The well-known journalist Mykola Nesenyuk spoke about Football Day in Ukraine, which is celebrated on 29 April.
Mykola Neseniuk"In recent days, I have heard a lot of references to the 'Football Day', which is the name of 29 April in Ukraine. On this day in 1992, the first match of the national football team of Ukraine was allegedly played, and its history began. This date makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Why do we like to deceive ourselves so much? Why do we repeat old fictions for no reason?
Let's start with the formalities - the first officially registered football match of the national team of Ukraine took place not on 29 April 1992, but more than two years later - on 7 September 1994. On that day, Ukraine started in the European qualifiers and lost to Lithuania 0:2. And I don't need to show you the statistics, according to which our national team had already played more than a dozen games by then. Because all these games were unofficial and did not oblige anyone to anything.
But let's go back to April 1992. To that very game in Uzhhorod against Hungary, which causes me nothing but burning shame. And not because the Ukrainians lost 1-3. And not because it was not really a national team - almost all the best Ukrainian players did not go to that game. And not because the game took place in Uzhhorod instead of Kyiv, because our federation did not have the money to pay for the guests' travel to Kyiv, including accommodation and meals. And not because Ukraine took to the pitch wearing the Romanian colours - red, yellow and blue. And not because some of our players picked their noses during the national anthem. The greatest shame, the greatest disgrace, was that three participants in that "historic" match later played for the national team of our enemy and no one condemned them for this, not even shamed them! And you propose to celebrate all this shame as the day of Ukrainian football?
I thought for a long time about how to fairly assess the actions of the players of the Ukrainian national team, who then began to play for the enemy. Firstly, they had the right to do so. The game with Hungary was unofficial, and, unlike the official one that took place more than two years later, it did not oblige its participants to anything. All that was left was conscience and conscience. But were the Ukrainians who actually made up the enemy team in 1994, where there were seven of them (Nikiforov, Tsymbalar, Salenko, Onopko, Kanchelskis, Ternavsky, Yuran) really such shameless traitors? I think this is not entirely true. Because at that time, almost all citizens of the newly proclaimed independent Ukraine were traitors in the current sense of the word. Until recently, many people considered themselves citizens of the Ukrainian SSR, that is, Ukraine as part of the empire. The same applied to football players and coaches.
Few people today remember that the Ukrainian national football team has existed since the 1930s. I saw this team with my own eyes in the summer of 1979, when it played at the All-Union Spartakiad under the leadership of Lobanovsky. It was the team of the Ukrainian SSR, a republic that was part of the USSR. So it was quite normal to play for both Ukraine and the USSR!
I think that's how those "traitor" players felt, who believed that playing for Ukraine in the spring of 1992 did not oblige them to anything, just as it had not obliged their older colleagues. That's why the argument that Ukraine could be betrayed for the sake of playing in the 1994 World Cup was quite normally perceived by the vast majority of the Ukrainian football community at the time. Which, to be honest, for all these decades was not a community of Ukraine, but of the Ukrainian SSR.
It all ended on 24 February 2022. We don't know what the future holds. But it is certain that our Football Day should not be on 29 April. And what day should it be then, you may ask? The answer is that every day should be Football Day! Just as every day should be the day of a doctor, miner, metallurgist, chemist, teacher. And most importantly, the day of the soldier who protects us every day!" Nesenyuk wrote on his Facebook page.
