Sergei Krivokharchenko

Berlin is the best city on Earth. It has everything that a man may ever need: bohemian districts with wild night life located in just 15 minutes from quite village-like suburbs, busy Kurfürstendamm lies very close to a huge forest park called Grünewald; the city is also full of lakes, museums, cozy cafes and whatnot.

Berlin is home to a great number of young people from all over the world. Once you have an intention you can go Latino salsa dancing, Austrian yodel singing, and American… well, Americans will just make you laugh.

Young Germans afford themselves crazy things; you can even become a bit jealous about this. They can start off to RSA to gather some medical plants after they are done with school or they can leave for Australia for a couple of years and embark on a laborer kind of work only to have an everyday opportunity to practice surfing. On the other hand it’s easier for them — they are not afraid of military service and thus never have to fuss about entering a university right after school.

They say that it’s not you who decide on the team, it’s the team that chooses you. I’ve been rooting for Kievan “Dinamo” since I was 5 and I can hardly give any reason for that. Nowadays people tend to find some more or less adequate reasons for their football likes: it’s like someone has happened to visit Hoffenheim, which impresssed one greatly and one has been rooting for them ever since.

I don’t think newspapers will ever give way to the Internet. It’s only natural that printing media are adapting to the modern realities and as time passes more and more readers will read them online. I guess paper press will become as refined as hand-written letters, and more of extravagance, I would even say. It’s so damn cool to receive such letters nowadays!

I can’t get enough fresh air in Moscow in any possible sense. There are almost no places where you can just lie on the grass in summer. Provided you find one, you will also find there parties that can hardly be called nice.

I felt really awkward when I got the opportunity to talk to the people I worshiped being a child, I mean Matthäus and Klinsmann. It was fun to ask queer questions to the leader of the group that would form my lyrical mood during my complex juvenile age, I am talking about Klaus Meine from Scorpions. But I was most impressed by a long conversation with Sergei Gandlevsky, one of the best modern poets, to my mind. I guess my inner me is more inclined towards poetry as compared to rock music and football.

There’s a beautiful phrase, I guess it belongs to Nabokov: “You don’t have to be a butterfly to study butterflies”. It seems to me that the keenest entomologists would sacrifice a lot to become a butterfly. But it doesn’t work with football journalism. No doubt anyone can classify football players according to their kinds and types. However you would make use of any kind of experience, even that of playing in the yard, if you had to go deep into their behavioral patterns. All in all I will conclude with a poem piece again: “May you be not Ronaldo but you ought to kick the ball”.