Mykola Neseniuk: "We have changed forever. Only the rudeness of Shakhtar players and coaches has remained the same"

Renowned journalist Mykola Nesenyuk talks about a characteristic trait shared by the players and coaches of Shakhtar Donetsk.

"Yesterday, Shakhtar almost secured first place in the Ukrainian football championship. We could congratulate coach Igor Jovicevic on this success and be happy for the talented Croatian specialist, who finally won his first title in Ukraine. But it doesn't work.

And not because Jovicevic is a bad coach. On the contrary, he is probably the most important contributor to Shakhtar's championship. You have to be able to make the strongest team in the country out of the players of the former Mariupol! And not because the Shakhtar were being pulled to the championship by the referees and football authorities. The current Shakhtar were objectively stronger than anyone else and would have won the championship without any help.

I was unpleasantly surprised by something else - the behaviour of Jovicevic and his team. I attended Shakhtar's last two games against Veres and Zorya. During those games, the bench, led by the coach, got up from their seats after every play, jumped around the pitch and shouted at the referee in two dozen voices, demanding the decisions Shakhtar needed. And while this was not so audible in Rivne, where a couple of hundred fans had infiltrated the stands, it looked ugly at the empty stadium in Kyiv. The behaviour of Shakhtar's coaches and substitutes, and the cowardly reaction of the referees.

It didn't start yesterday. Back in the summer of 2001, at the same Kyiv stadium, Shakhtar, led by the future traitor Tymoshchuk, chased the referee as a team after he dared to award an eleven-metre penalty in their goal in favour of Dynamo. The referee, I think his name was Melnychuk, showed good running speed then, running away from the angry players. And then... he cancelled the penalty!

More than twenty years have passed since then, we have gone through two revolutions and a war, and we have changed forever. Only the rudeness of Shakhtar's players and coaches has remained the same. It's as if the team hasn't lived in Donetsk for ten years, and this contagion hasn't been wiped out. The same Jovicevic, while working in Lviv and Dnipro, looked like a model of a European gentleman, inspiring sincere sympathy. And as soon as he started coaching Shakhtar, he turned from a nice gentleman into... Shakhtar's coach in a short time.

Would you say that this is not the most important thing, that the result that will remain is the most important thing, and that the rudeness allowed to only one team will be forgotten? Try to remember this after Shakhtar get another 1-7 in European competitions, just like in Rotterdam two months ago, and sit quietly. Very quietly. Because Europe does not understand such 'gentlemen'," Nesenyuk wrote on his Facebook page.