A well-known Ukrainian journalist Mykola Neseniuk dedicated a Facebook post to the psychology of former and current football players.
When I saw him for the first time, I was ten years old. I was watching a game of the Horyn football team from the stands of a wooden stadium, and the blond player number 2, who ran on the right side of the defense, was very noticeable. His name was Volodymyr, and we met him in person much later - I was already in my thirties and he was in his forties. It happened at a soccer game, and after that we crossed paths several times in different places - our city is small.
Once I told him that I remembered him as a football player. Volodya, who was a middle-manager of a food company at the time, immediately plunged into his memories, as if he were once again that blond young man who ran around the soccer field many years ago. He said that he was incredibly happy then! Indeed, why shouldn't a rural boy from Polissya be happy when he was invited to the regional center to play football, given a place in a dormitory, a salary of one hundred rubles, a uniform, and three meals a day! He told me how they traveled by a small PAZ bus, a bus that was used mostly on rural routes, to matches 1,500 kilometers away. Back then, in the Ukrainian "class B" zone where "Goryn" played, there were a dozen teams from Donetsk, Makiivka, Komunarsk, Kramatorsk... So the team from Rivne went there for two weeks, moving from city to city, spending the night in "hotels" with a toilet at the end of the corridor. There were up to a dozen such trips per season! That PAZ truck could accommodate fourteen players, two coaches, a doctor and an administrator. That was it! There were no physiotherapists, masseurs, physical training coaches, goalkeeper coaches, analysts, and so on. Interestingly, more people went to the matches of that team than go to the games of our "Premier League clubs" today.
Volodya told me a lot more about football in those days. And although he was not the last person in town, I could tell that he sincerely missed those years when he shook on the hard seat of the PAZ truck, driving to another football match in a new city. I think of his stories every time I hear current players and coaches complain about having to travel by bus for "six or seven hours" and how it tires the team out, preventing them from playing their best. It is probably true. The time of happy village boys just playing football for a penny is over forever. It's time for professionals!
Mykola NESENYUK