LONDON, UK -- After three years of hot pursuit Chelsea finally have the player Roman Abramovich wanted more than any other - Andriy Shevchenko, the Ukrainian superstar with the American model wife and one of the world's greatest players.
Andriy Shevchenko and wife Kristen PazikHe talks exclusively to James Eve, in London, about the horror of Chernobyl, his Champions League ambitions and how Giorgio Armani helped him to find love.
It was the right place, but the wrong time. In the late summer of 2003 Andriy Shevchenko arrived at the Four Seasons hotel in Milan for a meeting. By chance, Roman Abramovich had chosen the same hotel - a converted 15th-century convent - for talks of his own. Abramovich, in the short time since his surprise takeover of Chelsea, was establishing himself as European football's most powerful club owner; Shevchenko was still glowing from AC Milan's Champions League triumph against Juventus a few months earlier. It could have been the perfect romance. In the end it was a brief encounter.
'I happened to have an appointment there at the same time with another person, who introduced me to Roman,' Shevchenko says. 'Straightaway he asked me whether I'd like to come to Chelsea, but I told him absolutely not, because I was happy at AC Milan. We'd just won the Champions League. I spoke to him for another five minutes and that was it.'
Abramovich would not forget their meeting. It soon became apparent that he wanted the striker above any other to play for him at Chelsea, and so the wooing began. It started as a stealthy affair. In May 2004, Abramovich and his chief executive Peter Kenyon travelled to the northern Italian fashion capital to meet club vice-president Adriano Galliani. The meeting ended with both parties insisting their talk had been 'of a general nature only' and not about the specificity of a Shevchenko transfer. Few believed them.
The following summer the romance went public. Shevchenko and Abramovich were photographed in conversation at the stadium in Boston where Chelsea were playing Milan on a pre-season tour of America. This served only to intensify speculation that they had been talking, if not meeting, in private as well. By now, Shevchenko was sending out mixed messages. 'Even if Milan wanted to sell me, I wouldn't leave,' he said in July 2005, a few weeks after publicly expressing his respect and admiration for what Abramovich was trying to achieve at Chelsea.
The British press reported that Abramovich was prepared to pay up to £85m for the striker. Cifre da fantascienza- 'fantasy figures' - said their Italian counterparts. Milan's fans would probably argue they reflected the true value of their man. And the final figure, when the deal was concluded a year later, was a British transfer record of nearly £31m. It's no wonder Abramovich was so eager to sign the Ukrainian superstar. His European experience fits neatly with Chelsea's ambition of winning the Champions League - he has 43 goals in the competition and only Real Madrid's Raul of current players, with 51, has scored more. Three times the Ukrainian has been the competition's top scorer across a season and he remains one of the game's most consistent strikers. Importantly, for a player who turns 30 later this month, he is capable of adapting quickly to a new league - at Milan he became the only foreigner ever to finish top scorer in his first Serie A season.
This summer, Shevchenko captained Ukraine in their first appearance in the World Cup. Despite the shock of a heavy defeat in their first game, he led his side to the quarter-finals, where they lost to the eventual champions, Italy. A country whose league he had by then agreed to leave.
'Milan is a big club, a great club, but for him to leave Milan for Chelsea is a big statement about where Chelsea is,' said Jose Mourinho about a player who may have been pressed upon him by Abramovich.
There is without doubt an affinity of sorts between Shevchenko and Abramovich, the footballer and the oil billionaire. Most obviously, they speak Russian, are both former citizens of the Soviet Union and, for all their present wealth and comfort, know hardship and early struggle: while the Russian Abramovich began his business empire flogging plastic ducks from a grim Moscow apartment, Shevchenko escaped Europe's worst nuclear disaster in his native Ukraine to become Shevagol, the 'Wind from the East', 'the White Ronaldo'.
We meet on a wet West London evening at the hotel in Kensington where he is living with his 28-year-old American wife, Kristen Pazik, a former model, and their 22-month-old son Jordan. He arrives a little late, having spent the afternoon playing golf at the exclusive Wisley club in Surrey.
He must be tired, but he shakes everybody's hand and smiles, relaxed in his new surroundings. There's nothing showy in his manner, no strut or swagger. He's dressed simply but well in dark grey trousers and a black T-shirt; he negotiates the photo-shoot with practised ease. He is used to being photographed, having modelled for his friend Giorgio Armani, with whom he opened two boutiques back in his former hometown of Kiev.
Armani played a role in his relationship with Pazik, whom he met in 2002 at a post-show party organised by the celebrated designer; they married in July 2004 on a golf course in Washington DC. She is tall and blonde and graceful. Usually she would take part in the shoot, but not today: she is seven months' pregnant, with a son, and keen to avoid the lens.
