Famous Ukrainian player and coach Oleksiy Mykhailychenko recalled the semi-final matches of the 1998/99 Champions League season with Bayern (3:3, 0:1), when he was Valeriy Lobanovskyi's assistant at Dynamo.
– In the semi-final, Dynamo was waiting for Bayern. In Kyiv, you were leading 3:1, but in the end you allowed the Germans to equalize at the end of the match. Why didn't you hold on?
– I guess our luck ended with Real (laughs, – ed.). Of course, I’m joking, because we beat Real in the game, but there still has to be a bit of luck. We played very well against Bayern, probably one of our best games of the season, but… We shouldn’t have let in the first and second goals in a game like that. First, Tarnat scored from almost 40 meters, and then Effenberg dribbled a free kick past the wall, which was positioned slightly wrong.
– What was the mood of Dynamo when they went out for the return match?
– We also played very well in Munich. We could have opened the scoring, but we were a little unlucky, and then Basler scored an incredible goal. Forgive me, but I am sure that if Dynamo had reached the final, Manchester United would have won. In the final, Bayern completely defeated Manchester United, but they made unnecessary substitutions a little early, and the English club took advantage of this in injury time.
If we had been lucky with Bayern then, there is a high probability that Dynamo would have won the Champions League. But that's just my opinion.
– What was the atmosphere like in the team after the elimination from Bayern?
– After such a defeat there was great disappointment and devastation. We could have performed much better and achieved more. We understood that, first of all, we were the ones to blame for not going further. Where we did not work hard enough. As Lobanovskyi said: “You need to quickly forget defeats and victories in order to move on. If you do not forget the victory, it will relax you, and the defeat will weigh you down from within.”
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