Coach Marcel Lichka will head the Moscow football club “Dynamo”

Failed in the last championship of Russia “Dynamo” will try again to climb to high positions under the leadership of the until recently unknown Czech coach Marcel Lichka. He deserved the attention of the Moscow grandee with his successful work with Orenburg, which, having risen to the top division from the second in status, took seventh place, ahead of Dynamo and showing a very productive game. The departure of Lichka paved the way for a return to Russian football for one of the first top foreign players to appear in it. This is another Czech Jiri Yaroshik, who will lead the Orenburg club.

Orenburg has officially confirmed that Marcel Lichka, who coached him, is leaving the club. Its sports director Dmitry Andreev said TASSthat Lichka “decided to leave.” “We wanted to keep him, he did a very high-quality, good job. There are no offenses against him, this is his choice, which must be respected, ”added Dmitry Andreev.

Where exactly Marcel Lichka goes is no longer a secret.

Many sources – Sport24, championat.com, Sports.ru, “RIA News”, RB “Sport” – they said that in the near future he would sign a contract with Dynamo. With the help of Lichka, it will try to overcome the crisis in which it found itself last season.

It looked especially unexpected given the contrast with the season that preceded the one that had just ended. In the Russian Championship the year before last, Dynamo under the leadership of the German Sandro Schwartz made a real breakthrough. The team ended up in third place, winning the tournament’s medals for the first time since 2008. In addition, Dynamo played in the final of the Cup of the country, which they had not reached for exactly ten years. It was after the final match at Luzhniki, which ended in defeat from Spartak, that Schwartz announced about breaking up with him. It is believed that its main reasons lay outside the purely sporting plane, but were primarily related to the problems that many foreigners had in the RPL after the start of a special military operation in Ukraine.

Schwartz was replaced by Serb Slavisa Jokanovic, a coach with a rich and controversial biography (he achieved the greatest success in the English division next in status to the Premier League, and there was virtually no success at the elite level). The results of the experiment were disastrous. In the championship, Dynamo collapsed to ninth place, and Jokanovic fired three rounds before its completion.

Meanwhile, the bet on the 45-year-old Marcel Lichka also looks risky – just because his coaching biography is not very rich. Before appearing in 2020 in Orenburg, which at that time was playing in the second-highest domestic division, Lichka worked for only a few years in the not-so-noticeable championships of the Czech Republic, Poland and Belarus. True, his Russian achievements look impressive.

Lichka quickly brought Orenburg to the elite, and in it he immediately jumped to a record seventh place for the club.

At the same time, Orenburgers usually showed productive football unusual for modest teams. In terms of the number of goals scored in the championship – 58 – they were surpassed only by Zenit, Spartak and Krasnodar, and, for example, the silver medalist of CSKA was left behind.

Orenburg also played a number of successful matches against the giants. And for the Dynamo management, the most important was, presumably, the most recent of them. Two weeks ago, in the final round of the championship, Orenburg defeated Dynamo at home – 3:0 – and, thanks to this victory, got ahead of him in the table.

The transition of Marcel Lichka from a club without ambitions to a club with huge ambitions opened, as it turned out, the way to return to Russian football for one of his almost iconic characters. Dmitry Andreev confirmed to Sport24 that the vacant post in Orenburg will go to compatriot and Lichka’s peer Jiri Yaroshik. He will sign a contract with the club for a period of at least two years.

Yaroshik at one time was among the first potentially top foreign players who found themselves in the Russian championship. In 2003, CSKA acquired a central midfielder from Sparta for a record amount of $3.5 million for Russian football at that time. Yaroshik quickly turned into a core player for the army and even attracted the attention of Chelsea. The Londoners carried out his transfer from CSKA in 2005, and with them the Czech immediately won the gold of the championship, the first after the purchase of the club by Roman Abramovich. True, the continuation of Yaroshik’s career was not so bright. Chelsea soon said goodbye to him, and the giants were no longer interested in the midfielder. There was nothing strange in the fact that in 2008 he got into the Samara “Wings of the Soviets” for some time.

The coaching background of Jiri Jaroshyk is not yet rich and in this sense is similar to the background of Marcel Lichka. Since 2017, he has been working in the Czech Championship with different clubs and has not made extraordinary take-offs with them. The latter, Teplice, who fired Yaroshik in March, did not penetrate with him at least into the top ten in the championship.

Alexey Dospekhov