In Italy Pazik has been accused of enticing Shevchenko away from Milan. Her friendship with Abramovich's wife, Irina, with whom she goes shopping, and her wish to bring up their children in an English-speaking culture were reported as important influences on her husband's decision to join Chelsea. Adriano Galliani, the Italian club's vice-president who was reported to have held those preliminary transfer talks with Abramovich in 2004, described Shevchenko's departure as 'a victory of the English language over the Italian language'.
Shevchenko is defensive but defiant. 'I don't see why I should have to explain to loads of people why we've moved,' he says, speaking in precise, accented Italian. 'Kristen is American, I'm Ukrainian and we've spent the last few years living in Italy. We've already got one kid and there's another on the way. They will need stability and part of that is about what language they are going to speak as they grow up. The decision to come to London was a family decision about what was best for them.'
That has not stopped some Milan fans from, inevitably, branding him a 'traitor'. Perhaps their irritation is understandable: his departure is a blow for Serie A, which is still grappling with the fallout from the match-fixing scandal. After the departures of other top players, including Italy's World Cup-winning captain Fabio Cannavaro, Brazil midfielder Emerson and France defender Lilian Thuram, all to Spain, Shevchenko's move abroad confirmed the growing unease about the fading glamour and appeal of a league not long ago seen as the most prestigious in the world.
More recently, La Gazzetta dello Sport, the Milan-based daily newspaper, published a barbed account of the Shevchenkos' busy social calendar since arriving in London: golf, shopping excursions, a Madonna concert, the musical Chicago and dinner at smart restaurants. How quickly he has forgotten us, it implied.
Shevchenko and Pazik have just found a rented apartment close to Stamford Bridge. Had Abramovich offered to lend him one of his many residences, as was widely reported? 'No. It wouldn't be appropriate,' he said. 'He's the owner of the club. He's my boss and I'm his employee. I want to keep it that way.'
Andriy Shevchenko was born on 29 September 1976 and spent his early years in the village of Dvirkivschyna, 60 miles south of Kiev, before moving with his parents to the capital of what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. His father Mykola was a mechanic in the army, his mother Lyubov worked in a nursery.
When he was nine, on 26 April 1986 a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, spewing a vast radioactive cloud into the skies. The family home in Kiev was only 80 miles away. 'We knew something was going on because my father was in the army, but mostly it was just rumours,' he says now. 'People continued to go to work and go about their business. There was no panic. For days the press and television would not say exactly what had happened, how serious it was.'
The Soviet authorities were unsure what to do, waiting until the school exams were over before evacuating the children, including Shevchenko and his sister Elena, who is three years older, to live on the coast in the east of the country, near Donetsk. 'We were all taken off to the sea, to go camping. Eventually, after two or three months, my parents came to pick us up. It's only now, years later, with all the genetic illnesses that have started to emerge, that we've begun to understand the scale of the disaster. And people didn't just get sick. They also lost their homes, their possessions.' Shevchenko has since set up a charitable foundation for sick children, many suffering from birth defects, the result of the catastrophe at Chernobyl.
As a child, he was enthralled by football and, at the age of 10, was spotted by Dynamo Kiev scout Alexander Shpakov. He was invited to join the club's youth programme. Following perestroika, the programme of economic restructuring and liberalisation introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, the opportunities for a young player had never been so good. He travelled to Germany, Italy and England. In 1990, as part of Dynamo's under-14 team, he finished top scorer in the Ian Rush Cup in Wales and was awarded a pair of boots by the Liverpool striker. 'Funnily enough, the boots were too small for me but I still tried to play in them - until my big toes poked through,' he says, laughing. He has kept them to this day.
When he was 16, Shevchenko failed a dribbling test for a place at a specialist sports university in Kiev. 'After that, I had to choose: whether to continue with football or take another direction. It was difficult, but I never lost my self-belief. I told my parents I wanted a bit more time to prove myself. A few weeks later, Dynamo's second team stepped in. A year later [in 1994] I was playing in the first team.'
Dynamo had won the Soviet Union's championship a record 13 times and now dominated their domestic rivals in the league of the independent Ukraine. In five seasons, Shevchenko won five league titles and scored 60 goals in 118 appearances. But thrashing Dnipro and Shakhtar Donetsk was easy. Recognition abroad depended on success against Europe's top clubs and Shevchenko might have been easily missed were it not for the appointment of Valery Lobanovsky as coach.
