Next Monday Ukraine’s national soccer team will play its first official match since November 2009. This will be a Euro-2012 group stage game against the national team of Sweden. Owing to Euro-2012, to which our national squad made way without playing selection games as a host country team, we could only see our chief team in friendly, or, as we also say, control matches for two and a half years.
Over this period of time, the team has been coached by three managers: Myron Markevych, Yurii Kalytvyntsev, and in the past year, Oleh Blokhin. It is under the latter’s guidance that the team will play its first official match since 2009. To see how the team is prepared for Europe’s main soccer team, it was planned to play three friendly games not far from the Austrian town Wallsee, where the Ukrainian players had passed the last stage of training for Euro-2012. Thanks to the Ukraine Soccer Federation, which organized a trip of our journalists to Austria, your correspondent had an opportunity not only to visit two control matches but also to assess the conditions in which Oleh Blokhin and his assistants had been training the team to undergo the European tests. Briefly, the players and coaches had the best possible conditions for high-quality and fruitful work. Everything – from clean Alpine air and fair weather to an ideal training pitch and an ultramodern hotel – was conducive to calm and purpose-oriented work.
There were two results of this work. The first is the score of the control marches, in which Ukraine lost first to the national team of Austria (2:3) and then to that of Turkey (0:2). In both games, Oleh Blokhin’s squad very seldom played as befits a team that hopes for a success in Euro-2012. The second result is the condition of the team on the eve of the European championship’s finals. According to the coach and the players, nobody should feel sad about the score of the lost matches: things go as planned, and the team is improving daily its condition and will be in the required sporting and psychological shape on The Day of playing versus Sweden.
It was pleasant, of course, to hear this as well as to watch peace and harmony that dominated in the relationship between the team’s players and coaches in the moments when journalists could see them. Naturally, it would be good if the team’s play looked attractive at least against the backdrop of Austria and Turkey, and if we knew who Oleh Blokhin has picked to play in the first Euro-2012 match.
But all this remained a secret which the coach chose not to open.
We could identify those who best deserve to come out onto the pitch on the basis of what we saw in the two latest friendly matches. But Blokhin’s persistent request to support the team and “not to write filth about it” excludes this possibility. Who knows which of the words in the assessment of his team our coach can consider as “filth”? It would be better if he gave us a hint and named the players who he thinks are more prepared to begin playing against Sweden as well as those who do not deserve this. But he said nothing of the sort.
All we have to do is to wait for Monday, when we will see at last the fruits of the work of not only the Ukraine team’s coaches and players but of the whole soccer establishment in this country. The national team is the face of national soccer, and we would like this face to look at least not worse than that of the others at the European championship. And it would be still better if our team surprised everybody with powerful play and a victorious result – which we sincerely wish it.
