Yesterday, the Serbian specialist Zeljko Ljubenovic, who currently leads the first league team “Minai”, was spotted in the capital. In the evening, he was among the spectators who watched the central match of the 10th round between Luhansk’s “Zorya” and Kryvyi Rih’s “Kryvbas” from the stands of the capital’s “Dynamo” stadium named after Valery Lobanovsky.
Zeljko Ljubenovic— I can assure you right away that there is no need to look for any veiled reasons for my visit to the capital. Everything is quite simple: the day before, “Minai” played against “Podillia” in Khmelnytskyi, and having won, the players received two days off. Together with my assistant Nikola Ihniatievich, we decided not to return to Uzhhorod immediately, but to go to Kyiv to watch the match “Zorya” — “Kryvbas”. For me, kilometers are just numbers that are not hard to travel to see someone or something.
I really missed the Premier League matches since the time I played in it for twelve and a half years and worked as a coach for half a year. That’s first. And secondly, during my Ukrainian professional career, I played for both teams. “Kryvbas” was my first club in Ukraine (this was during the winter break of the 2005/2006 season), while “Zorya” was the last. I played six wonderful seasons there, and I ended my active playing career in football.
I talked to many acquaintances from “Zorya”. From the players, I only spoke with Timur Korabli, and I only managed to talk with the team’s coach Mladen Bartulovic by phone. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to talk with representatives of “Kryvbas” — specifically, Yuriy Vernydub and his coaching staff, as they were in a hurry to catch a train to Uzhhorod after the game, — explained Ljubenovic.
