The head coach of Dnipro-1 Oleksandr Kucher commented on the defeat of his team by the Cypriot AEK (0:3) in the second leg of the playoff round of the Europa League qualification held yesterday. Recall that on the sum of two meetings (1:2, 0:3), the Dnipro team dropped out of the tournament and will now continue to fight in the group stage of the Conference League.
“I will not say that it was very difficult for us to play. We expected to go further, tried to win, but the game turned out so that during the whole match we were hit on goal three times and scored three goals.
Of course, there were mistakes that could have been avoided. We talked about this with the guys, pointed it out, but we had some kind of bad luck today. Of course, I cannot reproach the guys for striving - they wanted to win and played with great desire. I have no complaints about them here. But today the winner is AEK, whom I want to congratulate on this victory, and who gets into the Europa League group. We also wanted to get there.
For us, there were no novelties from the opponent. We played the way we planned. But, I repeat, those mistakes that we made in defense, we all prepared for them. We knew how Gyurcho was moving to the center, and it was necessary to belay there, but, apparently, we switched off. I don’t understand the second goal at all, how the ball hit the goal, although the kick was covered. Well, the third goal was when we had already gone to win back, and the opponent played on the counterattack.
According to today's game, we should have scored, but the goalkeeper of AEK played well, who rescued his team and saved a lot of shots," Kucher said.
