Kyiv: On Tuesday, October 16, former footballer and coach of Dynamo Kiev Oleg Bazilevich died at the age of 81.
This was reported on the official page of the Kyiv club press service on Facebook.
“With boundless sorrow, the football world was greeted by the tragic news of the death of the outstanding Ukrainian footballer and coach Oleg Bazylevych. At the 81st year of life, the heart of an extremely decent, kind and intelligent person stopped beating, ”the message says.
From 1957 to 1965, Bazylevych, being the Dynamo striker, spent 161 matches and scored 53 goals. In the white-and-blue team, he spent almost his entire playing career, but ended it at Shakhtar Donetsk, having become the author of nine goals in 32 matches. Later he was invited to the headquarters of the Dynamo multi-year tutor Valery Lobanovsky, with whom he composed a coaching tandem.
“As a player, I won the first gold medals for Dynamo Kyiv in the USSR Championships in 1961. As a coach, he became a two-time champion of the USSR, the winner of the Cup Winners' Cup-1975 and the European Super Cup, the bronze medalist of the 1976 Olympic Games, ”the press service reported.
It was Bazylevych who created the Dynamo science laboratory, which resulted in Kiev’s victories in the Cup Winners Cup of the 1974/1975 season and the UEFA Super Cup of the same year.
In addition, the footballer was one of the first coaches in the history of the Ukrainian team. As a mentor for the “yellow-blue”, he spent a little less than two years, during which the country's main team managed to spend 11 matches and get four victories.
In recent years, Bazylevych courageously fought with one of the most difficult ailments of our time - Parkinson's disease.
It's not well known if coach Bazylevych could have died as early as August 1979, when he agreed to help the achievement of new heights for Uzbek Pakhtakor from Tashkent for a year.
By that tragic accident, one of the worst tragedies in Soviet football happened that year - almost all of the Pakhtakor team crashed in the sky over Dneprodzerzhinsk when, on August 11, two Tu-134A liners of Aeroflot airlines collided (flights 7628 Chelyabinsk - Voronezh - Chisinau and 7880 Tashkent - Gurev - Donetsk - Minsk).
Among the 178 people killed in the catastrophe, 17 were members of the Pakhtakor Tashkent football club team flying to Minsk: 14 players, a second coach, an administrator and a doctor. Bazylevych himself did not accidentally get on that flight.