U-21 Euro 2009 Qualifying. Turkey (U-21) - Ukraine (U-21). Olexiy Mykhailychenko post match press conference

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Ukraine U-21 team head coach Olexiy Mykhailychenko after the defeat against Turkey said that his players didn’t show a half of what they are capable of. “The result is very upsetting”, the head coach admitted. “We lost both games to Turkey who is our main rival. However we are far from surrendering. We’ll try to get maximum points in next matches and we still can fight to take the first place in our group.”

Hidden potential

“I am sure Ukraine U-21 team potential is much higher than we saw today,” observed Mykhailychenko. “However the boys failed to show their best. Unfortunately I have to admit that our team didn’t look invincible today. They lacked speed, mobility, and skill with the ball.”

Ukrainian football’s disease

“I think that our poor result can be explained by the old disease of Ukrainian football which is losing an equal game because of several stupid mistakes. This time it was the same: for a long time there was nothing to criticize our defense for, then after one failure everything went away. As for attack, we were completely unable to create anything up front. I understand that some game links were broken because of several injured players, but these changes were not quite as radical.”

No options to strengthen the attack

Although Olexiy Mykhailychenko didn’t explain the defeat by losses because of injuries, he couldn’t argue that with several leading players available to him the result of Istanbul game could be different. “Yes, if we could use Fomin, Lysenko, or Gladkiy in the attack, everything could went another way. Although Antonov tried to do his best, he still had a lot of mistakes. And Priyomov more often played in the midfield recently. In a word, we had no options to strengthen the attacking line.”

Forget about defeats“Well, now we have to forget about defeats and fully concentrate on upcoming matches. Nothing is lost yet. We have to grab all the points and then calculate our chances to go to the playoff stage. Will Chyhrynsky and Gladkiy help U-21 team at the end of qualifying stage? I don’t think so. We are very glad they got their places in the national team that has its own tasks. I think it would be better for them to continue gaining experience in the main national team”, said the U-21 head coach.

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