The well-known journalist Mykola Neseniuk shared his thoughts on the legendary coach of Dynamo Kyiv, Valeriy Lobanovsky.
"More than twenty-two years have passed since that day, and I can still see the central streets of Kyiv, with a wall of people lining both sides of the street from European Square to Baikove Cemetery, who came to see Valeriy Lobanovsky to his last resting place.
After that, I asked many Kyiv residents who had lived here all their lives, and they said that this had never happened before. I also asked historians. They also confirmed that in the thousand-year history of Kyiv, there had never been such a farewell to any of its prominent citizens. Later, when another anniversary of that event came, I wondered why it happened. Why Lobanovsky and not someone else? And each time the reason for such massive respect for this man seemed to me different.
Today, when we have lived another year without the great Kyivan, I thought that on that warm May day in 2002, Kyiv was saying goodbye not only to Lobanovsky. Kyiv was saying goodbye to its former life, which had ended long before. But it was only the death of Lobanovsky, who linked several generations of happy Kyivites with his existence, that finally confirmed that things would never be the same again.
And how was it? It was very good - hundreds of thousands of people came to Kyiv from all over the world after the Second World War. There was work in Kyiv, lots of work! And most importantly, this work was paid for! And not only with money. In the sixties, newcomers began to move en masse into new apartments in new neighbourhoods with everything for life: public transport, schools and kindergartens for children, cinemas, parks and squares, and shops with cheap food. Then there were summer cottages near Kyiv, motor boats on the Dnipro, luxurious beaches in Hydropark and Trukhaniv...
Of course, everything was different for everyone. But if you look at it from today's perspective, all Kyivans of that time were almost equally poor and rich at the same time. Because they had football, which in Kyiv was completely different from what it was in all other cities of our former country. Kyiv had Dynamo, which defiantly defeated everyone as if to remind them where the real capital was. It was the Dynamo football team, which for decades was the best football team in the country, that gave Kyiv residents a reason to be proud. The real one, not the fictional one, like "building communism" or "socialist competition".
Decades passed, life changed, but Dynamo remained the same as it was when a young, lanky and thin Valerii Lobanovskyi played for the team, who, along with his fellow Kyivans Bazylevych and Kanevskyi, was a favourite of Kyiv residents in the early sixties. And not only Kyivans - in my kindergarten in Rivne, the older boys used to tell me how Lobanovsky scored goals from a corner! And then there was Lobanovskyi the coach, about whom tonnes of memoirs and memoirs have been written. But he was more than a coach. He was a synonym for success, a synonym for the difficult but happy life of Kyiv residents of those distant times.
Therefore, when we remember Lobanovsky, we remember not only football, and even not football at all. We remember the times when we were young, confidently looking ahead and believing in a good future. And no one personified the time when it was impossible to imagine that our former "sapper friends" would kill us better than Lobanovsky. Now that old life will definitely never come back. All that remains is to remember that life in memory of Lobanovsky..." Neseniuk wrote on his Facebook page.