“It would be better if they lost to Russia!”
The number of people gathered for the decisive match between Ukraine and Slovenia was frivolously small, only 45 thousand in a stadium with a hundred thousand people - it seemed to everyone in the country that the team was already in the final of the European championship. To attract more fans to the stadium, the chairman of the Football Federation and part-time Prime Minister of the country Valery Pustovoitenko sharply reduced ticket prices: a ticket could be bought for 1-5 hryvnia ($1 - 4.75 hryvnia). However, this did not help.

Yesterday, at a meeting of the political council of the People's Democratic Party of Ukraine, Pustovoitenko said that he was extremely dissatisfied with the performance that the national team showed in the match with Slovenia. The newspapers will not print what he really thinks about the Kiev match; these words will not pass through even the most liberal censorship. There was despondency in the VIP box after the game. And the general tone of the statements was clearly expressed by ex-deputy Vladimir Yemelyanov in an interview with a Kommersant correspondent: “It would be better for Russia to lose than to disgrace itself like this!”
The Slovenians, of course, were in seventh heaven, and the sobs of adult Ukrainian men in the locker room, shown in the local “News,” were rather annoying: emotions had to be put into the game, into the game! Now they will remember that there is no championship in the country, but there is some semblance of the hockey “CSKA and others” of Tikhonov’s golden times, and how youth football was ruined. About the fact that there is a shortage of midfielders in the country, and much, much more.
The performance of the Ukrainian team's opponents was simply amazing. The Slovenians fought to the death, and when they missed the ball, they went and scored and again went into the trenches of total defense. If once the Rebrov-Shevchenko pairing could tear apart the defense of any opponent like Tuzik a rag, then on November 18, at the skating rink of a stadium completely unprepared for the match, these forwards looked like schoolchildren running out at recess to roll the ball on a snow-covered field. When the lot decided that they would play against the Slovenian national team, the Ukrainians took it as another gift of fate - something like Filimonov’s mistake.
After the match, the fans behaved quite despondently as usual: there were no usual songs, ditties, or loud shouts. The spectators left the stadium in complete silence. And therefore the crowd of people was very reminiscent of a funeral procession. No one will remember this for a long time, because usually Kyiv fans are not averse to hooliganism. My favorite pastime (regardless of whether there was a win or a loss) is pogroms in the subway. However, after the match with the Slovenians, they did not have enough passion even for this. Perhaps the fact that enhanced security measures related to the elections were still in effect this week also played a role, and Kyiv was literally flooded with police, there was simply a colossal number of law enforcement officers. And the weather matched my mood - it was very nasty, there was wet snow with “groats”, and there was slush underfoot. So no one lingered on the streets, and they were soon empty.
But numerous cafes around the stadium that evening were filled with gloomy men. But there, too, it was amazingly quiet, they drank in silence, and that’s probably why they drank a lot. Apparently, many of the drinking establishments immediately made a weekly plan for selling alcohol. Even the next morning there were a lot of drunken people on the streets.
Conversations in transport and on the streets boiled down to one thing: Ukraine had been lucky for too long in matches with strong opponents, and now the reckoning had come. It seems that everyone has suddenly become fatalistic.
At Euro-2000 there will be no one to root for again. Well, let's save our nerves until next time.

GRIGORY Kommersant-RUDENKO, Kyiv

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 214 dated November 19, 1999, p. 9