On the eve of the first match of the 3rd qualifying round of the Champions League between Dynamo Kyiv and Scottish Rangers, the famous Ukrainian journalist Mykola Neseniuk recalled the confrontation between these teams in the European Champions Cup in 1987/88.
Oleg Blokhin with Dynamo Kyiv in 1987"The first and so far the last time I saw with my own eyes a match between Dynamo Kyiv and Scottish Rangers was in September 1987. It was a game of the first round of the European Champions Cup.
That year did not go well for Dynamo. First, the team stopped a step away from the Champions Cup final, sensationally losing at home to Portuguese Porto. Then came the failures in the USSR championship. The USSR Cup, which Kyiv won in an epic battle with Dynamo Minsk, was a small consolation. Everyone was waiting for the start of the Champions Cup, hoping that by that time Valeriy Lobanovsky would bring the team to the right level.
But he failed to do so. One of the reasons was that Oleg Blokhin, the undisputed leader of the team for the previous fifteen years, was no longer the same. Blokhin was already thirty-five years old and had lost the main one of his footballing virtues, the reactive speed that had made him the best player at Dynamo and one of the best players in Europe.
Oleh tried to change his game, moving back, launching attacks, in short, looking for another place on the field. But there was no such place. That's why Lobanovsky no longer took Blokhin to the national team that year, which he led at the same time as Dynamo. But he did not dare not to put Blokhin in the Dynamo squad - the outstanding footballer had to understand for himself when he should end his career.
It so happened that it was in the game against Rangers that Oleh Blokhin could have scored his three hundredth goal in official matches. He would have done so after an eleven-meter penalty kick was awarded against the Scots (the team from Glasgow actually played Scots). Blokhin was already putting the ball on the mark when Lobanovsky got up from the coach's bench and, running to the field, shouted for Mykhailychenko to take the penalty. The goal he scored remained the only one in that game, and two weeks later in Glasgow, Kyiv lost 0-2 and were eliminated from the draw. Interestingly, in the last minutes of that game, Blokhin had a great chance to score and take the team further with an away goal, but he did not use that moment. He had to score his three hundredth career goal in Kharkiv against Metalist from the eleven-meter line.
For me personally, the Kyiv match against Rangers was the last time I saw Oleh Blokhin on the football field with my own eyes, having come to this game from Rivne. But I didn't know it then..." Neseniuk wrote on his Facebook page.
