On Tuesday night, Ukraine played out a 0 – 0 draw against England in a crucial World Cup qualifier.
But the last time the two teams met at a major tournament, it was on Ukrainian soil at Euro 2012 and England prevailed thanks to a Wayne Rooney goal.
Manager that day was former USSR icon Oleg Blokhin. But he has since departed the national team job. However he was not sacked. Instead he made the decision to swap the national team for the club he represented for 19 years as a player between 1969 and 1988.
But Dynamo Kiev are far less dominant than they were during the period in which he won eight Soviet league titles, five Soviet Cups and two Cup Winners Cups.
He took over the managerial hotseat at one of their lowest ebbs in September 2012. Previous manager Yuri Semin was sacked after losing four of the first five games of the 2012/13 season in all competitions.
Blokin managed to turn Dynamo’s form around and they managed to finish third in the league. However they missed out on the Champions League to Metalist Kharkiv and were left 17 points behind champions and great rivals Shaktar Donetsk.
Losing out to Shakhtar has become a regular occurrence. The team from the Eastern mining city has beaten Dynamo to seven of the last nine league titles, really stealing their thunder and overturning the dominance Dynamo enjoyed on the Ukrainian scene.
This season, Shakthar may only be second after eight matches but Dynamo Kiev are well off the pace. Beaten by Shakhtar on matchday 4, Dynamo are down in sixth, already five points down on their title rivals.
So what has precipitated their decline?
On one hand, the death of Valeriy Lobanovskyi in 2002 seems an important marker. One of the greatest managers of all-time, Lobanovskyi managed Dynamo for three spells, spanning 21 years.
The first two spells lasted between 1974 and 1990, yielding eight league titles. He returned in the post-Soviet era when Dynamo were struggling somewhat, winning five consecutive titles between 1997 and his death during brain surgery in 2002.
Lobanovskyi was famed for his belief in the system over individuality and the emphasis he placed on adequate preparation, also pioneering the use of scientific methods and even computers. He was also a domineering and respected personality.
Football's Scientist Valeriy Lobanovskyi
However, those standards have not been met since his passing and it is no surprise that a cash-rich Shakhtar has motored past and dominated much of the last decade. One must also remember that Donetsk have had the same manager since 2004 with Mircea Lucescu providing rare stability.
In addition, clubs like Shakhtar and Metalist Kharkiv have become incredibly wealthy. Shakhtar is owned by Rinat Akhmetov who is worth over €10 billion and is one of the 20 richest men on the planet. He has also invested heavily in the team and infrastructure, including the construction of the UEFA-standard Donbass Arena.
Metalist finally overtook Dynamo in the league to finish second last season after finishing third every season from 2006/07. But it has not been an organic process and there are shady goings on, given that the club was kicked out of this season’s Champions League over match-fixing allegations. Like Shakhtar the club was owned by a billionaire. Oleksandr Yaroslavsky is worth €3.5 billion and before he sold the club last December, he invested heavily in both infrastructure and squad terms. The new owner is 27-year-old Serhiy Kurchenko who owns Gas Ukraine which controls almost 20 per cent of the country's gas market.
Of course, Dynamo are not struggling financially by any means. Indeed their owner Ihor Surkis is a billionaire himself, although his wealth is dwarfed by Shakhtar’s Akhmetov. And even if they have started poorly this season, they spent significant sums in the summer to acquire Ligue 1-winning midfielder Younes Belhanda (€10 million), Bordeaux left-back Benoit Tremoulinas (€6.5 million), Dutch international Jeremain Lens (undisclosed) and Congolese striker Dieumerci Mbokani (€3 million).
So it is not really a case that Dynamo has declined. It is more of a case that they have lost some of their advantage when compared to the likes of challengers like Metalist and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk.
Main Image: Darijo Srna of Shakhtar kicking Dynamo Kiev's talented Ukraine international Andriy Yarmolenko between the legs
