R.I.P. Vujadin Boskov

Legend Boskov has died


Sad news for fans of Sampdoria and all of football, as legendary Coach Vujadin Boskov has died.

The news emerged from Serbia today that Boskov has died at the age of 82, just three weeks shy of his 83rd birthday.

He won Sampdoria’s only Scudetto title in 1990-91, that side also lifting the Italian Super Cup, the Cup Winners’ Cup and two Coppa Italia trophies as well as reaching the European Cup Final.

Boskov found success in Spain and Holland too, winning the Liga with Real Madrid and Dutch Cup with ADO Den Haag.

He spent most of his career in Serie A, coaching Ascoli, Sampdoria, Roma, Napoli and Perugia.

Boskov was well loved by fans in Italy and some of his idiosyncratic comments remain legendary, including: “Penalty is when referee whistles.”

Some of his other great phrases were “It’s better to lose a game 6-0 than six games 1-0,” “a great player sees a motorway where others only see a path” and “after the rain comes the sun.”
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That X-Yu phrase 'after the rain comes the sun'. RIP legend you will not be forgotten

Can people stop dying pls, k thx

  Thanks to him I could watch the god of football for this many years, RIP Mister Boskov

RIP. He was one of Calcio's greatest coaches.

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2009/jun/25/sampdoria-1991-rob-smyth

A domestic league has surely never been as superior as Serie A in the late 80s and early 90s. It was so seductively chic and suffused with gravitas that the world's best players were drawn to Italy like VIPs to the coolest afterparty. Goals may have been at a premium but the entertainment was of a subtler kind. Serie A wowed its disciples with an intimidatingly high technical and tactical quality.

The whole business – and it was business, not pleasure – was so otherworldly, and conducted with such operatic intensity, that you felt it should have been the subject of one of Grandpa's bedtime stories rather than available through a BSB Squarial.

It is in this context that we must understand Sampdoria's first and only scudetto in 1990-91, one of football's great modern fairytales. It was a gloriously improbable triumph dripping with enough charm and romance to melt the hardest heart; as incongruous as a love story in a gangster movie, only in a good way. They were the feelgood hit of the spring.

Sampdoria were far from greenhorns, but they had never before finished above fourth in Serie A. That should not suggest that their triumph was anything but richly deserved. They lost only three games, they were the top scorers and, by the time the title was won, they had conceded only five goals in 16 away games. They beat both Milan clubs and the champions, Napoli, home and away as well as taking a win and a draw off Juventus. The authoritative European Football Yearbook noted that their triumph "brooked no argument. [They] were far and away the classiest act in the league."

And the sassiest. Sampdoria's triumph was characterised by a rich and infectious sense of fun. Their team spirit was not, as Steve Archibald said, an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory: it was in evidence throughout the season as they showed that no challenge should be faced without a little charm and a lot of style.

Perhaps the acid test of how likeable they were is that, when they celebrated the title by bleaching their hair en masse for the final game, it didn't seem like the naffest thing ever. They didn't take themselves remotely seriously, cheerily prancing around like something out of the 19th century (see the photo at the bottom of this page) or on stage in full cock-rock garb miming Europe's The Final Countdown.

"[Sampdoria's] success was built on an unbreakable squad unity," wrote John Foot in Calcio: A History of Italian Football. "Seven of the championship team used to hang out together, calling themselves the Seven Dwarves."

At the start of the season, they were certainly dwarfed by their contemporaries. Sampdoria had four players in Italy's World Cup squad the previous summer but they couldn't wait to say ciao to the tournament. Gianluca Pagliuca and Roberto Mancini did not touch or kick a ball, Pietro Vierchowod started only the third-place play-off and Gianluca Vialli had an unmitigated shocker. He would redeem himself wonderfully, scoring 19 goals in 26 games, including strikingly nerveless penalties to give Sampdoria the lead in the second half of home matches against Internazionale, Juve and Milan.

Only Vialli and Mancini scored more than five league goals but then an unlikely triumph needs its unlikely heroes. The left midfielder Beppe Dossena, a 33-year-old journeyman, was the only man to play every league game and scored the opening goal in the epic victory at Inter in May, Giovanni Invernizzi scored a key goal at Torino in the run-in; Marco Branca, the understudy for Vialli and Mancini, scored the only goal in consecutive wins to arrest a mid-season slide; the unobtrusive right-back Moreno Mannini lashed in a glorious volley to ignite the title party against Lecce; and Fausto Pari diligently carried water so that Vialli and Mancini could walk on it.

