“Farewell to Mircea Lucescu, the football visionary who took the players to museums”

Mircea Lucescu worked for many years in Italian football, as a coach at Pisa, Brescia, Reggiana and Inter. The greats of Serie A were quick to pay tribute to him on Tuesday at his passing, but at least as impressive was the one that appeared in the prestigious Gazzetta dello Sport.

“When he arrived in Pisa, Mircea Lucescu asked President Anconetani for a video recorder”

In the opinion of the largest profile daily in the Peninsula, “the measure of Mircea Lucescu's greatness lies here: everyone talks about match analysis these days, but he invented it. He was already doing it in Romania, during the Ceaușescu era, with the means of the time.

He would borrow the best eight students from the nearest school and place each in a separate section of the stadium, tasked with marking the players' positions every fifteen minutes. He made his notes, formed a precise picture of the match and, the next day, explained to his team, Dinamo Bucharest, how he had played.

Technology changed things, and when he arrived in Pisa, Italy in 1990, just before naming forwards and full-backs, he asked president Anconetani for a VCR. He told us all this on a cold Friday evening while eating oysters in an Italian restaurant in Donetsk.

He made us wait a quarter of an hour. The delay was justified, because Friday is ballet at the opera. He was also annoyed because he had only been able to see it on TV; previously he had been entrusted with a less artistic task: to achieve a 4-1 derby victory against Metalurg”.

“Mircea Lucescu, this Nikola Tesla of football”

Ziarul roz, one of the most important profile publications in Europe and the world, describes Lucescu as a “Nikola Tesla of football, an unconventional genius who invented for himself and for others. A cunning revolutionary, a visionary who did not limit himself to the ordinary, but knew how to see beyond.

His list of achievements can speak for himself: 36 trophies won in charge of eight different teams or the hundreds of players he has started in the football game that matters, the spectacle he has put on or the final act of love that, just months after a respiratory problem that required hospitalization, led him at 80 to coach a struggling Romania team trying to qualify for the World Cup.

But more than anything, one statue speaks for itself: his, proudly displayed in Donetsk in front of the Donbass Arena, a few hundred meters from the statue of Lenin in the main square. How many footballers have one in their lifetime or career? Maybe they do later, but they certainly don't if you don't leave a mark, and Lucescu always had.

As a footballer, he was a tireless left winger with a sculpted abs. He helped Dudu Georgescu win the Golden Ice with his crosses for Dinamo, then the earthquake in Bucharest left him homeless and he moved to Hunedoara in Transylvania, where in addition to playing, he coached, wrote newspaper editorials and even composed the team's anthem in his spare time. There, he started to bring his unconventional football to the bench”.

“Mircea Lucescu overturned Colonel Lobanovski's style of football”

Gazzetta noted that “Lucescu's thought always started with an axiom: if everyone does something in one way, it does not mean that it is the best way to do that thing. Should Ceaușescu's son, Steaua, have won Romania's championship? He played the best football with Dinamo, using young players from the countryside, to the point where the dictator at one point appointed him to the national team to revitalize it.

In the Italian football of the 1980s and 1990s, did you survive with catenaccio and killer midfielders? He was talking about possession and spacing and using good feet, not strikers. In Ukraine, Lobanovsky's tactical dictatorship had ruled for thirty years – two scorers and a sweeper? He overturned the Colonel's style of football, drowned the Soviet attacks in the offside quagmire and overturned the superiority everyone took for granted in Dynamo Kyiv. For 12 years, the team to beat ended up being his Shakhtar Donetsk.

If you talked about 4-3-3 and the like, he scrunched his nose: “I don't coach formations, I coach ideas.” “Lucescu changes the roles of the players”, some said, but it was not true. Lucescu trained the players to understand their sport. Would Mkhitaryan, for example, have the same acclimatization times if he hadn't spent months blocking others because he was a full-back or defensive midfielder in Donetsk?

When you asked him for clarification, he would give you an example: “We are tied, 1-1, Brescia against Juve, the ball goes to Nappi on the edge of the box, the defenders are all around him, he tries to dribble, he loses the ball and they score on the counterattack. Nappi does it because he is a striker. If he was also a defender, he would know what to do.”

“At every away match, Mircea Lucescu took his players, at his own expense, to see a monument, a museum, a piece of local history”

Gazeta dello Sport also revealed another side of the football man Mircea Lucescu. “To transmit his principles, Lucescu imposed limits. Above all, he asked his players for education at all levels, including hygiene and culture, then dedication and discipline.

At every away game, he took his players, at his own expense, to see a monument, a museum, a piece of local history, even if it meant skipping the last training session. Without a guide, he did it alone, in all eight languages ​​he spoke.

“They're lucky kids, they travel the world, they can't just see stadiums and hotels. If your son asks you what you saw in Rome, in Paris, what do you tell them?” He was happy if they married young, because “a husband is mature, and maybe a lover.” Don't fine them. He spoke and explained.

