Well-known journalist Mykola Nesenyuk shared his thoughts on Zhytomyr's Polissya's losing streak in the second part of the current Ukrainian championship: the team has not won for five rounds in a row.
Nikolay Nesenyuk"All winning teams are happy in the same way, all losing teams are unhappy in their own way," would be the words of an enemy classic if he lived in our time and wrote about football, not noble adulterers. Every year, new ambitious participants from lower leagues arrive in the top league of Ukrainian football. Their success stories are almost identical and fully comply with the unwritten laws of our football.
It all starts with a new owner who has the money to finance the team. Then comes the invitation of players from among the "downed pilots" whose skills, together with the favour of the referees, are enough to promote them to the top flight in a year or two. There, the newcomer often succeeds thanks to the same thing - the owner's money, which is used by the aforementioned "downed pilots" and almost free foreigners.
Their desire to prove that they are not yet "downed", together with underestimation by their opponents and the traditional favour of luck to newcomers, allows them to score a certain number of points. When the referees suddenly start regularly noticing violations of the rules against the team's players at the opponents' goal and awarding quite fair penalties, the team, under certain circumstances, is able to rise to the top half of the table and even compete for European competitions. It can even get into these "European Cups" only to lose to foreign teams that do not know the unwritten laws of our football.
After a few years, the owner gets tired of burning hard cash for nothing and starts thinking. This is the path that Olimpik, Oleksandriya, Kolos went through in their time... Zhytomyr's Polissya followed the same path, and its owner is now sparing no expense for his project. The same will happen next season with Karpaty.
But something didn't go right for Polissia in the spring. They seemed to do everything right - they recruited a group of new players, held a winter training camp... But for some reason, the points that regularly added to the team's achievements last year stopped coming in - the team, which almost qualified for the Champions League in the autumn, lost its last two home matches to far from the strongest opponents. It wasn't because they played worse.
It's just that for some reason, Polissya's luck turned away from them - either a leading player would break down out of the blue, or the goalkeeper would score a ridiculous goal in his own net... And the ball wouldn't go into someone else's net, no matter how hard you tried! Even the traditional "home" penalty doesn't help. What's the matter? What happened? Who is to blame?
In my opinion, it's not about the players and coaches of Polissia, who have remained the same and are doing the same. It seems to me that football's fate turned away from the team because it broke one of the unwritten laws of football - it entered a boxer named Usyk, not a footballer, as a player in the championship. Everyone can see this by visiting the official website of Polissia.
The owner of Polissia is a newcomer to big football and therefore probably does not know that unwritten football laws do not allow this. There is no one to tell him that the presence of a famous non-footballer among the players not only adds to the hype around the team, but also humiliates the real players of the team and sooner or later is reflected in the results.
Veres Rivne once did something similar when they enrolled a popular blogger in the team. And where is that Veres team now? My point is that football laws, even if they are not written down anywhere, are inexorable. Footballers and coaches will not let you lie. So Polissia has two options: either let the boxer play on the pitch to help out, or remove his portrait as a player from their website. Guess for yourself which option will help the team to get their luck back," Neseniuk wrote on his Facebook page.