They were not alone in that. A pair of little-known 24-year-olds, the goalkeeper Pagliuca, and the jet-heeled winger Attilio Lombardo, had probably the best seasons of their careers, and were both rewarded with a first cap for the Azzurri, while the teak-tough and absurdly fast Vierchowod, who would play on in Serie A past his 41st birthday, marshalled the defence imperiously. For all that, the major focus was inevitably on Sampdoria's terrible twins, whose always excellent partnership reached its apogee. They complemented each other perfectly: Vialli was ruthless, powerful and irrepressible while the impish genius that was Mancini, always peculiarly underrated in this country, made mischief in the hole behind him.

Having such deadly weapons was central to Sampdoria's highly successful counter-attacking strategy. It would be unfair to label them as disciples of catenaccio but equally they knew the value of keeping their sheets clean. In this paper, David Lacey described them as "stealthy, guarded", while the description of Rudi Fuchs, a prominent Dutch art critic, to describe Italian football in general fits this Sampdoria side snugly: "The Italians welcome and lull you and seduce you into their soft embrace, and score a goal like the thrust of a dagger."

The blood of opponents was almost exclusively on Italian hands: Sampdoria achieved their triumph with relatively minimal contributions from overseas players. At a time when the three permitted foreigners at each club lorded over the league – Van Basten, Gullit, Rijkaard, Matthäus, Brehme, Klinsmann, Maradona, Careca, Caniggia, Sosa, Skuhravy, Aguilera, Völler, Berthold, Simeone, Lacatus, Hässler, Aldair, Branco, Taffarel, Martín Vázquez, Brolin, Francescoli, Aleinikov, Kubik, Detari, Alemao, Strömberg – Sampdoria's triumvirate of Srecko Katanec, Toninho Cerezo and Alexei Mikhailichenko started only three of the 34 league games together. That was a consequence of the 36-year-old Cerezo's injuries and Mikhailichenko drifting out of the starting XI in the second half of the season. He played more than enough to get a winner's medal, however, the second of a staggering seven in a row with Dynamo Kyiv, Sampdoria and Rangers.

There was significant foreign influence in their manager, the much-travelled Serb, Vujadin Boskov, who had played for the club in the early 60s. He had guided Sampdoria to the Coppa Italia in 1988 and 1989 and also the Cup Winners' Cup in 1990 but that's what they were: a cup team. Having finished fifth in the previous two seasons, there was no real sense that they were ready for a sustained title challenge.

Not least because the opposition was truly formidable. Diego Maradona's Napoli were the champions; Arrigo Sacchi's Milan were the European champions; Giovanni Trapattoni's Internazionale, who in 1988-89 had won the league by 11 points (when it was two points for a win), had the three best players of the world champions, West Germany, in Andy Brehme, Lothar Matthäus and Jürgen Klinsmann. And Juventus, under their new manager, Gigi Maifredi, had spent a grotesque amount of money on Roberto Baggio, Thomas Hässler and Julio Cesar.

Sampdoria would infiltrate this established four and, by coincidence, the fixture computer produced the sort of fascinating double headers that, these days, would explode the Sky Sports hypeometer. (Back then, the BSB coverage of Serie A, which included Andy Gray and even Gary Lineker, was happily restrained.) Both Milan-Sampdoria fixtures were played on the same day as Juventus-Inter; both Sampdoria-Inter fixtures were played on the same day as Juventus-Milan; and both Sampdoria-Napoli fixtures were played on the same day as the Milan derby.

Juventus would eventually fall away disastrously but were omnipresent in the top four until April, while Napoli, probably distracted by the slow demise of Maradona, were a shambles for the most part. Sampdoria, without the injured Vialli at the start of the season, struggled for goals with only three in the first five games. But in the seventh and final match without Vialli, in late October, they put down a marker by winning 1–0 at Milan, surmounting an atrocious pitch with some impromptu keepy-uppy that allowed Cerezo to rifle a volley through the Milan goalkeeper, Andrea Pazzagli. Sampdoria's victory put them top of Serie A for the first time since 1982.

Three weeks later came an extraordinary 4–1 victory at Napoli. Sampdoria were outplayed to a barely fathomable degree, and went a goal down, but won at a canter through two hideous defensive mistakes and then, in the second half, a pair of volleys from Vialli and Mancini that were outrageous in their conception and perfect in their technical execution.

That was the second of four straight wins in which 13 goals were scored, yet after the feast came the famine: Samp lost for the first time the following week, 2–1 at home in the derby against Genoa after a Branco special and would win only one of the next eight games. Crucially, that victory came at home to Inter in the first of two storming contests between the sides.

