We live in a time when deaths have become commonplace. It is very frightening. Every day you receive news of the death of a person who is close to you in varying degrees of proximity. So when I learnt this morning that the long-suffering Mikhail Ivanovich Fomenko was gone, I felt not shock, but emptiness and annoyance.
Mikhail Fomenko. Photo — A. PopovI am terribly offended that Dynamo 1993 did not get past Barcelona. But they could have! After Kyiv 3:1 in ten men! Had Viktor Evgenievich not hit the bar at the very end of the return match. They say that we were torn then at Camp Nou. So they tear everyone there. But Rebrov scored! And the first game gave just a fantastic range of emotions. And it was still, so to speak, before Lobanovskiy....
I am incredibly disappointed that the Ukrainian national team could not get past France and reach the World Cup. We certainly deserved it. We could have scored the third goal in Kiev, and the grey after the game Deschamps would have written a statement there right in the locker room, and for the return game the French would have been led out by a temporary player without any task. It seemed that everything was in our hands. But something didn't work out...
But two years later it did. And we made the Euros. But a crowd of critics began to say that any fool would have come out from the third place, and in general, if you go out like that, it is better not to go out. And they started stomping on the coach. This was joined by the federation, which decided that Andriy Shevchenko is overdue and "strengthened" his coaching staff, from which Oleksandr Zavarov had to leave.... Who benefited from this? Definitely not the national team.
In general, the third thing that causes me wild disappointment is the way they saw off Mikhail Ivanovich to a well-deserved rest. Or rather, how he was NOT...
I have not seen Fomenko in the game. I can judge about his skills only from the video of the semi-final match of KECH against Borussia Mönchengladbach. The fact that Dynamo did not concede in the only one of the six semi-final matches of this tournament in its history is an absolute merit of two super central defenders - Fomenko and Reshko. In one of the episodes of that legendary match, Mikhail Ivanovych gently embraced the outstanding Danish forward Allan Simonsen, who was running away one-on-one, and put him on the lawn. Even now they might not have given a red card, because the foul was so well executed!
"Modern football is about speed and fight," Fomenko liked to say. "Whoever wins the fight, wins." Mikhail Ivanovich, the last struggle in his life, alas, lost. But we will remember exactly HOW he won.
Thank you, great Dynamo player from Kyiv!
Artem ZHOLKOVSKY for Dynamo.kiev.ua
