Dynamo Kyiv’s Mircea Lucescu: ‘My dream is to see Ukraine smile again’

“When you sleep, you forget about the dramatic moments in your life. You forget about complications and obsessions, so every morning you can start a new life with new hope.”

The words were written by the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran but they could just as well have belonged to the Dynamo Kyiv manager, Mircea Lucescu. When the first Russian bombs landed near Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities in the early hours of 24 February Lucescu was sleeping.

“I woke up in the middle of the night and thought: ‘What’s with the weather? Thunderstorms in February? I heard a huge noise and the sound was frightening,” he tells the Guardian. “In the morning, the alarm woke me up again. Then I found out what had happened. There was panic everywhere.”

That morning there was no time for people to recover their hope. Life was purely a race to survive. Russia had invaded Ukraine and instead of fresh smiles millions of people started to run, looking for an escape from the horrors of war.

At 76, Lucescu is one of the oldest managers still operating at the highest level. The Romanian wrote history in neighbouring Ukraine, spending 12 years at Shakhtar Donetsk between 2004 and 2016, then accepting an offer from arch-rivals Dynamo Kyiv in 2020. His career started back in 1979 and he has coached clubs such as Inter, Galatasaray and Besiktas as well as the Romanian and Turkish national teams.

With 36 trophies to his name, Lucescu is the second-most decorated manager in world football, behind only Sir Alex Ferguson’s 49 and still ahead of Pep Guardiola by five. But this is no time to dwell on silverware. Lucescu’s mind and heart are at war too, thinking about those he left behind when he returned to Romania a few days after the invasion took place.

“I