The main match of the season

In my opinion, the main match of not only round 24, but the entire current Ukrainian football championship will be the game between Dnipro-1 and Metalist, which will take place today.

Mykola Neseniuk

And here's why: many "specialists" and "experts" had predicted Dnipro to win before the game. And it's not because Dnipro is currently a contender for the championship title, while Metalist is languishing in penultimate place and is considered a real contender for relegation from the main Ukrainian league.

Numerous "experts" hint that Metalist will simply give the victory to Dnipro because they need it more. In their opinion, it cannot be otherwise, as both teams are financed from the same pocket. Whose pocket? Ask the Premier League or the Ukrainian Football Association, who are supposed to make sure that two or more teams of the same owner do not play in the same league, as required by the European Football Union.

They will tell you (when they do) that these teams have different owners, which is an obvious and well-known lie. Because the owner of Metalist went abroad last winter "for a couple of days" and has since disappeared from the public domain. And the official president of Dnipro-1 does not have and has never had so much money to finance one of the leaders of Ukrainian football.

Let's leave it to Mr Krasnikov's crystal-clear conscience to say that he "found funding" for Metalist after Mr Yaroslavsky stopped giving money to the team. In a normal country, such a unique ability to "find" several hundred million hryvnias for nothing in the middle of a war would not have gone unnoticed by the press, if not by more competent authorities. In our country, everyone understands that Dnipro-1 and Metalist are maintained by the same person who once financed four or five major league teams at once. They understand and are silent.

And in vain. The experience of those long ago times reminds us that despite the fact that these teams "ate from the same bowl", they always played with each other seriously and at full strength, causing misunderstanding and even ridicule from teams belonging to another owner and in matches between them they gave the victory to the "older" team in advance. Of course, when the "senior" team needed the victory.

So today we have to find out whether the principles of fair play between the teams of the same owner, who for some reason is not named out loud, have been preserved. In the first half of the championship, Metalist and Dnipro-1 fought hard and the winner was determined in a dramatic struggle in the last minutes. I want it to be the same today, and I want the "experts" who predict that Dnipro will win without a fight to be put in their place.

I'm writing this not because my Dynamo wants Dnipro-1 to lose points, but because I believe that our football is not sold out yet. Otherwise, Zorya, which since 23 February last year has been living at Dynamo's base in Kyiv, using Dynamo's stadium and infrastructure, and having twenty players in its main and youth teams who belong to Dynamo, would not have beaten its benefactors twice, depriving them of their chances of winning the championship.

Because there is financial assistance and support, without which most of our football teams would not exist. And there is the actual game of football, where everything should be real. When friends in life are irreconcilable rivals on the football field. This is exactly what it looks like, if not for all the participants in our championship, then at least for most of them. You can laugh, but I still believe in it and hope for it. Especially today, when Dnipro-1 and Metalist will play each other.

Mykola NESENYUK