And there is plenty of free time. True, it's not rationally distributed: training in the afternoon. Woke up in the morning, had breakfast – off to training. Came back from training, went to recovery procedures, to the massage therapist – and evening is already approaching. Going somewhere in the city on your own is not convenient, and there's no company. There are practically no foreign players in the team. There was a Croatian, and for a while former Dynamo player Sergei Konovalov also played. That's all the socializing.
True, in the hotel by the sea, where the club rented Golovko a three-room apartment (convenient – the room is cleaned every day, no need to hire a maid), a Russian restaurant and cabaret opened. Sasha socialized with their staff. After all, they were almost countrymen, kindred spirits, and in the same situation: everyone is working in China.
By the way, thanks to the presence of the Russian restaurant, Golovko did not have to seriously feel the difference between Chinese cuisine in Kiev and Chinese cuisine in China. And the difference, as another ex-Dynamo player, Belarusian Alexander Khatskevich, who arrived in the Far East almost at the same time as Sasha, claims, is very significant. Golovko even managed to indulge in borscht. True, without beetroot and sour cream.
In general, there were quite a few differences between the cities where Golovko (Qingdao) and Khatskevich (Tianjin), who regularly talked on the phone, lived. One of them Golovko did not fail to mention: "I went to Tianjin. It's a city of cyclists. You go outside – and there are guys on bicycles rushing in a continuous stream. Three lanes in one direction, and three in the other. Moreover, cyclists there are holy people. God forbid you get under their wheels! You'll still be the guilty one! Stand and wait until they pass. In our Qingdao, probably because the city is located in a mountainous area, riding bicycles on the streets was, on the contrary, prohibited."
Returning to the topic of spending free time, Golovko noted that he spent a lot of time at his laptop, used the Internet daily, read Russian-language press. He also watched movies. He says that DVDs in China cost pennies: one disc is cheaper than a dollar. "Probably disposable," the footballer laughs. He went out into the city, but didn't go on excursions. There was no time. But he did feel Chinese specifics firsthand: "We came as a group to a karaoke bar. We just sat down, when two girls rushed over, sat down next to us and began to hint unambiguously. Like, let's go sing karaoke. No, I say, thank you, but I don't sing (laughs).
There was another funny episode. The Chinese language is so complex that I didn't even try to learn it. I somehow memorized the most primitive words and phrases, but even that didn't always help. Stress and the length of sounds matter a lot. Sometimes you call a teammate (and they are all either Chu or Li there), you shout and shout, but he shows zero emotion. It turns out I was pronouncing the name incorrectly and calling a completely different person.
So, once I hailed a taxi and asked to take me to the stadium where our team played. And I tell him the name. He looks at me. I repeat it again – he looks. I'm already pronouncing the stadium's name syllable by syllable, starting to boil, and he, this taxi driver, just blinks his eyes in puzzlement. He doesn't understand – and that's it. Okay, I say, let's go, I'll show you – left, right.
We arrive, he opens his eyes wide and shouts, why didn't I tell him that I needed here, why did we spend so much time explaining? I realized that I don't understand anything at all. I turned to the interpreter whom the club had assigned to me. It turns out that with the intonation and stress with which I pronounced that word, I was asking to be taken not to the stadium, but to the brewery. Although the set of sounds is almost identical.
And it was also unpleasant to go shopping and encounter the most banal deception. A thing costs no more than five bucks, but they offer me to pay $30 just because I'm a European, don't know Chinese, and can't prove anything. The seller can always weasel out: like, some European came, doesn't understand a thing, gave money and started shouting. Probably, foreigners in Ukraine who don't understand what they want from them feel exactly the same way."
However, if Golovko had curious (and not so curious) situations in off-field communication, then on the field his partners understood him amazingly well.
"On the field I had to tear my throat out," our compatriot grimaces. "I got practically no pleasure from football. And in the last months I was just finishing out, waiting for the contract to end. At first I tried to explain to the Chinese coach that I had seen how to play football properly, I thought to suggest something from what I saw at Dynamo, but it was all useless. During games I had to shout to be understood. You can't tell them: 'Please move left.' They won't understand either words or emotions. And although I learned Chinese swear words before many decent words, on the field I shouted mainly in Russian. The Chinese understood. But not the words, but the emotions. They felt that they were doing something wrong, not giving their all."
Our team was generally curious. Discipline is a relative concept, although there is an opinion that all Chinese are hardworking and organized. That's all nonsense. Or maybe we had fake Chinese on our team. You ask, for example, what time training will be tomorrow. They say they'll call in the morning and tell you (how am I supposed to plan my day?). They call at 10 o'clock – like, in 15 minutes we start our run. Good thing I don't need much time to get ready, but what if it were otherwise?
Some guys on the team couldn't be relied on at all. You tell him, you show him – stand here and don't go far. You just turn away – he's already about 30 meters away, rushing off somewhere. And I need to organize the defense. How great it was when the coach put our Croatian in the lineup. Together it's somehow calmer, there's someone to rely on. But for some reason the 'coach' didn't favor the Croatian. Though, he was quite an interesting person, maybe that's why he looked at the world from a different angle.
One of the most terrible games in my career. We are going to an away game – the temperature is almost 40 degrees. The match starts at three in the afternoon. Just the very peak. The air is still. We enter the locker room – all the windows are sealed tight, the coach is sitting on a small chair smoking a cigarette. Honestly, I have never seen anything like it. And he also says: “I feel, guys, that we will win today.” To which I replied to the interpreter: “But I feel that we won’t win anything today. Just don’t translate that to him, or else he won’t put me in the lineup.”
In China, Golovko, as he himself says, “made his mark in full” – scored a goal, earned a couple of warnings and one sending-off. But the most important thing is that he felt the strength to still play football. According to Sasha, he hadn’t had to run so much and fend off a pressing opponent so often for a long time.
And yet he does not consider the trip to China to have been a waste of time. He just cannot say for sure whether, in his situation, it is worth going so far from his homeland. After all, if you think about it, going to the Far East and making fans and specialists forget about your existence is not desirable for a footballer ready to move into coaching. Then again – family, children. However, be that as it may, he has something to tell...