To begin with, nobody expected Dnipro to qualify for the Europa League 2014/2015 final. But the club did so and triggered a hailstorm of favorable comments. It was an undeniable, absolute, success. This makes the team awesomely responsible to fans and the soccer community as well as to the entire Ukrainian society which has felt the magic effect of unity and a hope for victory. For this reason, even those who, frankly speaking, could not immediately understand whether our side wore blue or red jerseys (it’s me, of course) stayed glued to TV screens on the day of the match. It was not the match itself but the overall support and the feeling of cohesion for the sake of victory that really mattered. This feeling is always inherent in Ukrainians in various forms – from a soccer game to the Maidan and the counterterrorism operation. This feeling gives us a hope for the better, optimism, and a sense of being among “ours.”
Of course, some people did not share this kind of emotions about a soccer match. “There’s a war going on, but you can’t do without soccer,” social networking sites wrote. But, at the same time, the next post shows a photo of soldiers sitting tightly before a television put on a chair in the street – they are watching the match. And here is one more photo in the news stream: two flags – of Ukraine and of Dnipro FC – stuck into a trench’s breastworks. The caption says: “Somewhere in Donetsk region trenches.”
About 10,000 residents and visitors, including a hundred ATO soldiers, gathered on Maidan Heroes Square in Dnipropetrovsk, the club’s home city. The match was shown on a big 150-sq-m screen installed on a shopping arcade wall. Other cities also saw a display of support – perhaps on a not so large scale but equally enthusiastic.
“Dnipro, don’t disappoint us,” people wrote in social networks. Sevilla won the historic match in Warsaw with a score of 3 to 2. But Dnipro players did not disappoint us. Nor did the fans disappoint the players. Some came up to the expectations of Ukrainians and pushed themselves to the limit, others showed gratitude to the players for their efforts and a high-quality play. I think this is by far the most important point in the match.
“Clearly, when a team wins, it draws more smiles, thanks, delight, and dividends than when it loses. But in this case I would point out two phenomena of mass awareness. The first is that the majority of society badly needs a feeling of unity – we go through this and are ready to seize any brilliant opportunity to go through it again. So, it is not strange at all that the entire Ukraine supported the Dnipropetrovsk team,” social psychologist Vadym Vasiutynsky says to The Day.
The next day my Facebook news feed was full of the words of gratitude to the team from Dnipropetrovsk. There was not a single word of resentment, disappointment, or grudge against the players. Nobody accused them of bad play, insufficient devotion, or something of the kind. They thanked Myron Markevych and the players. There was pride, gratitude, and words of support. Among the thousands of social network users who wrote this were President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, musician Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, and TV presenter Marichka Padalko. This is a very eloquent detail. We know how to be grateful to and appreciate those who have made an all-out effort to win, rather than extol the win itself. Can you see the difference?
“It is a very gratifying trend which distinguishes between our and Russian mentalities. The Russian mentality is totalitarian, for it absolutizes all of its values. This is why they treat second place at the ice hockey world championship in Canada or at Eurovision as a defeat. But for us, second place is a great success. We know how to appreciate and to be grateful. We do not absolutize such things as sport. In sports, somebody wins and somebody loses. And one should not make a tragedy out of this. In this case, too, we showed our collective mental health, which, naturally, pleases us,” Vasiutynsky says. “The team pushed themselves to the limit, and we were not ashamed of them. Sevilla proved to be slightly stronger, but Dnipro also created the impression of a modern-day team that can play high-quality European soccer. There was neither aggression nor a need to politicize sport, there was a healthy enthusiasm.”
Why is this reaction to a soccer match so important to our society? We go through crises, suffer losses, and often have a lot of reasons for despair and disappointments. But when we thank Dnipro for the game, for high-quality work, for having met the expectations, we show our ability to appreciate efforts and not to regard intermediary slips as final and unchangeable defeats. You will agree that this ability is very valuable in wartime.
“If a society is dynamically developing, our optimal position should be as follows: we must do something, we must move on and improve ourselves. If you are doing something, you should, of course, think of achieving success and the best result. But, at the same time, you should know that life is not a bed of roses and there may be setbacks and failures – it is an absolutely normal pattern of our life. If we absolutize success, this will doom the individual, the social group to which they belong, and society as a whole, to a very bitter feeling of failure. For when society is only oriented to absolute success, whereas there can be no success all the time or, moreover, it is just impossible, then a failure is regarded as a tragedy, a collapse. As a result, we are trying to develop, bump into the first setback, and feel despair. We hang our head and no longer develop. Therefore, this ratio of success and failure is much better for a positive development than when we aspire for a maximum triumph always and in everything,” Vasiutynsky explains. “When society is in a protracted and deep crisis, when it is in despair and upset about dangers and losses, any success adds strength and hope to some extent. So, the victory of Dnipro would have been a greater triumph for us, but the fact that, after this relative failure or, rather, success, we can adequately assess things, instead of crying wolf, shows that there is a great potential for our further successes. We are not disappointed, we are not stopping. This joy and gratitude are on the rise, giving us new strength and expectations, and we are moving on.”
So, are we moving on?
