Yashin

Walking beyond the padded, thick front door of Valentina’s winter-proof Moscow apartment, you step back in time into a life of a footballing legend. Everywhere you look there are posters, trophies, signed footballs - a huge number of personal treasures gathered over a remarkable career. This was Yashin’s home for 26 years.

There are so many mementos it is hard to keep track. There is the stuffed lion toy on the sofa (Lev means lion in Russian). There is a pennant from Ipswich Town - Valentina does not remember how it came to Yashin. There is the gold medal he won at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, a medal that was shown countless times on the long, celebratory train journey home across Russia from Vladivostok.

But there is one major piece missing from the collection - a World Cup medal. The best Yashin achieved on football’s biggest stage was fourth place at the tournament England hosted and won in 1966. In fact, despite revolutionising his position - and despite receiving the game’s most prestigious individual accolade - a poor World Cup almost prematurely ended Yashin’s career.

In 1962, the Soviet Union went out in the quarter-finals, defeated 2-1 by host nation Chile. Yashin, then 32, had not performed to his best. Two soft goals contributed to his team’s downfall and the single Russian language report of the game painted him as the scapegoat.

When the team returned from South America, angry supporters greeted them at the airport. There were signs reading “Yashin retire” and “Time to get your pension”. The windows of Yashin’s home were smashed, insulting messages were left on his car, threatening letters arrived in the post. He called these days the “most bitter of my football life”.

How could you not take it badly?

Yashin had been the hero in 1960, holding off a dominant Yugoslavia side in the European Championship final while his team-mates up the pitch conjured a comeback win in extra time. After Chile, Valentina says she had never seen her husband so down.

“He wanted to quit,” Valentina says. “When Lev came back to Moscow they were whistling in the stadiums as soon as his name was announced. There was screaming and jeering. They thought it was all his fault - that it was only him who had lost the game, not the whole team. The journalist who reported from the match did not know about sports - his job was to write about South American politics.

But Yashin - a man who had built his success on hard work - found the resolve to carry on despite adversity. It was not the first time.

At the beginning of his career, while playing for his metalwork factory team at the age of 18, Yashin suffered a nervous breakdown.

In his autobiography, he wrote: “Was it depression? I don’t know. The fatigue accumulated over the years began to make itself felt and something in me suddenly broke. At that time I felt nothing except emptiness.” The future great had stopped going to work - “by law I was a truant”- and had lost his appetite for sport.

A friend at the factory team suggested he volunteer for military service. Yashin called it his “salvation” - and his big break turned out to be just around the corner.

Now combining football with his military duties, Yashin rediscovered his love for the game and began to commit to training far more seriously. He was soon spotted by Arkady Chernyshev, a Dynamo Moscow youth coach and former football and ice hockey player. By 1953, four years after being signed up, Yashin had become a trusted member of Dynamo’s senior squad.

He was also a talented ice hockey goalkeeper and lifted the Soviet Cup in March 1953. It was his first major silverware - although the football version followed in October. Yashin had thrown himself into both sports at elite level, before permanently siding with the game he loved most of all in 1954. He would be a part of four World Cups, help win his country’s first two major titles, save a record 150 penalties and see his reputation grow to the status of an international icon.

Yashin was known for his sportsmanship, his modesty and his imposing stature at 6ft 2in. Former England forward Sir Tom Finney, who died in 2014, recalled taking a penalty against him at the 1958 World Cup. He said: “I decided to use my weaker foot because I knew that he'd have seen me strike a few penalties with my left. Was I nervous? You bet! When I turned round to begin my run-up, some of my team-mates had their backs turned. They couldn't bear to watch.

Valentina remembers well the day her husband proved those who had doubted him after Chile wrong.

It was 23 October 1963 and Yashin was in London, playing at Wembley for a Rest of the World XI against England in a special game organised to celebrate the Football Association’s 100th anniversary. She was working as a radio journalist and watched the match on a big screen at the central radio committee building in Moscow.

Yashin had been selected by the World XI manager Fernando Riera, whose Chile team had knocked out the Soviet Union a year before. He played one half and made several outstanding saves. It was 0-0 at the break and Yugoslavia’s Milutin Soskic replaced him for the second half. The match finished 2-1 to England thanks to Jimmy Greaves’ 90th-minute winner.

Valentina recalls being on her way home in a taxi, having picked up their daughters from school and nursery. “The driver said to me: ‘Did you hear about the game in London? Our team came out on top,’” she says. “‘What do you mean,’ I said back to him. ‘It finished 2-1.’ ‘Oh, that doesn’t mean a thing. Yashin played the first half - the score was 0-0 when he came off.’

“That's what the reaction was like in Moscow. All the fans were celebrating him again.”

In his autobiography, Yashin wrote that his “childhood ended” at the age of 11 when he and his family arrived in Ulyanovsk, about 800km east of Moscow, chosen as a safe place to relocate the munitions factory where his father worked. By the time he turned 13, Yashin was working there himself, making bullets.

He wrote: “Girls and boys of my generation waited in line for bread, dreamed of victory on the front and a spare piece of lump sugar. We had to make sacrifices long before our time.”

They dragged the machines through the snow, rebuilding the factory out in the open. Food came from a nearby village, hauled 12km home on the back of a sleigh.

Eventually, the Nazis were driven out. By 1944, it became clear the “happy rumours of victory at the front spreading in the camp” were more than just hearsay and Moscow was deemed safe once more. Yashin and his family returned home. War would soon be over.

“In war, we received an experience that no course will ever be able to teach,” he wrote. “We were taught how to work - not out of fear or for promises, but to work for one's conscience and to work oneself to the bone. When we were competing for championships and titles, we weren't thinking about the rewards victory might bring, but were happy instead just to be able to play football.”

In other nations, you might find that the most revered footballers play further up the pitch. It could be the midfield schemer, the mercurial number 10, or the wily, sharp-elbowed centre-half. Yashin was a goalkeeper - the ultimate protector, the last line of defence.

The largest country on the planet is a complicated place - beautiful, damaged and proud. But the experience of war, a history of repelling foreign invaders, partly explains the special role of the goalkeeper in Russia.

Take a trip to Moscow’s Tretyakov gallery and you will see Aleksandr Deineka’s 1934 painting The Goalkeeper, a heroic body flinging itself towards the ball. Or there is the 1949 work by Sergei Grigoriev, in which a young boy with a bandaged knee and stoic frame crouches, ready to protect his makeshift goal on broken ground. Its title? The Goalkeeper.

In the 1936 Soviet film The Goalkeeper, the hero saves the day with a penalty stop and even scores the winner himself against a fictional international team clad in all black, resembling some kind of fascist enemy. A musical comedy, its final song contains the lines:

Yashin rose from humble beginnings, through suffering and sacrifice, to become a giant of the 20th century game, and he shone brightest during a time of extraordinary Soviet achievement.

But the end of his life was marked by tragedy and terrible health problems. Despite severe illness, resting on crutches following a leg amputation, the great goalkeeper would address his admirers one final time. It happened when the Soviet Union itself was close to collapse.