2022: results of the year for the national team of Ukraine

In the past year, the national team of Ukraine played only for two months - in June and September.

And there is an explanation for this - the war with the Muscovites and the failure in the decisive round of the 2022 World Cup playoffs. Because of this, the schedule turned out to be very strange: most of the time is rough preparation work, and then emergency match mode.

Oleksandr Petrakov's team stopped one step away from going to Qatar. The World Cup 2022 playoffs were held according to an unusual scheme - quartets of contenders were divided into semi-final pairs, the winners of which, in turn, determined the participant of the championship. Despite a convincing victory over the Scots, Petrakov's team rallied after the setback and took seven points from a possible nine in three UEFA Nations League matches. And for the first time in history, we played against the Irish national team. The acquaintance turned out to be pleasant.

But in September, Scotland drew conclusions from the summer defeat and organized an unpleasant surprise for Ukrainians - first on the field, and then in the standings.

After that, the "blue and yellow" did not enter the football field. There were no match windows in October due to the very tight international calendar for European championships due to the Winter World Cup, which took place in November-December and ended with the triumph of Argentina.

Interesting events in life of the national team of Ukraine in 2022

• For the first time, a legionnaire from the United Arab Emirates played in the national team. Which, by the way, came one step closer to Andriy Shevchenko's scoring record. Yarmolenko has 45 goals for the national team, Shevchenko has 48.
• Artem Dovbyk became the best sniper in 2022. In total, in the composition of the national team, he has six goals, he is on the threshold of the top 20 scorers in history. Apart from Yarmolenko, Roman Yaremchuk (13 goals), Oleksandr Zinchenko (8), Ruslan Malinovskyi and Viktor Tsygankov (7 each) are among the active footballers in the top 20.
• Vitaly Mykolenko, Oleksandr Tymchyk and Danylo Ignatenko opened the scoring with their goals for the national team. The latter, together with Oleksandr Pikhalyonka and Mykhailo Mudryk, made his debut at all. At the same time, Mudryk is the only one who participated in all eight games of the year.
• Yarmolenko is the new leader of the rating of guards of the national team (112 matches). Anatoly Tymoshchuk (144) started this year on the first step, but he turned out to be a mankurt, and the UAF punished the traitor by stripping him of all awards and achievements. After that, the rating was headed by Shevchenko (111), but in September, Yarmolenko caught up and overtook his former attack partner and former mentor. And Taras Stepanenko (73) entered the top 10 of this list.
• Andriy Lunin played three dry matches in 2022 at once (out of three possible). He now has five out of nine games for the national team without conceding a goal. And he has the third most shutouts in the history of the national team. In 30 years, we had two giants of the goalkeeping business - Oleksandr Shovkovskyi and Andriy Pyatov, who together have 194 games for the national team (93 of them - without conceding goals). The rest of the goalkeepers did not play very much (Georgiy Bushchan, 15, is the third in the rating according to the number of matches played), so Lunin has so far only detached himself from the general public. But given his young age, the Real goalkeeper has the opportunity to try and catch up with the titans.
• But Lunin's dry streak (297 minutes) ranks only 13th in our history. The record belongs to Pyatov (752). By the way, he has renewed another achievement: with an indicator of 37 years and 347 days, the goalkeeper is the oldest football player of the Ukrainian national team.
• Oleksandr Petrakov brought the number of matches at the head of the national team to 15. And this is the eighth result in the biography of the national team of Ukraine. The record is held by Oleg Blokhin (64).

All matches of the national team of Ukraine in 2022

The composition of the national team of Ukraine in 2022