During his playing career, Žigaevs played 35 games for the Latvian national team, in which he scored two goals. He was recognized as the best football player of the Latvian Premier League in 2011 and 2013. However, when he stopped playing in 2018, he did not know what to do next.
“I was happy then! (Laughs.) The first week was really a great pleasure. Ventspils, summer, you don’t have to follow any schedules, you don’t have to get up early, you can go to the sea, relax, do whatever you want! Of course, there were some concerns. Any athlete has them already during his career, when he is over 30 years old. I was no exception. I won’t say that I didn’t sleep well because of it, but I did wonder from time to time. But I guess I’m the kind of person who perceives everything positively, that I’ll figure something out and everything will be fine. I’m not a fool, the main thing is to be healthy. When a month later I still didn’t really do anything, it became more difficult – just take the children to the garden, cook, go for a walk. I started to train a little, but it got bad, because all my life I had only done it as training,” Zhigaev recalls in an interview the very usual situation for a professional athlete in relation to the uncertainty after the end of his career.
So, inspired by a foreign vlogger, encouraged by his wife, he started walking around the locker rooms of Latvian clubs and filming there. “That’s how I answered at that time: who am I – an idiot? walk around with a camera and film yourself? However, after thinking about it, I also tweeted whether people would be interested in it. So I went to Riga, filmed, learned to edit, learned to speak in front of the camera, which was probably the most difficult – to see how I look from the outside,” remembers Zhigaevs, who slowly gained supporters and was able to continue such an activity. “To be honest, I didn’t believe that I could do something like that, be a public figure or speak on camera. In the end, see how it turned out. The right moment and situation also coincided, because I was probably the only one doing something like that at that time. At least in football for sure.”
Žigaevs says that at that time it was possible to feel that coaches, players and football people in general were pleased that someone showed interest in them. “I think there was never a negative reaction. On the contrary, he said thank you and appreciated it very much. At the moment it’s already a bit different, because in recent years several people have appeared who do something similar, and sometimes it probably becomes a nuisance in the teams. You can say that I was lucky with the timing and the fact that the niche was empty.”
Shortly before the beginning of the pandemic, the project “Pa pares kausiem” (PPK) created with associates Kristians Karelin and Aivars Baranov followed, which returned many people’s interest in football, and after some time they formed their own football team. “The program was running, it seems, for the third year already. There were two options: either to open a PPK bar, which is still hanging in the air as a good idea, or to make a film about football. Not a team, but a film. We understood that no club would allow us to do that , as we want – it’s raining in the dressing room, hanging out with the players, showing everything as it is. Then we make the team ourselves!” “I didn’t want to train at the time, but I didn’t have the money to hire a coach… Well, I had a category, I will train too (Laughs.) Even then, Aivars chanted all the time about Virsliga as abnormal. I answered – what a Premier League, stop it! However, we see how everything happened. Every season we climb up the level, and now the Premier League doesn’t look so far away anymore. It is clear that at the moment we are not ready for it, but in time – why not?”
Many supporters of PPK also started attending matches of the Latvian national team. Remembering the years of Daiņas Kazakevičas as the head coach, Žigajevs describes that before that the Latvian national team was in a position where it couldn’t be worse. “It’s always a good starting point for at least some development. I believe that in general it was a kind of scrambling on the spot. Even now, it is difficult to see that we can claim anything. I’m not saying that it will be better under the leadership of Paolo Nicolato, but at least there are fresh ideas, a different perspective on the team’s play. You can see that the coach doesn’t care about what happened before. He comes with a new leaf, called everyone who moves to the first camps. The football that the team tries to play under the leadership of Nicolato also seems to me to be very correct and interesting. It’s soccer with a ball. The question asked by experts – are our footballers ready to play like this? Maybe not ready, but it’s more interesting for me to watch such a game. There are still many questions at the moment, but the first answers will be available in the fall.”
However, Žigaevs also criticizes Nikolato, being surprised that the coach expressed his shock about the limited resources of football players in Latvia. “Nikolato has expressed surprise that there are so few national team level players, Dainis has also said something similar before… If you come to work with the Latvian national football team, you have to reckon with it! This was also the case 20 years ago, when the team reached the European Championship. We will never have 150 footballers playing abroad and the coach just has to drive around and decide which ones to call up. We always have to know how to achieve the result with limited resources, so it is very important to be able to work with everyone, no matter what the characters of the players are. If you’re complaining about it when you’ve already signed the contract, I don’t think it’s right. The coaches know very well where they come to work.”
On Thursday, the Latvian champion RFS became the second team in the history of our country to enter the main tournament of the UEFA Europa League, following FK Ventspils for example, in 2009, when Zhigaev was also part of the team. “At that time, it seemed to me like a norm, even a matter of course. You earn good money, you play in the national team, in the championship team of Latvia, you get into the group of the European Cups, you play in the Olympic stadium in Berlin and you feel like one with another with the players of the German Bundesliga. At that moment, it is impossible to evaluate it, because it seems that every year there will be such an opportunity,” recalls the former football player. “At that time, no one thought that for another 13 years none of our clubs would even get close to that. Only then do you begin to appreciate what was achieved at that time. Therefore, we should appreciate this moment, when we are very close to being able to enjoy such and even better emotions on a regular basis.”
Read the entire interview with Yuri Zhigaev in the magazine Sports Newspaper in the August issue, which is still available for the last few days at the best newsstands.
2024-08-31 02:02:37