“Work always pays off,” said goalkeeper Andriy Lunin after putting Real Madrid in the Champions League semifinals after eliminating the current champion, Guardiola’s City. It doesn’t happen every time, but it’s beautiful to see when it happens. Just four years ago, the Ukrainian was in goal for a second-tier team, Real Oviedo, which that season was fighting, above all, not to be relegated. His time in the blue and white club began with a meal where he and his father made the coach and sports director promise that they were going to make him a starter. They didn’t trust. The precedents, when he was transferred to Leganés and Valladolid, justified his doubts. Oviedo complied. Lunin too: he helped them retain the category. It is normal that the Principality boasts now and that the local newspapers have dedicated dozens of articles to him these days: “The hero of the Champions League was forged in a small apartment in Lugo de Llanera,” says one of them. It was, surely, from that Asturian town of 3,400 inhabitants where he settled upon his arrival in Asturias, where he trained the first quality of a good goalkeeper: self-esteem.
His former teammates say that the first thing he did when he arrived in Oviedo was buy artificial grass to also prepare at home and ask the coaching staff to “train more.” Lunin is that nerdy kid who was in every school and who suggested to the teacher: “Why don’t you give us a surprise exam?” Before arriving at the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday, he had also thoroughly studied his rivals; That is why —as David Álvarez told this newspaper—, when Bernardo Silva took the second penalty of the shootout, instead of throwing himself to the side, he stayed in the center. He stopped that one and another one.
As a child, Lunin was a striker: “Everyone likes to score goals. Being a hero is more beautiful. But I became a goalkeeper little by little,” he once explained to EL PAÍS. Those with the goals, however, were very clear last Wednesday who had been the hero of the match, as shown in a video where Rodrygo, Bellingham and Rüdiger hug their goalkeeper in the white locker room. He not only saved two penalties. He weathered a hail of corners (18) and faced endless harassment from City, which made 117 attacking plays to Madrid’s 17 alone before extra time.
There is a lot of talk these days about Lunin’s shyness, his seriousness, his striking, however parsimonious, reaction – just another Wednesday in the office – when Rüdiger scores the last penalty and his teammates have to go look for him on the field so that celebrate the victory. But if I ever find myself faced with a crisis, I want it to be that calm man with the number 13 on his back and a master’s degree in benching who holds my hand. The 14-time European champion also entrusted himself to San Lunin when the team ran out of legs after 120 grueling minutes of play.
His Instagram account abounds, among some pictures of the countryside, with photographs dressed in the same way as his wife and son and messages of support for his country, Ukraine. “My people, my family, my friends, my school… are there and it is not easy, when the worst news comes out, to be focused on football,” he declared on Wednesday, after eliminating the European champion. He has auctioned off t-shirts signed by his colleagues to pay for a drone for the Ukrainian army and has asked for help to pay for ambulances to treat those injured by the Russian bombings. Putin thought it was going to be a walk in the park, but more than two years later, he still hasn’t won or lost the war. Ukraine resists and a shy 25-year-old boy remembers that example every day in the most competitive locker room, where nothing is given away. Not so long ago, when the club that had signed him in 2018 for 8.5 million euros did not have him, Lunin let himself be loved by a modest second-rate team. Today he receives the well-deserved reward for his work, discipline and composure. In a rabid game of excessive passions he has a lot of merit. But, in Oviedo, they already knew that.
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