Vitaliy Mikolenko: "Just the Malta national team is a good opponent"

Defender of the national team of Ukraine - about the victory over the national team of Malta (3:1) in the match of the qualifying cycle of Euro-2024 before yesterday.

"I do not think that our game was affected by climate change or insufficient recovery from the match with North Macedonia. Especially, the Malta national team played later than us. They had less time to prepare for this game. As our head coach said, there are no easy games in qualification now. So I do not think that our problems in the match against Malta were due to the fact that he is the second at this training camp. It's just a good opponent, who also analyses the game of the team he plays with. Maybe that's the reason.

Probably, we woke up after conceding a goal. Of course, it's not good news for me as a defender when we concede. Defenders and goalkeepers don't like to concede. I am very happy that we reacted well to this goal and scored twice in the first half.

Penalty kick performed by Dovbik? I think, even if he hadn't scored, it wouldn't have been a big deal, because at that moment the score was already 1-1. I am sure we would have had chances and we would still have won the match. But after the break, we finished the opponent with the third goal, and after that it was much easier.

Malta didn't have any objectives in this qualification, but they wanted to show that they have a good team. They are really a very good team and they showed that. Those who will write that "it was hard to win against the Maltese", let them come out, play and show how they should. This is a very good team. They improved in the second half, but we scored the third goal and the end of the match was easy," Mikolenko said on the air of the Youtube channel "VZBLRNA".