Oleksiy Blokha, the first coach of Vitaliy Mykolenko, the defender of the Ukrainian national team and Everton, spoke about the first football steps of the Dynamo player in Cherkasy and the capital.
- I came to the seventh grade. I looked at Vitali during a physical education lesson and invited him. There is a fire academy nearby, and we trained there. I watched Mykolenko for a week or two. He is small, agile, fast. I wrote "super" opposite his name in the magazine. Mykolenko trained with me for three years, from 8 to 11. His group graduated, we no longer had a gym at the firefighters' academy, and were given another field. Vitalii had a long way to go, so he went to the sports school. After training there for a year or two, he was noticed in Kyiv, and his father took him to Dynamo. He didn't seem to make the cut the first time, but they took him the second time. And from the age of 13, Mykolenko played for Dynamo.
Vitali is a guy with a temper, so angry, both in life and in football. And at Everton, he is now playing hardball. And he grumbles, grumbles all the time. He's a grumpy guy. He puts his head down and grumbles. "Biting", three times on the legs, once on the ball. Such is the school and his dad is like that. On the pitch, they say, Vitalii is like that, and in life he is not easy, and there were fights at Dynamo Kyiv. Kroshchenko kept him, while they wanted to expel Mykolenko. They stopped them, and he stayed. Dad went, negotiated, resolved the issue. And he stayed at Dynamo Kyiv. Back in 2009-2010, when he was studying with me, it was clear that he was a guy of character. He needs to be guided in the right direction.
But he was the smallest in the team. He is a defensive midfielder by nature. He could run for three days in a row without stopping, he was in good health. He could play two games in a row for one and a half halves. I told him: "Vitali, take a rest," and he said: "I'm not tired, I'll keep running". The genetics are good," Blokha said in an interview withUV.