Lobanovsky was 58 and already a hero to Dynamo fans when he returned to the club at the start of the 1997-98 season. As a winger, he had formed part of the great Dynamo side that won the Soviet league title in 1961 - the first side from outside Moscow to do so. Then, in 1974, he took over as coach. He held the position for 15 of the next 17 years, a period in which the club won the Soviet league eight times. He also had three spells when he was in charge of the Soviet Union national side: his teams won Olympic bronze in 1976 and finished as runners-up at the 1988 European Championship.
Lobanovsky left Ukrainian football in the early Nineties to take charge of the United Arab Emirates and then Kuwait but, after watching Shevchenko and strike partner Sergei Rebrov in action in the winter of 1996, he was persuaded to return home.
'He was the greatest coach in Dynamo's history and the father of Ukrainian football,' Shevchenko says. 'We called him "The Colonel". He was a disciplinarian and a very intelligent man - I don't just mean tactically. To be successful as a coach you need more than tactics. Lobanovsky was constantly looking ahead, trying to work out where football was going next. He was the first Ukrainian coach to use sports science to get the best out of his players.'
Lobanovsky died in 2002. Shortly after winning the 2003 Champions League title with AC Milan, Shevchenko took the trophy to Kiev and stopped off by his old coach's grave. 'It was my way of thanking him for what he gave me. Without doubt he was the coach that changed me most. He taught me the need to be patient, he instilled the culture of work in me and the importance of respecting your adversary. He laid the foundations on which my career is based.' The respect was mutual. Comparing Shevchenko to some of Europe's more established stars in 1998, Lobanovsky said: 'Big-name players get so far and become complacent. Look at Ronaldo. He's still improving, as he should at his age. But he stands around when he isn't scoring. I wouldn't swap him for Shevchenko, who puts in valuable teamwork.'
Under Lobanovsky, Dynamo made the step up from domestic domination to progress in the Champions League. In the 1997-98 season they reached the quarter-finals of the competition, the highlight of their campaign a 4-0 win over Barcelona at the Nou Camp, in which Shevchenko scored a first-half hat-trick.
'It was the night I was "discovered". After that there was no hiding,' he recalls. The team went even further the following year, beating reigning champions Real Madrid in the last eight, and could have reached the final if they hadn't squandered a 3-1 lead to draw 3-3 in the first leg of their semi-final against Bayern Munich. But Dynamo were ultimately victims of their own success, with their best players being lured away by wealthier and more glamorous western clubs. In the summer of 1999, AC Milan, then Serie A champions, signed Shevchenko for £26m.
'It was like starting my life from scratch,' he says of the move to Italy. His first coach, Alberto Zaccheroni, remembers him as being 'quiet, maybe a bit shy, and respectful. But right from the start he had a great desire to learn - not that he needed much help. He just seemed to soak it up. His record speaks for itself.'
'He seemed to settle quite quickly,' recalls Gazzetta dello Sport correspondent Alessandra Bocci, who followed Shevchenko during his seven years in Italy. 'He was shy, but there was also a quiet confidence about him. It was clear ... he had something to say. And he was never the kind of player who would go out to curry favour with the fans. He wasn't like [Gennaro] Gattuso, for example, who wears his heart on his sleeve. Big gestures weren't his style. It's easy to forget, but back then Milan wasn't a team of stars. For a few years at the beginning he propped up a side that was struggling to hold its own, and he had to wait a long time [five seasons] before winning the Serie A title. There was a lot of responsibility on him - that's a tough thing for a kid of 23 to handle, especially a foreign player. But he always remained very approachable, even when he became the star.'
At home, in Ukraine, Shevchenko remains a national hero, though fame can be perilous. In late 2004, for instance, he became caught up in the country's presidential elections, in which the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych faced the reformist, pro-Western Victor Yushchenko. The contest was marred by corruption and voter intimidation and the sinister suggestion that Yushchenko had been poisoned. How else to account for his sudden facial disfigurement?
During the campaign Shevchenko appeared on national television and glumly read a prepared statement that endorsed Yanukovych, who drew his support largely from the eastern part of Ukraine, the region where the footballer was evacuated as a child in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. The great hero who had departed for the West and married an American looked like a man reading his own death warrant. When Shakhtar Donetsk fans visited Milan for a Champions League fixture a few weeks later, they unfurled a banner with the simple message: 'Your choice made the nation weep.'
