Yuri Semin: the man who can’t say no when Lokomotiv Moscow call | Jonathan Wilson

He has been both a player and a president of the Russian club, and the 71-year-old is now in his fourth stint as manager which included last season’s remarkable title triumph

Never go back, they say, but Yuri Semin has never been somebody to place too much store by conventional wisdom. He is 71 now, his eyes more watery than ever, and this is his fourth stint in charge of Lokomotiv Moscow. In total, he’s managed them for more than two decades. To a large extent, Semin is the club and that they are playing Schalke in the Champions League on Wednesday is to a large degree down to him.

Semin first became manager of Lokomotiv in 1986. He had a year away in 1991, managing New Zealand’s Olympic team – a typically unconventional move for a coach who manages to combine supreme practicality and the dress sense of a maverick 70s TV cop with the sense that he spends half his life gazing into another realm – before returning for 15 more years at Lokomotiv.

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