Vialli gave Sampdoria the lead after 25 seconds but then Mikhailichenko was sent off after being suckered into an elbow by Giuseppe Bergomi. Sampdoria were left hanging on, particularly when Nicola Berti equalised just after half-time. Then Aldo Serena, one of the better headers of a ball in Italian football history, missed by this much with a downward header from Matthäus's undefendable cross. It was arguably the tipping point of the season: instead of losing and going four points behind Inter, as they surely would have done had Serena scored, Sampdoria stole a 3–1 victory with two late goals. Vialli's superb penalty was followed by an impromptu, carpe-diem surge from Vierchowod that led to Mancini's third.

It was a stirring victory but one that could not alter the perception that Sampdoria were living by the seat of their pants. In the next two games they had those pants pulled down, first by Torino – during which Pagliuca lost the plot – and then Lecce. Back-to-back defeats put Sampdoria down to fifth and engendered the widespread perception that they would fall away. This wasn't merely born of a patronising attitude to smaller clubs: Sampdoria had form – or rather lack of it – in this area. Having been within striking distance of the leaders in the second half of each of the previous two seasons, they won, respectively, three of the last 14 and four of the last 11.

A home draw with Lazio restored a semblance of order – and then they went on a run of nine wins and a draw from 10 games. That included a 1–0 win over Juventus, the beginning of the end of Juve's title challenge, Mancini's 92nd-minute winner against Parma, and a 2–0 dismantling of Milan that was probably Samp's best performance of the season. Mancini made Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini look like novices to win a penalty, tucked away supremely by Vialli, and then scored an elegant and quick-witted second on the counter.

A second, more authentic 4–1 beating of Napoli, a game best remembered for being Diego Maradona's last in Serie A, put Sampdoria three points clear, an advantage they still held six weeks later when they visited second-placed Internazionale with four games to go.

The equation was simple: Inter needed to win, Sampdoria not to lose. What unfolded was simply epic. Sampdoria won 2–0 but could feasibly have lost 10–4. The commentator Martin Tyler, not a man given to hyperbole, had gone completely by the end of game, announcing that "In years to come, people will be saying, 'I was here. I was at that game' … Grown men, hardened football-watchers, are scarcely able to turn their eyes to this." Compared to some Italian commentators, he was pretty restrained.

It is often said, with artistic licence, that a match has a gladiatorial feel from the very first whistle, but this truly did: Sampdoria idly took the kick-off, whereupon they were swarmed and dispossessed by a rabid Inter. For the first hour Inter absolutely slaughtered Sampdoria – in an unrelenting 10-minute spell after half-time you could almost hear Sampdoria's players gulping for air – but then Samp scored on the break and from thereon in, though still vulnerable defensively, they counter-attacked with the menace of a cobra whose tail has just been molested.

The game provided the most magnificent sensory overload. It had everything. A missed penalty, red cards for Bergomi and Mancini for a nothing spat at the end of the first half (after which, as the two men trudged off putting the world to rights, Bergomi was hit by missiles aimed at Mancini by his own fans), a controversially disallowed goal by Klinsmann, millions of missed Inter chances; Lombardo hitting the post and Vialli having a shot cleared off the line in the same attack. And, of course, the goals. The first was pinged in from 20 yards by Dossena of all people; the second came from Vialli, who muscled Ricardo Ferri and coolly, cockily rounded Walter Zenga to seal the game and, effectively, the title.

Overall, this was the definitive smash-and-grab victory. Inter had 24 shots to Samp's six. They had 13 corners to Samp's one. The Inter keeper Zenga didn't make a single save; Pagliuca made 14, including, unthinkably, a penalty from Matthäus. He had the game of his life.

Inter didn't go quietly, their fans bombarding Pagliuca with missiles and flares. But when the dust and the smoke settled, Samp had all but clinched the title. They needed three points from three games to finish the job. Invernizzi got them one in a tricky away fixture at Torino. Then, in their final home game, they blew Lecce away with three brilliant goals in the first half-hour from Cerezo, Mannini and the inevitable Vialli, prompting a joyous party that would go on for a long, long time.

As is so often the case, what appeared to be a beginning was in fact nearer an ending. Sampdoria struggled with the pressure of being champions and were in the relegation zone the following December before eventually finishing sixth. They reached the European Cup final against Barcelona, but, cruelly, Vialli missed three good chances before Ronald Koeman put them to sleep in extra-time.

Vialli left that summer, joining Juventus for a world-record fee of £12m. Boskov went too, to Roma, and Cerezo and Pari were also on their way. The decline had begun and Sampdoria were even relegated in 1999. They are back where they belong now, as a decent, generally upper mid-table side in Serie A. For one season only, however, they were so much more.