‘The more Ukrainians that play in the national league, the more examples for the young generation — let them learn from Shevchenko or Blokhin and not some Zumba-Bumba they took off a tree, gave him two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.’
— Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin, 2006
There you are, you see, Dr King — other people have dreams, too. Oleg Blokhin’s dream is a different sort of dream to the famous one you had. A less palatable dream, maybe.
Oleg, 59, is the coach of the Ukraine national football team, and Ukraine is a joint host of the current Euro 2012 football tournament, along with its occasional historical enemy, Poland. If you look at a picture of Oleg, you feel a warm chill of nostalgia: he has that big broad and flat face and frozen eyes you once saw surveying the endless procession of nuclear missiles from a balcony on Red Square in about 1972. This is not an entirely misleading impression; Blokhin is a creature of the USSR. He was, along with the acrobatic goalkeeper Lev Yashin, the most talented footballer ever to emerge from the Soviet Union, a Soviet footballer of the year three times running. Since the USSR dissolved he has dabbled in politics, being elected to parliament where he represented the Social Democratic Party of the Ukraine (SDPU) — which is not the sort of social democratic party that Roy Jenkins, say, would care to be a part of. It is a small but virulent pro-Moscow, anti-Nato, anti-western rump; it too, you suspect, is gripped by a certain nostalgia for times past.
Oleg’s quote about black players has earned him a certain, shall we say, notoriety, among the western press covering this exciting tournament.
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