Mircea Lucescu: the 72-year-old manager reforming Turkey's national side
Lucescu succeeded Fatih Terim as Turkey coach and, against the odds, is turning the team around
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Your support makes all the difference.Who is the best coach of an international team in Europe? Since Antonio Conte left the Italian job for Chelsea, there are few obvious options. Joachim Loew has done well enough with good players at Germany, Didier Deschamps has a very patchy record, and Dick Advocaat’s great spell at Zenit St Petersburg is almost 10 years ago now.
The answer could in fact be Mircea Lucescu, the 72-year-old Romanian, who took over an underperforming Turkish national team this summer, and is desperate to guide them to Russia in his last real job.
Lucescu has a long career behind him, winning the Romanian league with two different clubs and then the Turkish league with two different clubs. But most significant was his 12-year stint in charge of Shakhtar Donetsk, performing one of the great managerial feats of modern football. He welded a team together of, roughly speaking, Ukrainian defensive players and Brazilian forwards. They became one of the best in Europe, winning eight Ukrainian titles and the Uefa Cup in 2009.
After leaving, Lucescu had one disappointing season at Zenit St Petersburg and this summer he was waiting for one last managerial challenge. Enter the Turkish Football Federation, who had ended Fatih Terim’s third spell in charge after the veteran coach became embroiled in a large brawl in a restaurant. The federation did not think it was appropriate behaviour.
Lucescu had a difficult job to do. To lift a team who had run out of ideas and momentum under Terim, who had never really recovered from their disappointing showing at Euro 2016 and who were beset by politics. With Terim there was always too much baggage, to say nothing of his outdated methods and overbearing approach.
Lucescu is eight years older than Terim but his methods are fresher and when he took over this August he started to impose some discipline, structure and new thinking which freshened up the team. Their first game was their hardest, away against Ukraine in Kharkiv and they lost 2-0, leaving them with no margin for error left.
But their second game of the last international break, against Croatia in Eskisehir, was when Lucescu turned everything around. Turkey played as well as they had done for years and beat Croatia 1-0, the winning goal coming from Cenk Tosun.
Had Turkey lost then they would have effectively been eliminated from the qualification process. But now confidence has returned that Lucescu can mastermind another win back in Eskisehir on Friday night. They are facing Euro 2016 surprise package Iceland, who beat them in Reykjavik last year, and are currently in second place. But the feeling in Turkey is that confidence has never been higher.
By playing in Eskisehir, the Turkish federation has avoided the politics that would always strike when they played in Istanbul. Galatasaray fans would boo Fenerbahce players, and vice versa, even for a national team match. When a match was moved to Konya in November 2015, fans booed the minute’s silence following the Paris attacks, causing international scandal. But now the Turkish team is based in Eskisehir they have a home where they can rally behind Lucescu’s team, and in a brand-new stadium too.
If Turkey beat Iceland they will jump ahead of them, creating an almighty squeeze between those two teams, Croatia and likely Ukraine going into the final round next Monday. Turkey will then travel to Finland for an away game and if they win that then only an unlikely tangle of results will keep them out of the top two positions in Group I.
They have the players to do it, with talents like Tosun and Oguzhan Ozyakup of Besiktas as well as Nuri Sahin, Hakah Calhanoglu and captain Arda Turan, still at Barcelona. Lucescu is frustrated that the relaxing of the Turkish league’s nationality rules in 2015 has flooded Super Lig with foreigners, meaning also that the most talented Turkish youngsters, like Cengiz Under at Roma or Enes Unal now at Villarreal, have started to look abroad for opportunities.
But Lucescu has more than enough good players to work with, and has shown before that is all he needs. Two wins this week, then success in the play-offs, and Turkey will be going to the World Cup after all, for just the third time in their history. It would be quite a turnaround, but having the best coach in Europe certainly helps.
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