Well-known journalist Mykola Nesenyuk spoke on the topic of holding the current season's championship of Ukraine in wartime conditions.
Mykola Nesenyuk“Should I have started?
The first half of the football championship of Ukraine, which started on the eve of Independence Day, has ended. Maybe not as planned, but 113 matches of the first round out of the planned 120 were held. Let it be with adventures - postponements, stoppages due to air alarms and lights out - but the teams played these matches. Now you can try to summarize and answer the main question - should the football championship have been started in the midst of the war?
The answer suggests itself - of course it had to! To show ourselves, the world and the enemy that despite mortal danger, we continue to play football and inspire the nation to victory! But who to show? Who in Ukraine saw the matches of the current championship? There were no spectators in the stadiums - security requirements, and on TV this football had to be searched very well and not always successfully.
Now it is already clear that the moment to transfer the telecasts of the football championship to a paid platform was chosen extremely poorly. Well, during the war, who will pay money for the right to watch the match between "Minay" and "Ingulets"? On the contrary, viewers should pay extra to watch this, let's say, spectacle!
Why can you now watch World Cup matches with the participation of the best football players on the planet for free, and you have to pay extra for watching the games of domestic "professionals" separately? How do you explain this to people? What is the educational effect of football during the war, when no one sees this football except for the very interested people, of whom there are several thousand in the whole country?
Would you say that at most of the matches of our championship, even in peacetime, the people were not particularly angry? And you will be right - when no one is watching football, you can "help" the right team to win a little. I was personally inspired by it - individual arbitrators "wondered" this fall so openly and shamelessly that I forgot about war and missile attacks! Real professionals of war are not afraid and always do their job! The fact that the schedule of the championship was made in an unclear way and was freely violated or not by everyone, I already mentioned recently. It seemed that the teams decided among themselves when and where to play or not to play at all.
I will not go on about the bad. Because, despite everything, football did help us feel invincible. And there is time to correct all the specified and unspecified shortcomings - until March, when the championship should resume. Maybe other people are already doing it. And it instills even a little hope..." Nesenyuk wrote on his page on the Facebook social network.
