The Unconquerable
Nikita Simonyan, who died on Sunday at the age of 99, was one of the greats of Soviet football as both a player and a coach, but also had a bit-part in the Eduard Streltsov saga
The day before, I’d spent six hours with the historian Axel Vartanyan as he took me through his theories on the Eduard Streltsov rape case. Exhausted and very grateful I’d taken my indefatigable translator out for dinner, vodka had been taken, I’d ended up extremely drunk, had fallen asleep on the Metro and had awoken in a blizzard at the end of the line having been relieved of both my wallet and my phone.
I was not, it’s fair to say, at my best when I interviewed Nikitia Simonyan, who died on Sunday at the age of 99. There’s every possibility that was the worst I’ve ever performed in an interview. It’s very hard to concentrate when you’re engulfed in self-loathing and trying not to be sick. But Simonyan was polite, charming and fascinating. He had played with Streltsov at the 1956 Olympics., replacing him in the USSR side for the final because Streltsov’s teammate Valentin Ivanov had been injured in the semi and the coach, Gavriil Kachalin, liked to pick a forward pairing who played together at club level.
On the boat home, Simonyan had offered Streltsov his gold medal (in those days, only those who played in the final got medals); Streltsov refused, insisting he would win many other medals. He would win the league nine years later and the Cup three years after that, but by then Streltsov was a diminished figure, having served six years in the gulag for rape. Simonyan seemed genuinely not to know what had happened, to still be confused by the events of that fateful night more than half a century later.
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My history of the World Cup, The Power and the Glory, is out now. Order here. Or, for those who dislike Amazon, here.
Postcards from the Past continues with Episode 16: the Cat & Dog Steps in Sunderland, and Brian Clough’s rehab.
Sunderland: Cat & Dog Steps and Clough’s Rehab
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19 Nov
Brian Clough had scored 250 goals in 271 league games when, on Boxing Day 1962, he suffered a serious knee injury playing for Sunderland against Bury. Plunged into despair, he trained furiously on the beach, but was never able to recover his fitness. By the time Hartlepools United offered him the job of manager in 1965, he had begun drinking heavily.
Episode 17 follows next Wednesday. For the full archive of Postcards from the Past, go here.
On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we consider the remarkable life of Imre Hirschl, the salami salesman who revolutionised Argentinian football then inspired Uruguay to the 1950 World Cup. Listen here.
On Libero, we discuss the North London derby. Listen here.
A new project with Tifo: an animation charting the entire history of football. Episode Seven, about the early growth of women’s football and the ban is here.
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“Something happened,” Simonyan said over and over. He spoke of players sneaking off after the final day of the national team training camp, having being measured for their World Cup suits, of events unknown at a dacha just outside Moscow, of his shock the following morning when Streltsov and two others were arrested. At times he blamed “the system”, complained of how “the bosses” had weakened the team before the World Cup, but at other moments he seemed to acknowledge Streltsov’s guilt. At one point he reached in a drawer of his desk and took out four photos. Two showed Streltsov shortly after his arrest, the lines of three scratches clear visible on his cheek; the other showed Marina Lebedeva, his victim, lying in what appeared to be a hospital bed with a pair of black eyes. At a guess, I would say Simonyan didn’t want to believe his former teammate was guilty but accepted he probably was.
But Simonyan was far more than a supporting actor in the story of Streltsov. By 1958, he was nearing the end of his playing career and had already proved himself one of the most successful players in Soviet history. He was born to an Armenian family in Armavir in the far south of Russia and brought up in Abkhazia. His family named him Mkrtich, but his friends called him ‘Nikita’ – unconquerable – and the name stuck. During the Second World War, he lived in Sukhumi where he joined the local side.
Aged 20, in 1946, he joined Krylya Sovetov, at the time a top-flight team. It was common for early-season games to be moved away from the cold weather to the south, and it happened his debut, against Dinamo Minsk, was scheduled for Sukhumi. His father’s house was searched by the local authorities and Simonyan was arrested in an attempt to get him to join Dinamo Tbilisi. He remained at Krylya Sovetov, though, until they finished last in 1948 and the club disbanded.
He joined Spartak and, striking up a formidable partnership with Nikolai Dermentyev, soon became a regular goalscorer as Spartak won four league titles and two Cups before he retired in 1959. He had been USSR captain at the 1958 World Cup, his goal against England making him the first Soviet player ever to score in a final match. His 160 goals for Spartak remain a record.
But that was only half the story. Simonyan was named manager of Spartak in 1959 and had won a league and two Cups when, in 1965, he was forced to resign after one of his players, Yuri Sevidov, was involved in a driving accident, striking and killing the renowned scientist Dmitry Ryabchikov at a pedestrian crossing, an accident blamed on the “poor educational work” at the club. Simonyan returned two years later and won another league title in 1969.
His greatest achievement, though, was probably what came next. Simonyan moved to Yerevan to take charge of Ararat. Although they had come second in 1971 they were far from a major force, but Simonyan led them to the double in 1973, meaning he had won the league and the cup as a player, and as a manager with two different sides, an unprecedented feat. “If you compare my work with Spartak and with Ararat,” Simonyan said, “it was harder with Ararat. I had to change my personal style, because the players had a different mentality.”
Although he did subsequently manage the USSR, his one international achievement was the Olympic gold in 1956. And that would mean that, despite everything else he achieved, he would spend his life being asked about one of his team-mates. “There was no one like him,” he said. “He was very big, muscular. He could do anything with the ball, had great understanding of the game. He was a phenomenon.”
He was also probably a rapist – and that was a question Simonyan asked himself for the rest of his life.