Mykola Nesenyuk: "The memory of Kutaisi, where Dynamo lost the well-deserved championship title, hinders our hopes a little bit"

Against the backdrop of the current Ukrainian championship, renowned journalist Mykola Nesenyuk shared his memories of the events of 1965.

"After Dynamo Kyiv won the 1966 USSR championship, inspired fans came up with a new lyric to the then super-popular song 'Cheremshyna'. Those interested can find and listen to this version of "Cheremshyna". I'm talking about something else - the second line of the lyrics contained the words "Kyiv will win in Kutaisi". Obviously, the name of the Georgian city was inserted more for the sake of rhyme. But not only for that reason. The year before, it was in Kutaisi, where Dynamo lost to local side Torpedo 0-1, that the fate of the championship title was decided.

But first things first. Today, when almost sixty years have passed since those events, it is generally accepted that the "golden" era of Dynamo Kyiv in the sixties began in 1966. Hundreds of tonnes of memoirs have been written about it. In fact, this is a lie - Dynamo was the strongest team in the USSR already in 1965!

The decisive match of that year, as it was believed at the time, took place on 20 September in Kyiv. "Dynamo played Torpedo Moscow, which was first in the table, one point ahead of the Kyiv team. That game caused an unprecedented stir - more than seventy thousand people gathered at the then single-tiered central stadium in Kyiv, although the stands were designed for fifty. I watched it all on TV. I remember that Dynamo scored three goals in the first half, proving irrefutably who was the strongest. All that was left was to play the remaining ten rounds and win the well-deserved championship!

And then the same thing happened in Kutaisi! Back then, the technology was not the same as it is now, and there was no TV coverage of the match between Torpedo Kutaisi and Dynamo Kyiv. Only a radio broadcast with the noise of the stands and the voice of a commentator who said that the Kyiv team had lost 0-1. So far, none of the participants in that game has explained what happened. Why did the strongest team in the USSR suddenly lose to one of the worst teams in the championship? We will never know. Because only two of the participants in that game survived. Maybe that's why they live so long, because they don't say too much?

But let's go back to 1965. Moscow's Torpedo took advantage of Kyiv's defeat in Kutaisi and returned to first place. There were four more rounds of the championship to play, plus postponed matches. "Torpedo could still lose points. But the men who gathered at the Kolhospnyk stadium in Rivne in the evenings explained to me as a kid that the Moscow team would "not miss a point". In the end, it happened. But I still continued to believe in the miracle, tuning my home radio to the football match coverage every time. With each game, my hopes were melting away, but I continued to believe that justice would be done and Dynamo would become the champion until the last minute of the last match.

In the almost six decades since then, I have heard from "experts" more than once or twice that this or that team is guaranteed to become a champion, that it will, as those uncles from my childhood used to say, "not lose its way". But I continued, like that child, to believe that not everything in this life is "approved", that despite all the circumstances, the champion must be determined on the football field in a fair sporting struggle!

That's why even now, when all the "experts" have proclaimed in advance the champion of Ukraine, who "will not miss his own", I hope for a miracle. Although the mention of Kutaisi, where Dynamo lost the well-deserved championship title a long time ago, hinders my hopes a little," Neseniuk wrote on his Facebook page.