Minaj head coach Zhelko Lyubenovych commented on the decision of the Ukrainian Football Association Executive Committee to hold a "tournament of four" for the vacant spot in the UPL of the Ukrainian Championship.
- This decision came as a complete surprise to us, because on Friday at the General Meeting of UPL participants, the overwhelming majority voted in favor of replacing Dnipro with Minaj - 8 against 5 clubs. After Saturday's sparring match with Vorskla Poltava, I gave the team two days off, and I went to Belgrade to visit my family. Tomorrow, on Tuesday, the team is to gather for an evening training session. Now all the representatives of Minaj are in a state of shock at the decision of the Executive Committee. It turns out that when the situation was similar the year before last, our club was left in the elite, and this year, under the same circumstances, everything changed for some reason and the "tournament of four" suddenly appeared. It means that the rules change every year, as someone wishes. All this is demoralizing, and all our six months of work is going to waste. "Minaj has always played honestly under my leadership. We never played any match-fixing, as some people thought. And it's all the more disappointing to realize what happened.
It's hard for me to understand how to reshape the training process, which was formed in advance, when no one had any idea about any tournament. Judge for yourself: on the 23rd evening, after a weekend that was planned long ago, we are going to Minaya, and on Wednesday night we need to go somewhere to play the first match of the "tournament of four" on the 26th. It turns out that our team has only three days to prepare for it, including the trip. There are also many questions: who will pay for travel, accommodation, meals, and the rental of the training field? After all, we don't have money for all these expenses. So far, the management has not made a decision on Minaj's participation in the Tournament of Four.
We don't have enough players, because for a month there was uncertainty about which league Minaj would play in. If we had invited players for the First League and then found out that we would continue to play in the UPL, they would not have been able to reach its level. And to invite top-level players, we need to give them guarantees that they will play in the Premier League. Until today, Minaj was hoping for a fair decision on its future, but... It turned out that we have no players at the moment, and we still have to go somewhere to act as a punching bag for someone. Believe me, the fact that we are forced to play not according to the established general football rules, but in some other way, is very hard on the soul," Sport Arena quotes Lyubenovych as saying.