Student of Lobanovskyi

I have never seen Valery Lobanovskyi play football. Firstly, I was still small, and secondly, in those days, games involving Dynamo Kyiv were practically not shown on the then only television program.

But I have heard about him. In the older group of the kindergarten, one of the boys said that there is a football player in Kyiv who can score a goal directly from a corner kick. That footballer is Lobanovskyi.

Later, this information was confirmed by several older boys and some other adults. I couldn't believe it - how can you score a ball from the goal line? It was explained to me that for this you should spin the ball at the moment of impact.

I wanted to learn this over the next ten years of my life. At first there was a rubber ball bought in the "children's world" for 35 kopecks and a sandal made of artificial leather on a bare foot. With them I aimed at the gate that served as a gap between the neighbor's sheds. I didn't always hit - sometimes I got into someone else's laundry hanging nearby, sometimes I hit the ball somewhere behind the barn and then looked for it for a long time, sometimes I hit it all the way to the street, where my ball risked being crushed by cars, of which, fortunately, there were not many at that time .

Later, there was a wall of the newly built Cosmos cinema, now the Laguna nightclub is there. In short, all the walls were mine! The reward for my efforts was a trip to the pioneer camp in Hrinniki at the end of the summer vacation. There was a real netted gate!

In a few years, I enrolled in the football section, where I continued my attempts to learn how to spin the ball like Lobanovskyi. I don't know how many times I hit that ball, trying to spin it - maybe a thousand, maybe ten thousand, maybe a hundred thousand... The process was slow - it wasn't until somewhere in the ninth grade that I finally learned to two-putt from the corner flag three It was then that my coach Volodymyr Shmorgun explained that the ability to spin the ball from a corner is not enough to be a skilled football player. And he did not include me in the application for the championship of Ukraine among young men.

I was comforted then only by the fact that coach Viktor Maslov told the twenty-six-year-old Lobanovsky about the same thing a few years before, after which he dismissed him from Dynamo Kyiv.

It turns out that the ability to serve corners like Lobanovskyi, which I devoted a lot of time to, I never needed? At first glance, yes. On the other hand, thanks to these exercises, I learned to be stubborn and work hard, going to the goal despite the difficulties. I believed that I can do anything when I really want to and I won't stop until I do it. So it turns out that I was Lobanovskyi's student then, which he didn't even know! And how many more such students did he have!

Mykola Nesenyuk