But if he had to fight a war of principles, he did. At Brescia, he gave sixteen-year-old Pirlo his debut for the Anglo-Italian side. But he failed a few times, and in the locker room, to protect a child in whom he saw the future, he had a nasty fight with the current leader, Luzardi,” recalls the Italian daily.

“Mircea Lucescu, a mammoth among elephants”

“In today's turbo football, where you arrive and you are useless if you don't lift a trophy tomorrow, Lucescu seemed like a mammoth among elephants. His revolutions were not simple, they required warm-up and training, they had their own rhythm: “A coach needs at least three months to transmit ideas, automatic processes and patterns. Sometimes it takes longer, even six”. He said this when he took over Inter from Simoni in 1998, a team full of talent and players in the locker room.

After three months, the ideas did not take root and he resigned. He was lucky to find visionary presidents like him. Gino Corioni at Brescia, for example, made excellent capital gains with him, and at Rigamonti he admired Hagi's left-footed shot, one of the best of all time.”

“Mircea Lucescu created the Brazil of Ukraine in Donetsk”

Gazzetta dello Sport defined Mircea Lucescu's time at Shakhtar Donetsk as follows: “He made his masterpiece with Rinat Ahmetov, a Ukrainian steel magnate with a dream similar to Fitzcarraldo: to bring poetic and winning football to the border with Europe, in Donetsk. He gave Lucescu carte blanche, had him build a village-sized sports center to his taste, and fully embraced his philosophyincluding another rule of its own: the system must be impervious to the market; if I sell one, I have to have another one ready within the company.

«There are two ways to win: with money or with youth. With money, you earn while the money lasts; in the latter case, I continue»said Lucescu This is how the Brazil of Ukraine was born. Lucescu has always been fascinated by the green and gold ball, ever since he was a player, and at the 1970 World Cup, he swapped shirts with Pelé. At Shakhtar, he started buying dozens of Brazilians at a very young age, even trying out sixteen-year-old Neymar.

For them, breaking Soviet custom, he allowed a PlayStation in the chess room and a churrasco on the lakeside of the sports center. It was his masterpiece: a circus of miracles that in twelve years brought a UEFA Cup to Donetsk (“Do you know how hard it is to win against an Eastern European team in this football?”) ​​and made the big clubs tremble. The dream of Ahmedov and Lucescu was shattered only by the mortars of the civil war.

The same thing happened in Kiev, where one evening he woke up thinking they were fireworks, but instead they were Russian missiles. He used his good offices to get his players and their families out of the country, then did it himself, in his car. At Dinamo, a few years earlier, they had called him almost as a joke: “I thought they wanted some friendly advice, they offered me the team”.

It was as if Sacchi had gone to Inter or Guardiola to Real Madrid. It divided the nation. He didn't care, and he won here too. At one point they had about twenty million in the treasury and they asked him who to buy, and he said: “Build us a new gym, get a bus for the youth team, these are the purchases that will stay.”

“With Ronaldo at Inter, Mircea Lucescu had set up a small business: he gave him red oranges and the Phenomenon responded with bottles of Brazilian beer”

Gazzetta dello Sport also describes Lucescu's relationship with Italy: “A man of art, he was a fine communicator and he loved Italy. He had a house on Lake Garda, where he returned with pleasure. He liked our food and ordered it from all over the world. With Ronaldo at Inter, he had set up a small business: he gave him red oranges that arrived directly from Sicily, and the Phenomenon responded with bottles of Brazilian beer.

Did he like wild life? Amen. “Why are you doing this, Ronie?” he asked one day. “Sir, life is one,” was the reply. His eyes would light up if you mentioned the obscure Ilsinho, he would say he had the best dribbling in the world and he would smile like a father when he explained that he never managed to be successful because every break he came back from Brazil carrying seven kilos of luggage.

He would interrupt interviews to ask you about the latest news on Italian politics or if that pizzeria near the stadium in Brescia was still open. He would send you a Romanian song and then call you to explain. He didn't like VAR because it traded justice for emotion, he didn't believe in Saudi Arabia the way he didn't believe in China ten years ago, he liked Serie B more than Serie A because “it's the coaches' league, those with money don't necessarily win”.

He always spoke well of the players: “Simeone compensates for his legs with intelligence, he will be a great coach”, “Give Calhanoglu time to understand Italy and you will see”, “Douglas Costa is better than James”, “You don't know Zabarnyi and Mikolenko, but in two years they will be starters in any team”, “Fernandinho is like Pirlo”, “The difference between Witsel and Pogba is age”, “Mkhitaryan, with his head, plays as much as he wants”. At first it seemed like he was exaggerating, but looking back, he was almost always right. How can an ordinary person see beyond and not be deceived by the prophets?”.