Nodar Akhalkatsi

Nodar Akhalkatsi. 1981

Nodar Akhalkatsi (2 January 1938 – 24 January 1998) was a professional football manager from Georgia.

Akhalkatsi coached Soviet club Dinamo Tbilisi to the USSR league championship in 1978, with a side that contained the likes of David Kipiani, Ramaz Shengelia, Vitaly Daraselia, Tengiz Sulakvelidze and Aleksandr Chivadze, all of whom were regular Soviet internationals. The team were renowned for their swashbuckling style of football and attack-minded approach.

The following year, Dinamo entered the European Cup and stunned the reigning champions Liverpool with an impressive 3-0 win in the first round. However, they were eliminated by West German side Hamburg in their next tie.

Two years later, Akhalkatsi enjoyed his finest moment as a manager when he guided Dinamo to victory in the 1981 Cup Winners' Cup final,^[1] beating East German outfit Carl Zeiss Jena in Düsseldorf's Rheinstadion. Dinamo had won the 1979 Soviet Cup to gain admittance to the competition, beating FC Dynamo Moscow on penalties in the final.

Akhalkatsi was a member of USSR manager Konstantin Beskov's coaching staff at the 1982 World Cup in Spain, forming a three-man technical team with Beskov and Dynamo Kiev's legendary coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi.

In the early 1990s, Akhalkatsi was one of the integral figures in the formation of the Georgian Football Federation after the republic achieved independence from the USSR. He was the organisation's president from 1990 to 1998.

He died of a heart attack in Tbilisi on 24 January 1998, aged 60, while on his way to attend a tournament in the city.

His son, Nodar Akhalkatsi junior, was the president of the Georgian Football Federation from June 2005 to September 2009.

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