The unspeakable game of the Latvian national football team against the national unit of the dwarf state still surprises many. However, almost three years have passed when the national team won a convincing victory for the last time, and the team looked convincing on the field well before. Today, one may ask: where is the surprise in all this?
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In 2001, I was young and understood little from football, but I knew so much that Alexander Kolinko, Igor Stepanov, Andrei Rubin, Marian Pahar and others had to win the San Marino national team. We did not win then and after the game the frustration was great. Several years later, after another disappointment against the dwarf national team, I refused to point out in the title that this failure is sensational, because we are neighbors in the rank of FIFA. Now there are two draws against Andorra and Malta, and the Latvian national team did not score the only goal.
The last time the Latvian national team in the first hundred of the FIFA ranking changed was in 2016, but the stable TOP 100 national unit was in 2011, when it took 68th to 84th place. At present, Latvia is in 137th place, behind Andorra and Myanmar and ahead of Taiwan. Not a bad company, but not the most elite.
However, in Latvia, fans and football experts from the Faroe Islands, Andorra, Malta, Gibraltar, Luxembourg and other small countries are among those who have to win with their eyes closed, but in recent years this is no longer our reality. We are on the same level with these teams. I would like to believe that the average individual skill of players is better for Latvian footballers, but the confidence and toxic environment that has developed around the national team due to the results of recent years affects the performance of players. It is possible that, for example, Andorra and Malta enjoy football much more at this time.
And why not. In the leading clubs of the Latvian “Optibet Virslīga”, the names of Latvian footballers are rarely seen in the core line-up, because they are competed by legionnaires. Of the top ten top league goal scorers, only three are Latvians, but of those Latvians, only debutant Raimonds Krollis participated in one of the last two games. It is not bad that the level of the Premier League is raised by legionaries, it is bad that only a few of us manage to keep up with them. Latvian footballers do not play in the strongest football championships in Europe. Those who have gone as legionaries do not always have a stable playing time. Not everyone has been able to create such a stable career in Poland as Pavel Steinbor, Kaspars Dubra has been a stable value in the football championships of Belarus and Ukraine. Now it is to be hoped that Vladislav Gutkowski will continue to “fireworks” in Poland, but hoping will not help to achieve results.
Tossing between the coaches of the national team in recent years has not improved the situation, as no coach has been able to realize his vision to get out of the pit. If there has been one at all. Then there is the constant belief in Alexander Starkov, who has unsuccessfully come as a messiah and has worn out his name in the context of the selection that many have already forgotten what he has achieved with the selection. However, everything is in order, he acts as the LFF national team director, “in a consultative way directing the new players of Latvian football to planned development” (quote from the LFF press release).
In my opinion, the biggest problem has been that no solution has been found in time. We failed to get out of the situation on our own, we can see it now. I don’t believe that Latvian national football team Ainars Bagatskis and the basketball team once performed with the talented Jānis Strēlnieks, Dairis and Dāvis Bertāns, Rihards Kuksiks, Mārtiņš Meiers and Rolands Freimanis, who were accompanied by the experienced Jānis Freimanis. There was only a loss, but the aftertaste was optimistic after the tournament. And with each tournament, the results improved, until being left without medals in Eurobasket 2017 was a disappointment.
Head coach Dainis Kazakevičs is currently not to blame for the two draws, but he has worked in the football federation as a sports director for years, so the issue of developing the individual skills of the players could be addressed to him. He has also put his finger in shaping the overall strategy and development of the national team and Latvian football. And now that finger is guiding what he’s been working on all these years.
In basketball, the team grew from a short story to a medalist in six years. Football is another sport. As Anatolijs Kreipāns, the best sports commentator in Latvia, said: “Nowadays everyone can play football.” But why are we the ones who play football worse every year?
The first step towards solving the problem is to acknowledge it. We acknowledge that there is a problem in Latvian football. We accept it and start solving it. As we can see, semi-professional footballers are not “biting” for us at the moment. It is serious. Reputation in football has suffered, because the national team is the face of Latvian football. If there were good results, even all LFF scandals would remain in the background. Now everyone sees both bad results and scandals. If there are not even modest results, then it is no wonder that public officials do not appreciate this sport. Because there is nothing to congratulate on the social network “Twitter”.
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