Vitaliy Mikolenko: “Since childhood I have played against the elders. Therefore, from childhood I was taught to play hard and ne

Ukrainian defender of the English "Everton" Vitaliy Mykolenko spoke about his first steps in football.

“I was six years old when I started playing football. But I always played with older children. I seem to have always been drawn to people older than me, even now I am younger than almost all of my friends.

These are good memories of how I played near our apartment building, right on the street. That's all we did, because back then there were no laptops or video games.

I never really thought about football until I started playing. And I immediately liked football.

But in football, I have always relied on hard work, even as a child. Not only did I not yet have special skills, I also constantly played with older children. So I always played hard and never stopped.

And as for my first steps at the Dynamo Kiev school, where I got at the age of 12... I know that many people say: "I would like to go back to the days when I was at school." But I definitely don't want that! It was hard for me. Every day for me started with breakfast at exactly 7:40 in the morning, and then went to school, where I didn’t like it at all.

I was at school until about 15:00, and then right from there we went to the training camp, had lunch, and then started training - at 17:00 or 17:30. And so six days a week. Week after week. Only on Sundays I had a day off, ”Everton’s official website quotes Mikolenko as saying.