Vyacheslav Churko: "Zorya failed in the summer training camp"

Zorya midfielder Vyacheslav Churko told UPL TV the reasons for the team's failure in the autumn part of the season.

- If we analyse from the very beginning, it all started with the summer training camp. A new coach, Lalatovic, came in, and the team was not fully equipped. The players gradually came together. There were a lot of injured players, including me. And you can't build a good house without a foundation. So the first thing that went wrong was the training camp. Experienced players who are difficult to replace - Buletsa, Shakhov and Rusyn - left.

What I noticed was that in the first two matches we were still playing on the same petrol we used to finish the last championship. It was the same pattern of play. But from the 3-4th match it was clear that something was changing with the new coach.

I can say that we have only now started to come to our senses and gain momentum - we have started training and working out. We started to get a load of work and endure, and then we became more ready to play. This is very important.

The fact that we won bronze last season was at least due to the fact that we were physically very well prepared. We ran 7-8, sometimes 10 or more kilometres every day. We made some mistakes, but because we ran a lot, we covered up our mistakes.

Apparently, in the summer we thought that we would continue on this track, because we were doing almost everything. But we were physically unprepared. We made one mistake, another, lost confidence, lost once, another. We thought it was a fluke, we'll get ours back. And now we have what we have.

It was only at the end of the year, when Koval came in, that he and Bartulovich gave us good training sessions, quite tough. So we started to get fit and it affected the game. Somewhere we managed a draw, we felt that we had a team. The young newcomers also started to open up. We are trying to forget about what happened, because it cannot be fixed in the past tense. We are trying to think about what to do next to improve the situation in general," Churko said.