Although there were times when older teammates laughed at him, a young guy. Showing a penchant for exact sciences, and not yet having decided on his football future, the young native of Kherson entered a construction institute. And suddenly – an invitation to Simferopol’s Tavriya, which, at the decline of holding USSR championships, played in the first union league. Now Golovko laughingly recalls how he had to come to the training base with textbooks, tubes, drawing paper, and blueprints. Unlike most footballers, who get grades in their record books by correspondence, the future captain of the Ukraine national team took exams absolutely seriously and wrote his thesis just as seriously.
“Can you picture it?” Golovko asks. “The guys are playing cards, and I’m sitting doing drawing. They laughed, of course. But I needed it. I would have stopped respecting myself if I had given up my studies.”
But Golovko’s passion for study did not disappear. With his move to Kyiv Dynamo and the return of legendary coach Valery Lobanovsky to that team, the young footballer became interested in psychology. Having entered the Institute of Physical Education, Sasha took up topics that, as it later seemed to him, nobody in our country needed. That is why he refused to go on to graduate school. And it would have been very interesting – a footballer as a postgraduate student...
Probably, the ability to analyze and calculate the situation, as well as to psychologically process the information obtained, helped Golovko outwardly quite calmly endure the loss of his place in Dynamo’s starting line-up. And for many years it was impossible to imagine the Kyiv team without the number four. But, unlike some teammates who rushed to accuse the coach of trusting other footballers too much, Alexander philosophically decided to test his strength elsewhere. And, trying to get double benefit – in playing and financial terms – he went to China.
In the world of football, many say that the most rapidly developing economically regions are Russia and China. Russian and Chinese clubs are becoming more powerful every year and can afford to invite fairly strong football players, paying them very attractive fees.
“Which country’s club would you like to continue your career in?” the footballer muses. “In principle, I haven’t yet decided on further plans. And I won’t make any predictions. Maybe it will be a Russian club, maybe a Chinese one. We’ll see. During the six months spent in China, I managed to form a certain impression of local football. But I got a particularly clear opinion about the team I played for – Qingdao Etsong. In football terms, the team is very weak. But that cannot be said about the club. At least, with regard to me, everything was at the highest level – what they promised, they fulfilled from beginning to end.”
Although already during the season I learned that one club refused the services of a foreigner who had just arrived in the country, having previously signed a contract. The managers of that club considered that it was unprofitable, in conditions where no one is relegated from the top league, to keep an expensive foreign player. And they are right in their own way. But such an approach – signing a contract and then brushing aside the employee one has hired – cannot be called civilized in any way.
And yet Chinese football has improved greatly precisely in organization. Also in financial investments. True, spectators don’t really attend matches. The attendance of the games reminded me of the first years of the Ukrainian championship, when several thousand fans gathered in the stands. But again, I know that there were games that the Chinese attended in large numbers.”
Golovko ended up in the port city of Qingdao, located between the coast and coastal mountains. He says it’s very beautiful there – looks like Switzerland. And to the question of whether he went swimming in the sea, he answered: “Can you imagine me on their beach? It would be the same as if a monkey came to the seashore and started bathing. The Chinese are used to Europeans, but not to that extent. In the city they often see us, but without clothes we are truly exotic. They run, shout, try to touch, feel, take pictures. To swim in China, you need a strong nervous system. I went very rarely, at first I was simply shocked. But gradually they got used to me and stopped paying attention. And what do they have on the beach? No sunbeds, no deck chairs. A Chinese man comes to the sea, sits in the sand and sits – meditating. I can’t do that.”
To be continued.