On Friday, the former midfielder of Dynamo Moscow Maxim Romashchenko celebrates his anniversary.
Maxim Yurievich was born on July 31, 1976 in Pavlograd and is a graduate of Dnepropetrovsk football. He started his professional career in the Ukrainian Polygraph Engineering, after which he went to Belarus in the footsteps of his older brother Miroslav, whom fate later also brought together with Dynamo, where he helped Stanislav Cherchesov.
For three years, Maxim played in Dnipro (Mogilev) and MPCC (Mozyr), for which he scored 16 goals and won the championship and Cup of Belarus in 1996. Having proved himself well at the Commonwealth Cup, Romashchenko accepted the offer of the blue and white and moved to Moscow.
At first, the talented winger played mainly for the double, but gradually Adamas Golodets began to pull him up to the base and in the last round of the championship-1997 Romashchenko, having joined the starting lineup for the first time, was marked by poker in the gates of KAMAZ. So the bronze medal he got at the end of the season turned out to be well deserved.
– It so happened at that moment that I threw all my energy into this game, – Romashchenko later recalled. – I kept waiting, waiting, waiting, but they didn't give me a chance. Maybe the coaches saw somewhere that I was already mature, but they deliberately didn't let me out. So, everything coincided. For four goals KAMAZ was handed a wooden spoon – huge-enormous. There was even something engraved on it.
A master of set pieces and wing passes, he spent the next three seasons as a regular starter, debuting in the UEFA Cup and for the Belarusian national team before heading off to conquer the Turkish league at the end of the 2000 season. During his four years with Gaziantepspor and Trabzonspor, Romashchenko scored 32 goals, won the league runners-up title and the Turkish Cup.
After returning to Russia, Maxim played two more seasons at Dynamo, surviving a torn cruciate ligament and the "Portuguese landing." In total, Romashchenko played 144 games for the White-Blues, scoring 29 goals and providing 17 assists.
"I love Dynamo, and even when I wasn't playing for the White-Blues, I always followed the table, matches, and news from the club, and I was always there. No matter what happened to me at Dynamo, even if there were some negative moments, it's my team." "I'm a Dynamo player at heart — that's all," said Maxim Yuryevich.
After leaving Dynamo, he played for Torpedo, Bursaspor, Khimki, Salyut, and Dynamo Bryansk, and scored 20 goals for the Belarusian national team, remaining its top scorer. After retiring, Romashchenko took up coaching and worked at Strogino, FShM, and Metallurg Lipetsk. In recent years, he has been actively involved in the Dynamo veterans' movement and has competed in the "Never-fading Stars" tournament.