broadcast, this time, coming from american satellites… all information regarding the tournament came through the newspaper… and the journalists… they made Yashin into a scapegoat… By the time he got to the airport, expecting a hero’s welcome, he was instead greeted with signs demanding his retirement… at home, his windows had been shattered, insulting notes were left on his car… threatening letters arrived by post… in his own words: “those were the most bitter days of my life”. .
. Yashin had been set up… his legacy had been tarnished just as he intended to play out his final years… as his wife would explain: “the journalist who wrote about it knew nothing about sports, his job was in American politics… he never even mentioned the concussions, nothing about the rest of the team, only that Lev was sleeping and that he let the goals fly in”. .
. and so, by the end of the year, for the first time in almost 7… Yashin missed out on a Ballon D’Or nomination… Suddenly, the man who once said that “the joy of seeing Gagarin fly through space was only outdone by the joy of saving a penalty”. .
. was now admitting that “What kind of goalkeeper is not tormented by the goals he has allowed? I must be tormented!
If I’m calm, that means the end. It means no matter what I did in the past, I’ll have no future”. .
. and ironically, this was what pushed him to a level no other goalkeeper has ever reached… Back at Dynamo, Yashin requested a few weeks of absence to decide on his future and after coming back from this… spiritual retreat… he announced he’d be taking a year long break from the national team… while for club, he’d settle for playing just the away matches, likely hoping that there the crowds would go easier on him… and somehow, this stunt worked… by the next season, still in a way sharing the goal with his backup goalkeeper, the divide between him and the other player’s of his time became more obvious than ever, since, as he took his 6th league title, he played in 27 out of the league’s 38 matches… and conceded only 6 goals… meanwhile, his backup, conceded 8 in the 11 matches that remained… and if there was still a good chance that the rest of Europe could move on without realizing what a mesmerizing peak Yashin had just hit now that he was supposedly “past his prime”. .
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