Watch British children playing football, and all of them will want to be the centre-forward, scoring the goals and grabbing the glory; in the Russian schoolyard, though, the big argument will be over who plays in goal. Even four decades after he inspired the USSR to a World Cup semi-final, Lev Yashin, the only goalkeeper to have been named European Player of the Year, regularly tops polls as Russia’s greatest ever sportsman.

Yashin is like the Dalai Lama – every generation has its own incarnation. Rinat Dasayev, although probably the greatest goalkeeper in the world in the late 1980s, never quite escaped comparison with Yashin the Black Panther, while Sergei Ovchinnikov, Russia’s keeper at the European Championships last summer, has been saddled with the “new Yashin” burden for years.

And the latest in the great tradition of Russian goalkeepers is Igor Akinfeyev, the 19-year-old who will line up for CSKA Moscow against Sporting Lisbon in Wednesday’s Uefa Cup final.

He made his debut in the Russian top flight when he was just 16. “I remember when I found out that [Veniamin] Mandrykin [the first-choice goalkeeper] was injured,” Akinfeyev said. “I was very nervous about how I would be received, so I locked myself in a room in our training camp. I wouldn’t speak to anyone. In the evening we had a training session, so I had to go out, but the guys greeted me warmly. After that first game I took a load of beer to the sauna to celebrate.”

It was a performance worth celebrating. Akinfeyev saved a penalty as CSKA beat Krylya Sovetov 2-0, and went on to win the Russian championship for the first time since the fragmentation of the USSR. In the two years since, he has become not merely a regular with the former army club, but also a fixture in the Russia national squad. Had he been summoned from the bench, he would have been the youngest player at Euro 2004.

“He’s got courage,” said the CSKA goalkeeping coach Vyacheslav Chanov. “He doesn’t get nervous. His main strength is his confidence, which transmits itself to his team-mates. It’s very rare for him to make a mistake in positioning.”

It will be a long time before he emerges from Yashin’s shadow, yet even the Russian great almost gave up football for ice-hockey in 1953 because he was sick of playing second-fiddle to the brilliant Alexei “Tiger” Khomich, who had become a cult figure following Dinamo Moscow’s tour of Britain in 1945. Khomich was so revered that when the Glasgow club Rangers toured Russia in the early 1960s, the Daily Express newspaper asked reporter James Sanderson to interview him. After a desultory effort to track him down, Sanderson pocketed Khomich’s fee himself and made up the column, after which he was terrorised for weeks by telephone calls from Rangers players pretending to be Soviet officials threatening legal action over the misrepresentation of a comrade.

In western Europe, the goalkeeper is an outsider, the gawky misfit. Wim Wenders used a goalkeeper as a symbol of existential angst in his 1972 film The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, and the fact that Albert Camus, author of The Outsider, should have been a goalkeeper is regardedseen as entirely appropriate. In Russia, though, the goalkeeper is regarded as the hero.

The Russian love affair with the goalkeeper probably began in 1936 with Semyon Timoshenko’s hugely popular film adaptation of Leo Kassil’s book, The Keeper of the Republic. Its hero, Anton Kandidov, played by the Russian matinee idol Grigori Pluzhnik, worked stacking water-melons on to a cart, and became so adept at catching those that fell that he was noticed by a scout and called up to play in goal for an unnamed Russian team. The climax of the film came when, having made a series of fine saves against a touring Basque side, he ran the length of the field to score a last-minute winner.

Just in case anybody hadn’t worked out the political message, the most famous song of the film contained the lines, “Hey, keeper, prepare for the fight/ You are a sentry in the goal./ Imagine there is a border behind you.”

Late goals may be the stuff of fiction, but the real keepers – and Yashin in particular – were hardly lionised any the less. Any goalkeeper who keeps 100 clean sheets in his league career is said in Russia to have entered the “Yashin Club”.

Injury aside, the only thing that could prevent Akinfeyev joining that club would be a move to a leading western European team. “If you get the chance to leave for a prestigious club, you must take it,” he said. “Maybe not now, but certainly by the time I’m 25.”

In Russia, when you turn 30 everybody forgets about you. There are great actors who were famous across the whole country who die in poverty and oblivion.

That is a sharp slap of reality to those who have seen in CSKA’s progress in the Uefa Cup indications of a bright new future for Russian football. With the financial backing of the oil giant Sibneft – whose $18m a year sponsorship deal was, when signed last year, the largest single-company deal with a football club in history – they are the first Russian side to reach a European final since Dinamo Moscow in 1972, and could be the first eastern winners of a European competition since Red Star Belgrade in 1991.

Victory, certainly, would give credence to the Russian league’s claim that, fattened on investment from the privatised oil and gas companies, it is now edging to the top of the second tier of European leagues – not yet on a par with England, France, Germany, Italy or Spain, but certainly comparable towith Portugal, Turkey, Greece and the Netherlands.

Akinfeyev said: “The level of our league has grown up. It’s great.In 2006-2007 Russia will have two teams in the Champions League. Everything is in place for us to reach the standard of England or Italy.”

Between them and a first Russian success in Europe stand Sporting, whose defensive weaknesses detract from their attacking verve to the extent that although they are favourites, they are not overwhelmingly so. Sporting do, though, have the significant advantage of playing in their own stadium, the Estadio Jose Alvalade in Lisbon, which by coincidence was previously chosen for the final.

Akinfeyev, typically, remains optimistic. “It’s even better to play there, because it means there will be even more fans there and a great atmosphere,” he said. “And anyway, I don’t believe this will my last major final. I dream of playing in a Champions League final, and I believe I will.”

Even the great Yashin did not manage that.