Dynamo Kyiv failed to start the championship of Ukraine, losing the first two games, and currently occupies the last place in the table. There can be no excuses for such a result - current Dynamo should beat current Dnipro-1 and current Zorya in any lineup, on any field in any weather. Why didn't this happen? Have football players forgotten how to play? Are the coaches out of their minds?
Photo — Yu. YuryevI will try to offer my own version of what happened. And what happened was, in my opinion, a very simple thing - the people of Dynamo really learned how to play football. But not football in general, but Ukrainian football, which has very little to do with football in the normal sense of the word. The last time "Dynamo" played Ukrainian football was on December 12, 2021, playing in a draw with the same "Zorya", which, despite the winter weather, openly lay on the field for almost the entire second half, maintaining a draw with all truths and falsities.
From that time until August 28 of this year, Kyivans did not play against Ukrainian teams. During this time, they got used to a completely different football, which they play, instead of "working for the result". How it looks could be verified this Sunday, when viewers of the Setanta channel, who were expecting the broadcast of Formula 1 car races, were unexpectedly "happy" with the showing of the game of the "presidential" club "Kryvbas" with the team "Lviv" in the championship of Ukraine. Both teams diligently hit the ball for almost two hours and ran around the field to the wild shouts of the coaches that echoed through the empty stadium. But for some reason, they often fell not on the ball but on the opponent, losing the ball after the second or third pass.
Calling this push football would be an insult to football. And this is how we play almost all games, with the exception of matches involving "Dynamo". In them, the opponent stands in three rows in his half of the field and kicks the ball forward at random. Sometimes there is a counterattack, and more often the Dinamo players are stuck in this wall until they score a couple of goals. It did not start yesterday - this is how they have been playing against Dynamo for four dozen years.
This time, the Kyiv team simply could not switch from real football - before that, the Dynamo team played six qualifying matches for the Champions League - to Ukrainian football. It's like a driver who drove a car with an automatic transmission for ten years, and then switched to a car with "mechanics".
I repeat, this in no way justifies Dynamo, which played two very bad matches in the championship. I am sure that the Kyivans will eventually adapt to our football and start beating everyone again. But what to do with this football in Europe? Where they play the ball, not against the opponent, where they don't simulate clinical death after every contact with something solid, don't knock the ball out at random just to pass the time? How can a team switch from one sport to another every week so as not to look like the same, sorry, "Zorya" in the European Cups?
I think that one should not think about the problems of "Dynamo" - they will be solved in the team. One should think about Ukrainian football. More precisely, about what we call football for some reason. Oh yeah.
Mykola Nesenyuk
