A vivid story from the ex-president of "Borisfen" about how for the first time in Ukrainian soccer a dark-skinned player entered

Igor Kovalevich, a well-known soccer functionary and former president of Borispol "Borispol" described in detail how in 1996 for the first time in the history of Ukrainian soccer took part in the match a dark-skinned soccer player.

"Today I suddenly remembered a funny story that happened back in 1996 in Zaporizhzhia, where "Borysfen", then playing under the name "CSKA-Borysfen", held its calendar match of the championship of Ukraine against the local "Metallurg".

The team took off for a calendar match from Borispol on the day of the match early in the morning, and a few hours before the starting whistle. Dima Zlobenko and our head coach Ivan Terletskiy with our new player, who was called for our club only an hour before the flight to Zaporizhzhya, took the second plane from Borispol.

By the time we arrived at the stadium, the names of both teams` players had already been added to the match report, and the starting team squads were already warming up on the pitch. And at the end of the second half, instead of Andrei Gusin, who played for our team at that time "Borisfen", Mykhailo Fomenko sent our newcomer, whom Ivan Terletski, has just declared for our club just a few hours before the match, to the pitch.

And at that moment the whole stadium in Zaporizhzhia bursts, after a second of confusion, with loud contagious laughter.

And the point is that for the first time in the Ukrainian championship a black player, our first foreigner from Zaire called Mafumba, who had arrived from Vienna to Kiev just the morning of the match day and immediately signed up for our club, entered the soccer field, and the announcer at the stadium announced that instead of Andrei Gusin he entered the field... Stepan Matviev took the field.

As Stepan later told me, he was explaining to his mother, who watched the match on TV, that it was an elementary mistake of the stadium announcer who didn`t have time to show the new match protocol with the squads of players, rewritten just before the starting whistle, in which newcomer of Borisfen Mafumba was on the post, and not him after a huge drunkenness).

Р. S. Mafumba is far left in the bottom row", - wrote Kovalevich on his page in social network Facebook, posting the above photo.