The PFL Bureau Council at its meeting held on Tuesday approved the calendar plan for the second round of the all-Ukrainian football competitions among professional teams for 2004/2005. According to this calendar, the championship in the Higher League will begin with matches of the 16th round, which will take place on March 13, and will end on June 19 with games of the 30th round.
The first semifinal matches of the Ukrainian Cup will take place on February 27-28, and the return matches on March 5. Unlike the previous coordination of the calendar plan for the second round, this time everything went smoothly. The whole matter is that with the current calendar, which was approved by the PFL council on Tuesday, Kyiv's "Dynamo" had not agreed a month ago, as it had planned its own game schedule in case the team advanced to the Champions League. Admittedly, the Kyivans were not destined to reach the round of 16, and therefore the calendar from the PFL was adopted by a unanimous decision of all participants. Incidentally, the current version of the calendar was also approved by the head coach of the Ukrainian national football team, Oleh Blokhin. Now the calendar must still undergo the approval procedure by the FFU Executive Committee.
In addition, PFL president Ravil Safiullin delivered a report at this meeting on the results of the first round of the Ukrainian championship, the essence of which boiled down to the fact that competition in the Ukrainian championship has increased and we are heading in the right direction.
Interesting from this speech will be the statistical data on legionnaires in the Ukrainian championship. According to Safiullin, it turned out that over the past year we have had 51 fewer "natives." Thus, a year ago there were 189 foreigners in our championship, and now 138.
Admittedly, there are worse trends regarding the reserve in the form of the second league. Over the past year, 22 players moved from the second league to the first to play, and only two from the second to the higher. At the same time, more than 30 footballers were sent from the Higher League to lower divisions to hone their skills.