Former Ukraine national team player Andriy Polunin summed up the performance of the Ukrainian youth team at Euro 2023 U-21.
Andriy Polunin- There are two reasons for the crushing defeat of our "youth" from Spain. The first is the superior individual skill of the Spanish players, they used almost all their scoring chances. The second is that our players played on the third day after the quarter-finals, took a long time to get to the match, spent a lot of time at airports and did not have time to recover.
All of our players earned vistas at the Euros and became more expensive. Still, they made it to the top four in Europe. Shakhtar's Georgiy Sudakov and Artem Bondarenko showed solid and mature football. When necessary, they accelerated the pace, while in other episodes they kept the ball. It was clear that these were not children, but real football aces on the field.
Next summer, the youth team's coach Ruslan Rotan will have a very difficult choice next summer. He can take three of the seven players who played at the Euros to Paris (Oleksandr Syrota, Maksym Taloverov, Rostyslav Lyakh, Oleksandr Nazarenko, Dmytro Kryskiv, Oleksiy Kashchuk and Artem Bondarenko do not meet the age limit - ed.) Or he can strengthen the team with stars like Yarmolenko, Zinchenko or Malynovskyi. That is why it is unrealistic to predict the result of the Blue and Yellows at the 2024 Olympics," the expert said.
