Last Thursday, Shakhtar Donetsk played their first leg of the Europa League 1/8 finals against the Dutch Feyenoord 1-1. The game took place in Warsaw. We bring to your attention the post-match comments of the head coaches of the two teams.
Igor Jovicevic, Shakhtar head coach: "The result is better than the game we showed. Perhaps the opponent felt the lack of chemistry in the last line and covered us much more actively than usual, which made life difficult for us, because it is impossible to play well in defense because of one set-up. I can only thank the whole team for our play in the defensive phase, although we did not perform to our level.
I think in this reserve of potential lies our chance for the return match. If we play the way we have already shown, then in soccer anything is possible. And what looks impossible now will become reality, even though we have the result and we are alive.
The match was difficult. "Feyenoord" is a good team that does not lose 14 games in a row. If you drop one player at this level, it can already be a problem. We are still fighting for the quarterfinals and there are many teams who have already watched our match on TV. We should be proud of the team that fought for Ukraine.
There is no need for questions about the fact that someone did not work well. Who did not work well? Everyone on the field was literally throwing up, and we should be proud of it. We did not have the quality and aesthetic game, which we showed before - I agree. "Feyenoord definitely deserved a goal because the team was good and outclassed us. We weren't that fast on rebounds, if they played fifth or sixth gear, we only played fourth.
If we add, and we've shown so many times that we can do that, we have a chance to go further. We have to believe in it, because this round consists of two matches. It turned out that way, but the result leaves us in the game. We did not score three or four goals, as the bookies said, although I do not think so. Everyone said we were the absolute outsider of this pairing and we should have been scored a whole bag of goals. We played without Mykhailychenko and Konoply, and at the set-up this defense played for the first time, but the guys fought. We will make conclusions, we will be even stronger in the next match. You can be a hundred times champion of the Netherlands, but it is very hard to kill us, so we believe!"
Arne Sloth, head coach of Feyenoord: "The draw result is disappointing. I was a little surprised to see us show such dominance. At halftime I complimented the team for that, but I said they should reward themselves for their dominance. In the second half they created some great chances to score. And we conceded nothing.
I think the reason Shakhtar didn't look very good was our play. The only thing Shakhtar could do was to protect their own goal. And we had to keep in mind their counterattacks, which we managed to neutralize perfectly. But this is not the first time this season that our opponents managed to score with a single shot on goal. We did almost everything well, except for one tiny moment.
You never know what the return match will look like. That's why we are so disappointed right now. You never know how important winning here could have been. But it's always better to draw and not lose.