Since then Shevchenko has tried to distance himself from what happened. He spoke of enjoying 'warm words' with Yushchenko when the latter, then installed as President, congratulated him on becoming European Footballer of the Year in 2004. 'The people in Ukraine deserve democracy,' he says now. Then, with anger: 'It's bullshit. A big load of bullshit. Listen, politics is a shitty world. I want to stay well away from it, and well away from newspapers and TV stations that are standing up for one candidate or another. I'm an athlete. I represent my country. Whenever I'm called on to play, I play. And when the time comes to stop, I'll stop. But I do all this because I want to, not because someone is forcing me to.'
There was further controversy last month, this time trivial, when, on his competitive debut for Chelsea, he kissed the badge on his shirt as he celebrated scoring in the 2-1 Community Shield defeat to Liverpool. Former team-mates at Milan were disgusted. 'It's best if I don't say what I really think,' said Gennaro Gattuso, the bearded midfield mastiff. 'It looks like he has fallen for his new team in a hurry,' team coach Carlo Ancelotti said.
'People give far too much importance to things like this,' Shevchenko says now. 'They don't look at the person, they look at some tiny gesture instead. When I was at Milan, I didn't win the fans over by kissing my shirt. I did it through the way I played on the pitch. Here at Chelsea I want to do the same.'
He says he misses friends in Italy but is adapting quickly to life in London. The hotel where he lives employs Italian staff and Chelsea use an Italian cook on their travels. As for the football, 'it's faster, more physical and less tactical than in Italy. The smaller teams seem to go for the long-ball approach and, in general, teams don't try to keep possession so long, and the defenders close you down much faster.'
His ambition above all others is to win the Champions League with Chelsea, especially as he was part of the Milan team that lost the final on penalties to Liverpool in 2005, having led 3-0 at half-time. Shevchenko missed the decisive penalty in the shootout. 'It was incredibly painful at the time, but I've learned to see it in a positive light. The team was playing well that night, there was a great feeling between the players. In my opinion we deserved to win, but Dudek made an incredible save to stop me scoring [in extra time]. That's just part of football.'
What is also now 'just part of football', or of English football at any rate, is the constant media attention from both sport and showbusiness journalists. With his model wife, who likes to pose nude, Shevchenko is more likely than many of his team-mates to feel this intense exposure. Kristen admits that she has already been surprised by the close scrutiny of the British tabloid press. Yet Andriy is still engagingly open in conversation and manner. Perhaps this is because in Italy the relationship between footballers and reporters remains comparatively accessible and relaxed, whereas here in England they are protected by image makers and are often paid for interviews (as if they needed the money).
By way of confirming his naivety, the week before we spoke, he had driven on his own to Wentworth, hoping to pay a green fee for a round at the exclusive Surrey golf club. The three gentlemen with whom he made up a four-ball must have been as thrilled as they were unsettled to be joined for the afternoon by Britain's most expensive footballer. Perhaps the ultimate test of his assimilation into Premiership culture, then, will not be how many goals he scores, but whether he is still making such spontaneous trips at the end of the season.
The life and times of Andriy1976: Born on 29 September in Dvirkivshchyna, Ukraine. His father, Mykola, served in the Red Army and his mother, Lyubov, was a nurse.
1986: Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurs in April. His family is forced to abandon their home in Kiev and move to the coast in the east of the country. Later that year, he is brought to Dynamo Kiev after a scout spots him playing in a youth tournament.
1994: Breaks into the Dynamo first team. He goes on to win five successive Ukrainian league championships between 1994-95 and 1998-99.
1995: Wins his first international cap for Ukraine against Croatia.
1996: Scores his first goal for Ukraine in a 3-2 defeat against Turkey.
1999: Signs for AC Milan for £26m in July, making his league debut in a 2-2 draw with Lecce. Becomes the first non-Italian to be top scorer in Serie Ain his debut season, with 24 league goals.
2003: Scores the winning penalty as Milan beat Juventus in a shootout in the Champions League final at Old Trafford.
2004: He is again top scorer in Serie A and Milan win the title for the first time since his arrival. In July, he marries American model Kristen Pazik on a golf course in Washington, DC. The couple had met at an Armani after-show party. A few months later, Kristen gives birth to their son, Jordan. Andriy is named European Footballer of the Year.
2005: After leading 3-0 at half time, Milan lose the Champions League final against Liverpool on penalties. Shevchenko's miss in the shootout is decisive.
2006: In May, he signs for Chelsea for an English transfer record of more than £30m and in June he captains Ukraine in their first World Cup. Their first match is a 4-0 defeat by Spain, but he scores against Saudi Arabia and Tunisia as Ukraine reach the quarter-finals, where they lose to Italy. Scores on his Chelsea debut in August in the Community Shield against Liverpool.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
