Former Dnipro and Chornomorets midfielder Serhii Politylo recalled his time at Dynamo Kyiv.
- You are a graduate of RVUFC, a famous non-club football school in Ukraine. How did you get there?
- I am from Novovolynsk. There was a boy from there in this Kyiv boarding school. Nowadays, children start training from the age of 3-5, but in my childhood, this was not the case. We didn't have a football school or anything like that. We just gathered with the boys, as we usually do in our villages, at a small stadium near the church, and played mostly with men. It was just yard football.
There was a man named Vasya Sokolovskyi, who coached children for a while. So he took me to RVUFC to watch. Out of 200 people, maybe 20 were selected. I was somewhere in the top three. I spent four happy years at the boarding school. It was like a small village where everyone knew each other - we played all kinds of sports and lived close by.
- Tell us about your transition from youth football to adult football.
- It was an interesting situation. My coach was Vladimir Yevgenyevich Ishkov, may he rest in peace, he recently passed away. He was always telling us that the most important thing in the final year was to get to the final. And then "coaches from different clubs will watch you closely". Although we made it there every year. In the final year, we reached the final and took second place, while the first place went to Dynamo Academy, where Zozulia, Kravets, Kichak played - a great gang.
- By the way, didn't Dynamo have a chance to get through?
- Actually, there was a condition that after graduating from RVUFC we were obliged to come to Dynamo-3. They were coached by Yeskin. We went there, trained, as if to say that we could sign a contract. But I didn't see any particular prospects in that. When we were training at the boarding school, we could take special cards to get into the Dynamo stadium and watch the matches. Of course, when I watched, I dreamed: "I wish I could play for Dynamo after graduation.
But every year you realise that it will be difficult. At Dynamo-3, there was a situation where if you didn't prove yourself in a couple of months to be invited to Dynamo-2, then you were done for. Aliyev and Milevsky had already played at Dynamo-2. The youngsters were given extremely modest chances. Everyone was looking towards the legionnaires, so it was almost impossible to break into the first team. I refused to stay at Dynamo-3, saying that my parents said I was small in stature and would not fit the specifics of Dynamo's structure.
Kirill Krutogorov