Andriy Shakhov: "Ukraine's national team needs to improve at lightning speed"

Football journalist and expert Andriy Shakhov gave a commentary to the Bankova Mail Telegram channel after the Ukraine national team's 1-2 match with Albania in the League of Nations.

I remember how indignant I was when our team failed to score against Albania in a home match of the 1998 World Cup qualifiers.

Yes, the current Albanian national team is far from the level of the one whose goal Serhii Rebrov scored at the very end of that match (let's not forget that Albania is a participant in Euro 2016 and Euro 2024). However, I cannot and do not want to take the current defeat by the Eagles for granted. From the Eagles, who have only beaten Faroe Islands away since October 2021!

You can say as much as you want that our team did not deserve to lose, that they threatened the opponent's goal more often, created more chances, and Brazhko should have scored in the locker room when he missed his head after a corner, and then who knows how it would have ended. Although the Ukrainians still scored first...

But we saw how quickly the Albanians reacted to the conceded goal, how they got back into the game in five minutes, and in another dozen they were ahead. We saw the first half, in which our team did not show even a quarter of its abilities in the attack. Why did Ukraine look so passive again before the break? We saw this in the head-to-head matches for the right to play at the Euros, at the European Championship itself, and we see it again. We also saw that in the 1-2 deficit, Ukraine failed to create anything truly dangerous at the opponent's goal.

We have a lot of complaints, and we need to fix them as soon as possible, because we have an away match with the Czechs on Tuesday.

Andriy SHAKHOV