Oļegs Karavajevs

Oļegs Karavajevs (born 13 February 1961) is a former Latvian international football goalkeeper. Karavajevs was the goalkeeper with most appearances for Latvia in the 1990s.

Club playing career

His first club was Alga Frunze in Kyrgyzstan (still within Soviet Union) with which Karavajevs played 18 matches in 1979. Karavajevs stayed with Frunze until 1984, except for a brief time with Pakhtakor Tashkent in 1981. Then came a season with Kairat Almaty but Karavajevs became a real Soviet First League goalkeeper in 1985 when he transferred to SKA Khabarovsk. With SKA he played 88 matches over two seasons and was invited to transfer to Daugava Rīga where he took over the number one goalkeeper position from Aleksandrs Kulakovs.

In 1987 Daugava with Karavajevs as an irreplaceable goalkeeper nearly earned promotion to the Soviet top league but in 1988 the performance of the club started to decline and Karavajevs had to battle for his position with Valeri Shantalosov.^[1]

In 1988 Karavajevs left Daugava for Fakel Voronezh. For two seasons he was the top goalkeeper of Fakel but then he went abroad and joined Serbian club OFK Belgrade, playing back then in the Yugoslav First League. While playing in Yugoslavia, his name was spelled and referred to as Oleg Karavajev.^[2] He came to Belgrade in summer 1990 having played the second half of the 1990-91 season back with Fakel. Next summer he returned and stayed with OFK until winter break of the 1992-93 season (already playing in the First League of FR Yugoslavia) when he returned to Latvia where and played with Olimpija Rīga.

His next move came to Cyprus where Karavajevs played for Evagoras Paphos in 1993/1994. From there his steps lead to Carl Zeiss Jena and FSV Zwickau in Germany.^[3]

For the 1998 season Karavajevs went to Latvia as he joined the champion club Skonto FC where he played together with Aleksandrs Koļinko who eventually would replace Karavajevs as the main goalkeeper for Latvia national football team.^[4] In 1999 Karavajevs joined the newly founded FK Rīga with which he won the Latvian Cup and retired after the season.

International playing career

In total from 1992 to 1999 Karavajevs played 38 matches for Latvia.^[5] He was never a 100% first goalkeeper for Latvia, as he had a very strong opponent in the person of Raimonds Laizāns who played for Skonto FC - the base club for Latvia national team in the 90s. Still Karavajevs played slightly more for Latvia - he beat Laizāns by 7 matches but Karavajevs also usually played in the more important matches. Karavajevs played in several historic matches for Latvia - when it managed to hold draws against the Euro 1992 winners Denmark and one of the strongest European national teams Spain. He played his last 2 matches for Latvia in 1999 in two goalless draws against Greece and Albania.^[6]

References